There is something about wine experts that rubs people the wrong way. Wine tasting has become the epitome of a privileged elite who spend their days nose deep in a glass of swirling pinot noir. This negative view of wine experts isn’t only misguided, but part of a general devaluation of our sense of smell.
Over 2000 years ago, Aristotle wrote that “.” The human ability to smell is still thought of as weak. A UK showed it was seen as the least important of the senses, and about half of young adults would rather lose their sense of smell than their mobile phones.
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But humans are astute smellers, and smells affect our lives in profound ways. A decade ago, researchers that humans can often detect odour molecules at a weaker concentration than non-human animals can, outperforming bats, monkeys, pigs, rats and otters – really most other animals except dogs. Ethyl mercaptan, a molecule added to natural gas so we can detect leaks, requires the equivalent of three drops in a space the size of an Olympic swimming pool for us to detect it – a of 0.2 parts per billion.
It is true that our sense of smell is different from our other senses. While our brains are superb at performing visual analyses of the sensory environment, the human sense of smell creates holistic impressions of our surroundings, informed by all our senses. When we perceive a smell, we interpret it based also on what we see, hear, think and feel. , a bright yellow colour helps bring out the citrus aroma in a lemonade. Hunger or the bodily memory of an illness might create opposite reactions to the same food smell.
These cross-sensory influences on our smell perceptions might seem like a shortcoming, but my research has taught me to consider it as a feature, not a bug. My team recently that the brain is especially engaged in making predictions about future smells, and when those predictions are violated by a surprising smell, several regions across the brain respond in an effort to re-evaluate what we are actually smelling.
Wine experts are great at making smell predictions. A pale ruby-red colour might guide the expert to sniff for strawberry and mushroom, characteristic notes of a pinot noir. The sense of smell evolved in natural environments where the senses had to work together to find potential food sources and remember the consequences of eating them. The expertise of wine tasters is by their knowledge of sensory correspondences.
Smells bind together impressions from all the senses, linking them to our internal states: hunger, emotions, memories of the past and expectations of the future. That is why anosmia, the loss of the ability to smell, which happened to millions during the , often leaves people , from their partners, with a and a lack of enjoyment from eating and drinking. They sometimes they are detatched from reality rather than being immersed in it.
Smelling makes us live our life more vividly, and for those affected by chronic anosmia, a cure for the condition cannot come soon enough. While exposure-based smell training remains a recommended treatment, that help rebuild olfactory cells are currently being explored.
For those of us who are fortunate to have retained our sense of smell, learning about wines and new cuisines to expand our palate, and spending more time among the smells of nature, are excellent ways to our nasal intelligence.
Jonas Olofsson is author of The Forgotten Sense: The new science of smell
