A Nose is a Nose is a Nose

Countless brown-glass bottles and canisters in metal line a multitude of shelves in the lab room, a space that seems to breathe various fragrances. On a large work table in the next room, Tolaas shows me a picture of a child playing in a heap of garbage. Our sense of smell starts off neutral, she says, explaining that the child has not yet learned that garbage is supposed to be stinky. Smell is the sense most directly linked to memory and emotion, but humans only learn about smells by smelling. Through their societal expectations, they then begin to judge odours and fragrances as either good or bad (with the exception of recognising toxic substances, olfactory judgement is nurture, not nature). This scent knowledge builds until puberty, then remains set—one reason why people in western cultures think white linen should smell a certain way, or that a sweaty foot, or the damp sock that was on it, is stinky (Tolaas has, in fact, 40 variations on the smell of a stinky sock in her archive, a room that represents 25 years of research and thousands of molecular concoctions). We can’t relearn smell, but we can add to our smell knowledge, says Tolaas. What I do is decontextualize smells and take people out of their comfort zones.