Smell is our most seductive and provocative sense, invading every domain of our lives. We can identify our relatives by smell alone, detect the availability of a potential mate, sniff out danger and distinguish between good and bad food just with our noses. Nothing is more memorable than a smell. so why do we persist in dismissing the nose as a blunt instrument? In this book Lyall Watson rescues our most unappreciated sense from obscurity. He brings to light new evidence concerning Jacobson's organ: an anatomical feature discovered high in the nose in 1811 and dismissed for centuries as a vestigial ghost. Yet recent research has shown Jacobson's organ to be the phenomenal mechanism necessary for operating a true "sixth sense", feeding the area of the brain that affects our awareness, emotional states and sexual behaviour. With it, we have access to a world we thought we had lost. Following the seven classes of smell devised by the pioneering botanist Carolus Linnaeus in his "Odores Medicamentorum", Watson examines the diverse roles of smell and pheromones in human beings, plants and animals. He reveals the curious ways in which trees communicate their distress, the tricks truffles use to attract the attention of passing pigs, the olfactory abilities of feral children, the unerring capability of certain species to find their way home, the bond we have with our offsprings, the psychosexual effects of perfume, and the link between smell and memory formation.
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Smell is the Cinderella sense, says Lyall Watson. Humans are smelly creatures, but we spend millions pretending we aren't, blanking out the signal. We little realise how large a role it plays in our likes and dislikes, our intuitions about people and places. Watson's lively and engaging attempt to make us realise that smell rules features a great deal of natural history--outlining the way creatures of all kinds are linked by the myriad molecules they secrete and detect, an odournet. More surprising is his account of the recent rediscovery of Jacobsen's organ, a secondary chemical detection region high in the nose which is linked to the oldest regions of the brain. This, says Watson, registers different substances from the smells we are conscious of, including powerful chemical signals from other humans. It gives us an unrecognised sixth sense. If only we cultivated this sense we could all perform olfactory miracles, and our oldest way of extracting information from the environment would once again come into its own. As he admits, this is speculation. The fact is that humans long ago decided to devote most of their brains to vision and language skills. But smells still speak to us at a deep level, and Watson's consistently entertaining book reminds us how many spells they weave. --Jon Turney
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