Lurana on Pinterest - smell, fun, fragrance, bottles and more

If you are on Pinterest click here for my olfaction images #fragrance #fun #perfume #scent #packaging #installations #bottles #humor

Lurana on Pinterest - smell, fun, fragrance, bottles and more

If you are on Pinterest click here for my olfaction images #fragrance #fun #perfume #scent #packaging #installations #bottles #humor

Sailing on Scent

 




 Sailing on Scent: Lura Astor

Chemical Alphabet - Smell All About It

Like all good mysteries, it is hidden in plain sight.

It has, if anything, deepened as our knowledge of smell has increased.

Like most enticing enigmas, it is simply stated:



what is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth?

 – Luca Turn


illustration: Alphabet Stew Lura Astor

Chemical Poetry

Perfumes are chemical poems.

Smell is our chemical sense.

-    Luca Turin



Illustration: Sprifff Lura Astor

Chromosone 11 & Olfaction

Chromosome 11 constitutes just over 4% of the genome, contains more than 40% of the olfactory receptor genes, making it the largest chromosomal repository of such genes in the human genome.

Many of the genes on chromosome 11 are grouped into related clusters known as gene families, the most notable of which is the olfactory receptor gene family. This family, whose corresponding proteins govern the sense of smell, is the largest known grouping of genes in vertebrate species.

In humans, its members are sprinkled throughout the genome, with the exception of chromosomes 20 and Y. But chromosome 11, which constitutes just over 4 per cent of the genome, contains more than 40 per cent of the olfactory receptor genes, making it the largest chromosomal repository of such genes in the human genome.

-Broad Institute 1996

Click here for a brief video

Minute 1:25 begins the region affecting olfaction

photo: National Library of Medicine

The Century of Odour? The Nose has Gained Stature

I think it's an interesting area to look at because essentially,
the investigation of the olfactory
is the investigation of everything else.

- Hans Rindisbacher, author of The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature, and more, here

Scent as the Seat of the Soul
 
Gustav Jaeger, author of Origins of the Soul, a zoologist, physician, and contemporary of Charles Darwin, "reportedly reckoned that scent was the seat of the soul".


















 

My DNA

The Transparent Citizen
 
"Yes, they've been collecting human scents to trace anti-globalisation activists they believe may try to disrupt the G8 summit in June. They have been confiscating sweaty vests and getting well-known radicals to impregnate steel pipes with their hand odour to present to their German shepherds." 

- Rindisbacher














 
"Oh, a number of people have called the twenty-first century das Jahrhundert des geruch, the century of odour. The nose has gained in stature. This gain is reflected, for instance in a more aggressive stance by the perfume industry and the exploding artificial fragrance and flavour business. I think the first newspaper reference I saw to the social implications of environmental fragrancing systems was in the 1990s, in the Wall Street Journal. In it, executives of a leading fragrance manufacturer acknowledged that smells of the future could be potent enough to put smell suppliers in competition with the pharmaceutical industry." - Rindisbacher

 
 From Amber Marks' book
Headspace: Sniffer Dogs, Spy Bees and One Woman's Adventures in the Surveillance Society

more on Odour Clues & Odor Clue Collectors! chapter 25: The New World Odour
read full text here
Alternative book cover image here




Stasi Smell Jars mentioned in book 







photos:
Big Stinky  Huntington Library and Gardens
My DNA press photo
GDR Duftproben Stasi Smell Jars Appaloosa 2009
G8 Protest Sam Fentress, Edinburgh 2005
Clues Syker Fotograf

olfaction in schools

Most school systems have art teachers
educating the eye and music teachers
educating the ear, but none so far has attempted
to tutor the nose.

Yet the nose holds the key to distinctions
no other sense can unlock,
and to esthetic pleasures as great for some
as music and pictures are to others.

from Your Educated Nose in Our Sentinels
section of the Reader's Digest

Our Human Body: Its Wonders and Its Care
adapted from Have You an Educated Nose?, Roy Bedichek 

and  How Your Nose Knows, Ruth and Edward Brecher

photo: Autumn Lura Astor

dispenser of sensuous delights

 












Nature anticipated the perfumery trade by mixing odors indiscriminately in the wind, and the sniffer abroad is in for delightful surprises. Unique blends are bound to occur; mixtures never before sensed by mortal man may come casually into his nostrils.

Though in our Western civilization the sense of smell has fallen from its great estate as dispenser of sensuous delights, it is a sense that can be developed.

from Your Educated Nose in Our Sentinels section, Reader's Digest
Our Human Body: Its Wonders and Its Care
 article adapted from Have You an Educated Nose? Roy Bedichek
How Your Nose Knows, Ruth and Edward Brecher

photo: Huntington Gardens Lura Astor

beautiful young adult's book

Warriors, Warthogs, and Wisdom: Growing up in Africa is a lovely read written for young adults. Lots of heart and some smelly facts, authored by Lyall Watson.

The young Watson befriended an orphan warthog who became part of the farm's family and gained the name Hoover. In Watson's longer book Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs he could emphasize pigs' olfactory expertise.

Hoover ran away one day to be eventually found at the site where he was originally orphaned when his family had been killed and eaten. A bush elder tracking low to the ground in search for the pet says to the boy, “Intibane, the ugly one. He has very smelly feet.”

The author continues, "Which is true. Pigs have poor eyesight and only average hearing, but their sense of smell is fantastic. They are walking scent factories, with special glands on their faces, at the corner of the eyes, on the chin, in the mouth, under the tail, and even on the ankles. And warthogs have particularly strong glands on the pads of their feet. Everywhere they go, they leave tiny little droplets of their own personal smell behind them, which can last for days. Every warthog lives in a world filled with messages from every other warthog in the area – so that each one knows exactly where everyone else is, how they are, what they have been eating, and how long ago they passed this way. It must be like getting lots of letters every day from all your friends and family, letters filled with news and gossip, but written in ink that slowly fades away."

"He (pet warthog Hoover) had a great memory and never forgot an odor." 











 ... the imagery of smells as ink stories that slowly fade away.

Reminds me of the burnaway cypher silks in Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide.  



photo: BS Thurner Hof 
Illustration: Color Wave Lura Astor

Sweet Dreams

Professor Tim Jacob, an expert in smell and taste at Cardiff University (UK), said:

"Smell is the only sense that doesn't 'sleep'. Information continues to reach the limbic system of the brain and that includes the hippocampus, or memory area and the amygdala, that is involved with emotional response.

"Other senses have to pass through the 'gate' of the thalamus, which is closed when we sleep."

When the smell of roses had been wafted under the noses of slumbering volunteers they reported experiencing pleasant emotions in their dreams.

....emotional tone of the dream did change depending on the (smell) stimulation.

BBC 22 September 2008






















Illustrations: Fan Spray/Dream Smear Lura Astor

Sniff 'n' Poof !

I love Lyall Watson's Jacobson's Organ!

Don't worry, you have one, and you and you and I ... we play them marvelously ... lovely smell music.

Published in 2000, Jacobson's Organ: and the Remarkable Nature of Smell from another interdisciplinarian, is a delight to read.

 
We think because we smelled ~ Lyall Watson

Smell is governed more by instinct than intellect, moving through our lower brain while other senses take a different freeway, transmitting via one's upper brain.

Dr. Watson passed in June of 2008 at the age of 69. He answered many of the questions I have begun to raise on this site.

First Smell
 
In his commentary on Patrick Suskind's book Perfume I found kindred perspectives. On people's surprise that the main character, orphan turned murderer, Grenouille, has powers of extreme smell receptivity, Watson says, "He produces all the evidence of what we call 'second sight' by the exercise of what we might instead call 'first smell'.

yes!

And, in my opinion, importantly Watson writes

"I believe that where Perfume ultimately fails is in its emphasis on the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell Suskind lingers on the details of fragrant, hapless maidens stalked by an obsessive maniac who sniffs out his prey, instead of exploring everyone else’s untouched potential. This is a little disheartening. It really is time we stopped denigrating the power and influence of smell in all our lives. And yet, smell has been culturally suppressed for so long that one has to wonder. Perhaps heightened olfactory consciousness really would be dangerous to the established social order. Think what we could do with it!"

To that I respond, more heartening, lifely ... fun and funny things.



Lyall Watson addresses smell's effect on our hormones, which dovetails with earlier posts here addressing some precarious side effects of birth controls, especially in relation to smelling and truth in mating.

"We know that the odour of a strange male’s urine lowers the level of pituitary hormones in pregnant female mice and results in miscarriages. It has been shown that strange male urine can even shift the hormonal balance so far that female hamsters never become pregnant at all. And the same results in rodents have been produced by androgen-rich human urine. But no one seems to be looking at the possible role of smell on the fertility of women who work, perhaps as cleaners, n surroundings where they may be exposed to the urinary odours of unfamiliar men.

We should worry about such things. They represent real risks to any woman who is both pregnant and has an intact Jacobson’s Organ. An informal survey among my own friends suggests that young wives do often have difficulty conceiving for the first time when living in the home of their husband’s family, surrounded by the odours of brothers and fathers-in-law. They often fall pregnant within months of finding a home of their own."

 












 
I remain vividly aware of scent and color.

Watson, ".... I believe that there may be still other ways of olfactory knowing. These involve synesthesia, not taking away a sense and allowing others to compensate for the loss, but adding one sense to another in ways that reinforce them both."

 
A bit of the organ's historical context and lore:

"This elusive feature is the Organ of Jacobson, named after the sharp-eyed Danish anatomist who discovered it nearly two centuries ago. It is easy to miss. The external evidence consists simply of a pair of tiny pits, one on either side of the nasal septum, a centimeter or two above every human nostril. But the fact that it does exist changes everything.

Far Smell
 
1780, an obscure civil servant on Ile de France (now Mauritius) wrote to his Minister of Marine and announced that he had discovered a way of detecting ships while they were still below the horizon. He called it nauscopie, and describe it as ‘anticipating by means of smell’, the olfactory equivalent of ‘far sight’, a sort of ‘far smell’. Unfortunately we know no more details about his technique, but history records that it enabled him to win a great deal of money in wagers."

There is so much more in the rich books he has left us; mine them. 

For now, I leave you with this:




 


















"I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our sense of wonder. We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon  the old ‘smell brain’.

Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.


Jean Jacques Rousseau says,
The sense of smell is the sense of imagination.
It greatly disturbs the brain.

Indeed, and it still does."


Images: Circle Fumes/Woman/Wind/Under Beauty/DNA Egg Lura Astor Art

Ah, T, how we've loved ya

Oh, Tyrant Lizard King
T. Rex
Tyrannosaurus Rex


This diagram is the
Olfactory Tract of T
(almost 8 inches long, see below)your sense of smell was evidently quite astute
funny to think your blood runs through our cars
and of jim morrison singing I am the lizard king

Regarding Olfaction
The Royal Saskatchewan Museum has this to say about their nicknamed Scotty T

Scotty’s skull is an average size, for a T. rex. It is slightly over 1.32 m (4 feet) in length. T. rex had about 50 teeth in its mouth; the largest tooth is up to 30 cm (1 foot) long, although about two-thirds of that is root. The teeth have serrated edges and are curved backward, and are obviously designed for grabbing, stabbing and crushing.

T. rex’s teeth were large but its brain was small—approximately 17 cm (6 3/4 inches) long. However, the organs responsible for smell are huge—approximately 20 cm (8 inches) long. This would have given T. rex a very keen sense of smell and, as a result, palaeontologists think that T. rex was a scavenger rather than a hunter.

LA's tip o' the hat to Monty Python's Spamalot:
Huge tracts of smelling and smell

The article click here reveals new finds on the environment of T rex and other flora and fauna 65 million years ago with interesting information on environmental changes in Saskatchewan as fossilized. This, if you believe in life on earth before 6,000 years ago.