Gateways to Relationship: Smell

The nose knows…. many things… and is central not only to our face, it is also the gateway to our respiratory system (when you have a bad cold it can be very hard to breathe), it helps shape our speech (some voices have more ‘nasal-y’ tones), it is key in our sense of taste (flavour largely comes from our sense of smell), and our sense of smell can immediately illicit emotions and memories. Let’s learn how that occurs.

A bit about anatomy and physiology: After conception, around week 5-7, various bones that create our viscerocranium (face, mouth, nose, ears) come together at midline to form your jaw, palate, and nose. Depending on what you count, there are 8 bones (!!) that make up your nose, while the softer part, which is prone to frostbite in -20C, is cartilage. Of course there are also various muscles of the nose; think of flaring your nostrils or wrinkling your nose at a something distasteful… or using botox to prohibit these lines of expression. Here is a very simplified version of what happens when you smell something: gaseous molecules from an odor enter your nostrils  the air is warmed and humidified… and hairs inside your nose filter out particulate matter to protect your lungs from harm (sneezing is a protective reflex to get rid of dust etc)  odor molecules enter the nasal concha (spiral-shaped bones that circulate the molecules) inside the ethmoid bone  odor molecules dissolve in the moist mucosal membranes  this creates chemical signals to neurons  then lots more chemistry of action potentials, ion channels etc  to send this information to the olfactory bulb in the cribiform plate and to Cranial nerve I  this neural signal is sent directly to the limbic system (one of the oldest parts of the brain): amygdala (emotional centre) and to the hippocampus (memories). So smell directly triggers emotional responses and memories. Let’s explore:

Memories and Emotions(~ 30 minutes or more)

• Highlight your awareness of your sense of smell. Notice when a smell offers pleasant memories. What is that memory? Notice what happens to your body tone as you ‘enter’ the memory (Does it increase with excitement? Does your tone soften with memories of calm, cuddly times? etc). What happens in your body if the smell is unpleasant?
• With a friend: Person A is blindfolded. Person B offers various smells one at a time (use coffee grounds a neutralizer between scents…and go slowly so Person A has time to ‘recover/neutralize’). Try things such as citrus, perfume, chocolate, rotting leaves…anything really. Person A smells the one item…then, rather than identifying it verbally… person A feels whether he/she likes (bonds) or rejects (defends) the offered smell AND notices the embodied tonal response in his/her body. Show that embodied response to B as a bit of exaggeration. Have fun with this!
• Observe and consider animals in their use of smell: a dog at the airport baggage claim, horses and deer when walking thru the woods, grizzlies and their search for food (they have 7x stronger sense of smell than even bloodhounds), snakes who flick their tongues (different mechanism in olfaction, but it is still smell).
• A few fun books to consider:
• Oliver Sacks, 1985, The man who mistook his wife for a hat. (There are lots of interesting stories about senses and perceptions in this gem.)
• Patrick Suskind, 1985, Perfume: the story of a murderer. (This is a strange, sort of creepy halloweenish book about the sense of smell. It was recommended to me by a BMC® colleague who works with perfumeries.)

Our senses ultimately bring us into relationship and movement. Drop me a note of what your experience of smell offered you…. ENJOY!