(08/10/20) Snuff and Smell

“The Graphic Designer Who Maps The World‘s Cities By Smell” by Bianca Bosker, 03/04/2017- The New Yorker

Snuff being powdered preparation of tobacco used by inhalation or by dipping—that is, rubbing on the teeth and gums. Manufacture involves grinding the tobacco and subjecting it to repeated fermentations. Snuffs may be scented with attar of rose, lavender, cloves, jasmine, etc.

This has lead me to the research of smell and how it is tied to memory. A Personal tie for me is that my Grandfather smoked a pipe and so that smell by association brings back memories of him and the imagery of him packing a pipe and puffing on the back porch. He quit for the later years of his life and so his companion piece of the pipe became a pack of mints always on his person to replace and appease the addiction.

Smell is intrinsically linked to memory, a known fact is that a smell can call upon a memory of a time and place quicker than any of other senses and also lasts longer.

According to a biologist and an olfactory branding specialist Wednesday, it was the nose that was really at work. This should not be surprising, as neuroscience makes clear. Smell and memory seem to be so closely linked because of the brain’s anatomy, said Harvard’s Venkatesh Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Murthy walked the audience through the science early in the panel discussion “Olfaction in Science and Society,” sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Harvard Brain Science Initiative.

Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, the structure in the front of the brain that sends information to the other areas of the body’s central command for further processing. Odors take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory. “The olfactory signals very quickly get to the limbic system,” Murthy said. But, as with Proust, taste plays a role, too, said Murthy, whose lab explores the neural and algorithmic basis of odor-guided behaviors in terrestrial animals.

When you chew, molecules in the food, he said, “make their way back retro-nasally to your nasal epithelium,” meaning that essentially, “all of what you consider flavor is smell. When you are eating all the beautiful, complicated flavors … they are all smell.” Murthy said you can test that theory by pinching your nose when eating something such as vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Instead of tasting the flavor, he said, “all you can taste is sweet.”

The ingesting that is necessary for this stimulus has driven me to draw a comparison to what could be considered a modern equivalent, coffee. Like then it is normalised even positively reverted in society. I had thought of cigarettes as a comparison given the ingredients they have in common, however it is not as publicly accepted nowadays as snuff was when popular.