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We can preserve and experience historical sights and sounds. But how do we know what, for example, Eighteenth Century Manhattan smelled like? Thanks to technologies developed by the perfume industry, there are now ways to preserve smells so that future generations can experience them:
A pioneer of this approach is Roman Kaiser, a Swiss fragrance chemist who developed a technology called “headspace” in the 1970s that made it possible to capture and analyze the scent given off by flowers and other objects. Using a glass container, a pump, and a sampling trap that gathers molecules using a solvent or coated surface, the system allows a chemist or perfumer to gather the volatile scent molecules exuded by an object without harming it.[...]
Perfumers like New York-based Christopher Brosius have used headspace to re-create less obvious smells, like the odor of an old fur coat or a well-worn paperback. Their goal is an artistic one, but the same approach could serve as the beginning of a database. Imagine having a library of scents specific to a particular time or place, from the strangely sweet aroma of a plastic-wrapped CD case to the blend of horse dung and candy that permeates Boston’s Faneuil Hall.
Other historians are attempting to recreate scents from the past, from a cologne used by Napoleon Bonaparte to a Viking-era latrine. What historical smell would you like to experience?
Link -via Althouse | Photo by Flickr user Dennis Wong used under Creative Commons license
Katie Liljenquist of Brigham Young University led a study that suggests that clean-smelling environments subtly encourage people to avoid abberant behavior. From Science Daily:
The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.
The first experiment evaluated fairness.
As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.
Link via Instapundit | Image: flickr user rq?
Matt Kaplan writes in National Geographic about a new study that suggests a link between a person’s olfactory sensitivity and awareness of the emotions of other people. Denise Chen of Rice University in Texas led the research process:
Women have a more uniform sense of smell than men, and are also thought to be more sensitive to emotional cues.
So Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou presented 22 pairs of young women living in university dormitories with identical t-shirts to sleep in.
After being worn for one night, the t-shirts were later presented to the same women to smell.
Each woman was given three t-shirts and informed that one of the shirts had been worn by her roommate, and that the other two had been worn by other university students.
The subjects were asked to identify the shirt that had been worn by their roommate.
The women then took a series of recognized emotional-sensitivity tests.
Subjects who correctly selected the t-shirt worn by their roommates tended to score high on the emotional tests.
Link | Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
