Friday, May 31, 2013

Up the East Aspen Trail (but not very far)

Roaring Fork Creek on the way to East Aspen Trail
(not far from our condo)

Roaring Fork

About as far as I got
The East Aspen Trail goes all the way up to Independence Pass, that is, from nearly 8000 feet to 11,000 plus altitude, and quite a number of miles.  I really can't have gone very far, but it gets really pretty almost immediately from our condo, following various rushing streams and looking across meadows towards the smaller peaks in the mountains.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Morning Bike Ride, Aspen

I went along a short stretch of the Rio Grande Trail

Fruit trees are still flowering here: it's still early spring.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Rainy Day in Aspen

The rain stopped in the late afternoon, and I walked up the mountainside a little towards the ski area -- now all bare earth and gravel. Snow was predicted but we haven't had it yet.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Cheers from Aspen

Maroon Bells, beautiful snow-capped peaks near Aspen, Colorado,
where we'll be spending the next 3 weeks.

Another view of the Bells. We were waiting to find out which apartment we will stay in.

Road to the Bells

Aspen trees just leafing out -- up higher, they aren't as advanced.

Our first dinner in our Aspen apartment, which is the same one where we stayed in June 2011.
Chateau 4th street is made by a friend in Des Moines, who gave it to us on the way here.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Aroma Image of the Day

Lilacs blooming

We rode past a beautiful lilac bush on our bikes today, coming home from the Bonsai Festival at the Matthei Botanical Gardens. The festival celebrated the opening of a new outdoor display area for the extensive bonsai collection of the gardens; it included a concert of koto music. The music included a few short pieces that sounded like traditional Japanese music and a couple of pieces that sounded like the sound track of a Miazaki film. The finale was an elaborate version of "El Condor Pasa" that sounded more like Simon and Garfunkel than like the Inca flute and drum players that often busk in public spaces in large cities (or used to do it, I haven't seen any recently).

A few images from the festival, no particular aroma associations:


Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Smell of Beauty

Beauty parlors used to smell of unpleasant chemicals. Now, I've observed, they smell mostly of perfumes with undernotes of chemicals. I wondered about this, so I asked an expert: Kim, the woman who always cuts my hair. Her explanation begins with the fact that permanents have always been the source of the harshest chemical smells in hair products. Kim says that coloring products smell the worst when you mix and prepare them, which doesn't take a lot of time and can be done away from the customers. Acrylic nails also involve stinky chemicals besides the banana smell of nail polish remover, she says.

Childhood memories: this is a Toni Doll
that could be given stinky home permanents
Why doesn't the shop smell like these chemicals? Like the beauty shops I remember from the past?

Permanents, at the moment, are out of style, Kim explains. In the past, a salon would have been giving people permanents all day long. Currently they might do one a day (this morning, she says, they did only one permanent at her shop, which is large, and none this afternoon). Hair styles are more natural now, at least those done in her salon. Along with this natural look for hairstyles, people also are less interested in artificial nails than they were a few years ago. In her view, the natural trend is a main cause of the better smell of beauty salons.

Coloring of all sorts is very popular, now, says Kim, thanks to improvements in the products used: you can choose a more natural-looking hair color. But from the smell perspective, your beautician can choose products with milder chemicals to use when doing the job. She says she has several favorites that don't smell particularly bad -- one she describes as "vegan."

Another specific reason why her salon smells predominantly of the perfume in the many gels, hairsprays, shampoos, lotions, and conditioners is that her salon has confined perms being done with chemicals to a single area of the shop, away from customers who are just getting their hair cut and blow-dried. They are back by the old-fashioned dome dryers, used mainly for these processes. I've never been back there!

I thought the government had regulated salon chemicals to protect the workers, but Kim thinks the smell improvements have arisen mainly from change in demand for artificial products and from the choices of the management, beauticians, and nail techs to use products that smell safer and thus are more pleasing to customers and to themselves.

Note: I recently stuck my nose into a couple of salons in shopping malls and so my aroma observation is not just based on the place where I get my own hair cut, for what that's worth. If there are socioeconomic differences in these trends and choices -- which I'm sure there are -- I'm not in a position to have noticed. I suspect the natural look and smell isn't as popular in other areas as it is in Ann Arbor, but I haven't checked it out.

"A History of the Senses"




Cluny Museum:
The Lady and the Unicorn, Sense of Smell (WikiMedia)

Friday, May 17, 2013















Aroma Image for Today

Lillies of the Valley make my whole front yard smell wonderful this week

Thursday, May 16, 2013

"Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell"

Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnot covers several key topics in smell reading. It begins historical data that summarize how smell appeared in ancient times through the Dark Ages up through recently. It includes a survey of anthropological observations, and a summary of some of the commercialization of smell in modern times. First published in 1994, the book is a very useful introduction to topics that have recurred in the small but possibly growing literature exploring a variety of aroma topics.

Classen notes the many uses of perfumes, fragrant unguents, incense and other burned aromatics, spices, beds of rose petals, and many other odor conditioners of the Romans. While modern people see distinctions between perfumes, incense, products rubbed on the body, and spice or flavorings added to food, the Romans often used the same products as incense, food additives, drugs, and perfumes; that is, in a sense, they ate or drank perfume, used incense or perfume as medicine, and otherwise blurred the lines as we see them.

The role of aromatics in Romans' lives contrasted with the many unpleasant smells of their cities and industries -- such as the use of urine in tanneries and even laundries. A fascinating observation: that the shellfish used to dye garments the well-known royal purple color left a fishy odor on the cloth that had to be masked by various fragrant smokes or powders put on clothing.

The early chapters of Aroma particularly stress the role that aromatics like incense and the smoke from animal sacrifices played in ancient religions and early Christianity. Specifically, the Roman gods loved incense -- like many ancient Mediterranean gods they ate nectar and ambrosia, a cross between incense and food. Spicy, exotic aromas were associated with religious experience. The early Christians at first rejected this, wanting to make their new and more reserved faith different from the old religion. The Church, however, eventually added incense back into the sanctuary and added the concept of a holy odor that distinguished saints even after death -- the odor of sanctity. Only the devil stank.

While the Romans loved bathing extended with lots of perfumes, unguents, etc. later people virtually gave up bathing and used perfumes to cover the rather appalling odors of their bodies, feet, breath. The puritans purified things by opposing the use of perfume.

In the chapter on medieval through modern times, I enjoyed her description of a medieval kitchen. Its odors not only included the smoking hearth but also refuse, spoiling food, sweating cooks and servants, dogs turning the spits on the fire, and animals waiting to be slaughtered or actually being killed prior to cooking them. Pungent sauces or vinegar served to mask putrid meat; their odors blended with those of spices, herbs, garlic, onions, wine, meat, cheese -- nothing refrigerated. Such were the smells of the medieval kitchen.

Classen's chapter on anthropological observations inspired me to read about the Andaman islanders, which I wrote up here: The Spirits Can Smell You. Her observations are interesting, and  have been expanded by later writers.

She describes how the Victorians defined the senses -- sight was for men like explorers and scientists while smell was feminine and associated with women, savages, animals. Smell symbolized intuition, irrationality, and sentiment. Her discussion of how modern advertising of beauty aids and personal care products has driven current western attitudes to odors is interesting, but I have read more penetrating analyses of this area.

I am getting ready to return all the books I have from the library, so I hope to make a quick set of brief notes on some of them before they are out of my hands.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Who smells better: a man or a dog?

Agriculture-sniffing dog
One rarely-disputed belief about smell is that humans have a less-developed or weaker ability to detect odors than many animals, especially dogs. Both Freud and Darwin suspected that evolution had weakened the human sense of smell while being quite kind to dogs. Recent research has changed the way science views the difference. Dogs don't necessarily smell better, they just smell differently.

Drug-sniffing dog
Let's begin with the term "trained bloodhound," which of course refers to a dog breed that can smell with incredible, almost uncanny accuracy. Give them a tiny whiff of a person's scent and -- noses to the ground -- these dogs can find their quarry. At least since the Middle Ages, bloodhounds have been trained and used to track down criminals or victims. And dogs seem to have helped human hunters to track prey animals for around 16,000 years, or at least lived with humans that long, making them the first domestic animals.

Boston Police dogs in hunt for fleeing
Marathon Bomber
The terror of being hunted down by baying sniffer-dogs plays a role in a variety of melodramas depicting an innocent accused person, a runaway slave seeking freedom in a hostile wilderness or a dangerous criminal attempting to escape in urban confusion. In stories, comic books, and movies (once they were invented) the bloodhound chase has become a cliche along with a near-mystic belief in dogs' ability to sense the quarry.

More recently, many breeds of dogs work in the customs halls of America's international airports, as you may have seen while returning from a trip abroad. Drug-sniffing dogs wear badges that say "US Customs and Border Protection" and Agriculture Department sniffing dogs wear little green coats that say "Protecting American Agriculture" while working with their handlers. Bomb squads have trained explosive-sniffing dogs. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that "using a drug-sniffing police dog on a suspect’s property without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches." (NY Times, March 29, 2013)

Major news coverage has also described success training dogs to recognize the odors of various diseases such as bladder cancer smells in patients' urine and other diseases on patients' breath. However, the success rate isn't good enough to create squads of disease-sniffing dogs like the law-enforcement dogs.

Could humans accomplish anything like dogs? Of course no humans would be able to make their way through the woods on their bellies, sniffing a trail of scent. Not even if their noses would pick up the traces that the dogs would find. And although in the Middle Ages, doctors sniffed their patients' urine as a diagnostic test, I suspect that most medical professionals today would rather forget that smell has diagnostic value. Leave those things to the dogs!

But is the human olfactory sense really deficient compared to dogs? The book What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert suggests that the common awe for what dogs can smell is unfair to humans, who aren't tested or trained to do similar acts of sniffing. "If the human nose received the same gee-whiz treatment given to animal stories, we would sound as impressive as any dog. Here's an example: Just by smelling some ice cream that once had a wooden popsicle stick in it, regular folks can tell whether the stick came from Wisconsin, Maine, British Columbia, or China. Amazing, no?"

Gilbert describes the popsicle-stick experiment and several others in which humans demonstrated feats of smell prowess that compare to those that give dogs their reputation. A human can pick out a T-shirt that belongs to his or her spouse or partner from among a number of shirts. A human mother knows her own babies smell from that of other babies. In his autobiography, physicist Richard Feynman described several smelling feats he had mastered, including following a scent trail on the ground or identifying people by the smell of their hands. (Gilbert calls some of these "stupid human tricks.")  And in an experiment at Berkeley, human subjects on hands and knees could "follow a 10-meter-long chocolate-scented trail using only their noses." Training improved their performance -- after a few days of practice, their speed doubled and they stayed on the trail better.

"Dog lovers ... may also be surprised to learn that drug dogs and humans have almost identical sensitivity to methyl benzoate, the smell used to track cocaine. Dogs have great noses, but it's time to stop the trash talk and give ourselves more credit," writes Gilbert. (quotes from What the Nose Knows, pp. 62-64; Kindle locations 1018-1034)

On the more technical side, in the book Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, author Gordon Shepherd describes the comparative anatomy and neurobiology of the human and canine sensory organs.

Shepherd describes the length, placement, and form of the nasal tract; how the nasal tract attaches to the mouth; the form of the nostrils, the configuration of the location of the molecular sensors that connect by neurons to the brain, the olfactory bulb that processes the responses, the cognitive apparatus for sensing, recognizing, and remembering odors, and the overall measurable results. Both dogs and humans have the olfactory bulb at the base of the brain just above the smell receptors in the upper chamber of the nose, as do other mammals.

Dog nostrils have several specialized structures for scooping up air and effectively delivering smells to the smell sensors in the upper part of the snout (sniffing through the nose is called orthonasal smelling). The dog's snout and nostrils very effectively pull in smells from the ground or the air surrounding their snouts. Human noses aren't as good at sniffing, but humans make better use of retronasal smelling: that is, pressing scent-laden air across chewed food in the mouth and wafting it onto the sensors in the upper nasal passages. Such retronasal smelling combines odor sense with all the senses in the mouth (taste buds, pressure and temperature sensors, etc.) In retronasal smelling, the senses of smell and taste integrate in the brain to make flavor. Dogs' noses, says Shepherd, are "engineered for orthonasal smell, and the human nose is engineered mainly for retronasal smell." (p. 19)

In the past, generalizations about human versus dog ability to smell have not considered these structural differences. For example, simple counting of the number of olfactory sensors oversimplifies the comparison of smell ability. Indeed, humans are outranked by rodents with 1000 types of smell receptors and dogs with 800 -- humans have only 350. "However, the greater complexity of the human brain in analyzing the images becomes a critical factor," says Shepherd. He elaborates this complexity a great deal in the remainder of the book. (p. 89)

Detection of molecules is only the beginning of a process. Humans perceive flavors and create "smell images" by using the complete set of structures in the mouth, nose, and brain. The human sense of flavor thus discriminates between many foods -- the aromas of boiled or fried foods, fermented foods, and spiced foods. The brain also has intricate ways of creating smell memories, as well as selective ways of reacting to flavors, depending on the context in which one smells, including how hungry one is and on the appearance, especially the color of a smelled object. (p. 97, 137)

The role of evolution in creating the human or canine senses is mainly speculative, according to Shepherd. Details of the adaptation and evolution of the structures of the human and canine snouts and brains are not well understood, nor about the relationship of humans and dogs.

Other writers do speculate about how dogs and humans got together. One theory is quoted by Richard Wrangham in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human -- wolves began to hang around human settlements because of the great garbage they could find nearby. The calmer members of the wolf packs were able to get closer to human camps; over time these calmer members of the species self-domesticated into dogs and were accepted as part of human society. (p. 184)  Another theory says that once wolves did become part of the human family, dogs and humans evolved together to improve their ability to track prey and score lots of meat for both species. The dogs' role included helping to frighten away predators or human enemies, as well as participating in the hunt and eating the garbage.

The idea that dogs have an incomprehensibly evolved sense of smell beyond our imagining is probably just wrong. The concepts that human use of smell is part of a broader cognitive grasp of flavor and that it's an often unnoticed human way of perceiving the environment are fascinating. I have learned from my recent reading that human olfactory activity is far more complex than I thought. We can do away with the simple-minded idea that if we aren't able to replicate the action of a trained bloodhound we aren't very good at smelling.

So next time you hear that people don't smell well, you could mention this: dog owners in a carefully controlled test could smell which of two blankets belonged to their dog and which belonged to an unfamiliar dog 89% of the time. (Gilbert p. 61) On the other hand, if you hear that people don't smell good, you're on your own.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

A Scratch-and-Sniff Story

"Responsible thing: An energy company sending out scratch-and-sniff cards that smell like natural gas so customers can learn to identify the smell in case of a leak. Unfortunate thing: An entire box of said cards compressed in a garbage truck that then travels through town and makes residents think there’s a widespread gas leak." -- from The Consumerist, 5/8/13
 A gas company employee in Great Falls, Montana, threw away the scratch-and-sniffs because they were expired, but when the garbage truck's compressor processed them, it was like "turning the compressor into a giant finger that scratched all those smelly cards."

"Gas on all floors" -- Paris sign that inspired Marcel Duchamp
See this blog post for details
What people really smelled was a harmless but smelly gas called mercaptan, which gas companies for a long time have added to harmful but odorless natural gas to make sure people can smell it when it leaks.  (The practice started after a build-up of the undetectable gas caused a tragic school explosion in 1937.)

Whether they had been educated by one of the scratch-and-sniffs or otherwise learned to recognize a gas leak, the people in Great Falls recognized the smell so -- "Emergency crews responded to reports of gas smells and evacuated at least six downtown buildings," according to the Great Falls Tribune.

I was surprised that anyone thought it was necessary to ensure that people could recognize the smell of natural gas. I thought the smell was absolutely universal in America where so many homes have a gas line, and occasional bits of odor escape from time to time without consequences -- other than maybe a call to the gas company to check for leaks.  When a person totally loses the sense of smell, a condition called anosmia, the fear of missing a gas leak is one of many terrible reactions to the loss.

My own false alarms about a gas smell have resulted when my hands have absorbed the stinky aroma of garlic during food preparation. Sometimes the odor stays on my hands until the middle of the night, when it's made me think of mercaptan, a thiol (organo-sulfide) with a garlic-like odor. I've talked to other garlic-loving cooks who have experienced this.

A lot of stinky organic chemicals can cause a similar odor. For example, it can also result from algae in seaside ponds. Last May in Santa Barbara I wondered why the beautiful ponds of the Andree Clark Wildlife Refuge near the downtown beaches were absolutely rank-smelling. The rotten-egg-like odor, according to the Santa Barbara Independent, came from an unnatural algae bloom, which arises from time to time in the artificial pond which replaced a natural wetland.

I imagine that everyone has a memory of a gas-leak smell that wasn't a gas leak, but I guess Great Falls is the champion!

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Garlic Smells









Photo from Wikimedia commons.

Saturday, May 04, 2013

The Spirits Can Smell You

Illustration from Radcliffe-Brown's
The Andaman Islanders




Radcliffe-Brown writes of the ferocity of these storms:






Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Reading about aromas, smells, odors, and how we perceive them

I have mentioned my recent reading project about the senses, with an emphasis on the sense of smell. I've read an explanation of neurogastronomy (how the brain works with the senses of taste and smell),  anthropological studies of the role of smells in other cultures, historical studies of attitudes and theories about odors and aromas, and various works describing subjective feelings about smells and their meanings. I've been reading but not writing much, but I want to change that. So first, here's my recent reading list (some of which I've mentioned before):

  • Neurogastronomy​: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon M. Shepherd
  • Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classen
  • A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
  • A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace by Robert Jütte
  • Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory by David Howes
  • Andaman Islanders by A. Radcliffe-Brown