There are more things in heaven and earth

From Can’t Place That Smell? You Must Be American by T. M. Luhrmann.

Under the leadership of Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, they made up a kit of systematic stimuli for the traditional five senses: for sight, color chips and geometric forms; for hearing, pitch, amplitude and rhythm variations; for smell, a set of scratch-and-sniff cards; and so forth. They took these kits to over 20 cultural groups around the world. Their results upend some of our basic assumptions.

For example, it’s fairly common, in scientific literature, to find the view that “humans are astonishingly bad at odor identification and naming,” as a recent review of 30 years of experiments concluded. When ordinary people are presented with the smell of ordinary substances (coffee, peanut butter, chocolate), they correctly identify about half of them. That’s why we think of scent as a trigger for personal memory — leading to the recall of something specific, particular, uniquely our own.

It turns out that the subjects of those 30 years of experiments were mostly English-speaking. Indeed, English speakers find it easy to identify the common color in milk and jasmine flowers (“white”) but not the common scent in, say, bat droppings and the leaf of ginger root. When the research team presented what should have been familiar scents to Americans — cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, rose and so forth — they were terrible at naming them. Americans, they wrote, said things like this when presented with the cinnamon scratch-and-sniff card: “I don’t know how to say that, sweet, yeah; I have tasted that gum like Big Red or something tastes like, what do I want to say? I can’t get the word. Jesus it’s like that gum smell like something like Big Red. Can I say that? O.K. Big Red, Big Red gum.”

Interesting. I wonder what the standard deviation is for each sense within a population. For example in my family (n=5) one son has perfect pitch, my wife can both identify and name incredibly specific colors, and I am especially alert to and can name particular smells.

Perhaps it is entirely luck of the genetic draw. Perhaps my wife's talent is related to a life long love of embroidery entailing both sustained and close work with fine hues. Perhaps my sense of smell owes something to having grown up internationally in an exceptionally wide variety of environments, each with their distinct portfolio of smells: cities, the countryside, farms, mountains, by the ocean, in the desert, in the jungle, etc.

I love that we are still discovering that the world is not what we think it to be. Hamlet nailed it.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.