ANDRZEJ KRAUZEFor Proust, it was madeleines; for my kids, pizza. The Brooklyn neighborhood in which they grew up was dotted with pizzerias from which wafted the mouthwatering smells of newly baked pies. Eating pizza was a definite pleasure for them, but evoking the experience was another thing altogether. One of their favorite books was a scratch-and-sniff book that let the reader smell his way through the construction of a pizza—tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, oregano, the finished pie—odors remarkably like the real ones. Even scratching the pages now, some 30 years later, you can still inhale faint traces. Or maybe that’s just the scent of memories . . .
Once a year, TS devotes the better part of an issue to one of the senses. In 2011 it was taste; 2012, touch; this year, smell. As we were pulling content together, the staff realized that there were many, many ways to cover this particular sense. Olfaction is complex. It’s less acute in humans than in most animals, however, and is processed somewhat differently by other species—insects, fish, rodents—commonly used as models for studying smell. We decided to concentrate mostly on the reports of researchers using the latest tools and techniques to probe into the nitty-gritty of how the olfactory system is wired to deliver an odor message to the brain, and how that delivery translates into behavior.
Humans don’t use antennae to parse odors, ...
