In her book "The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell," Rachel Herz, visiting assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School, explains the surprisingly significant findings of her 17 years of research on the olfactory sense. One of the world leaders on the psychology of smell, Herz will be featured tonight at 6 p.m. at the Brown Bookstore for a reading and signing of her book.
Herz studies the links between smell and emotion, memory, language, interpersonal interactions and taste. Her book was published Oct. 9.
She became convinced of the importance of smell when she acted as an expert witness for a case in which a car accident victim lost her ability to smell. The woman, who was in her 20s with a healthy home life and career, reported a feeling of disconnectedness from herself and others, doubts about her competence as a homemaker and caretaker, a decreased appetite and a lack of interest in sexual intimacy, according to Herz' book. After some investigating, it became clear that the accident victim's depression and lifestyle changes were directly linked to her anosmia, or inability to smell. The woman's "loss of sense of smell impacted everything in her life," Herz said. "When she had her sense of smell, she totally ignored it. People take the sense of smell for granted."
Herz told The Herald that her book "brings home the fact that the sense of smell enters into every facet of our life." Her book has been hailed as "the first and definitive book on the psychology of smell," and strives to exhibit the immense importance of smell in our daily lives, according to a bookstore press release.
"A primary point here is to shake people into alertness that (smell) is the major sensory experience that people are having," Herz said.
Herz discovered that sleeping people cannot smell, underlying the need for loud smoke alarms. Her research also indicates that no responses to smells are genetic. For instance, Herz interviewed a woman who hated the smell of roses because the first time she smelled roses was at her mother's funeral. Herz herself adored the smell of skunk in elementary school because she never had a negative response to the odor, she wrote in her book.
Smells work by evoking direct personal experience with them, she said. "I smell Coppertone sunscreen, and I am immediately brought back to being on the beach in Florida," Herz said.
In Asian culture, cheese is generally considered revolting, Herz said. On the other hand, Westerners consider cheese indulgent "comfort food." However, in Japan, a fermented soybean dish called Natto is a common breakfast food, but no Westerners would think about eating it, she explained. "To me, it smells like burning rubber, and burning rubber and food don't go together in my lexicon of what I consider food to be," Herz joked. "It has to do with the context in which I've learned it."
For women, the way that men smell outranks all other physical characteristics. From the male perspective, the way women look is more important, but scent ranks a close second, according to Herz. That doesn't mean, however, that men should load up on cologne and body wash.
"What the artificial smell is that's going to be the best scent - I can't predict that," Herz said.
She added that from a biological perspective, it's best if "the man were just bathed in ivory soap and didn't put on any cologne, body spray, just got into his fresh washed clothes with no scented detergents and fabric softeners and went out with a woman and she could smell him for who he truly is biologically."
According to her book, "the external manifestation of the genes for your immune system is your body odor." It is important that couples have dissimilar immune systems and are therefore attracted to each other's respective, and different, smells. That way, their children inherit the most diverse immune system possible, according to "The Scent of Desire." Herz said, therefore, that there is "no such thing as the 'Brad Pitt' of body odor" because there are advantages to varying immune systems.
"For every woman there is a set of men with whom it would be good to pair one's genes and another set with whom it wouldn't be good to mix and match," she said.
Herz argued that smell is an important tool used to reflect on the past so that we know who we are in the present. "It's not semantic memory where I can say the capital of France is Paris. It's not just where you were when you were learning this - it's all the feeling and association that you had at the time when you were learning. And without the sense of smell, that (feeling and association) is removed. It becomes robotic."
Herz has changed her relationship with the University so that she no longer has an active research lab. She said she teaches one course , but works primarily as a consultant in the private sector, having worked with International Flavors and Fragrances, Frito Lay, PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company. Her work for food product distributors focuses on the fact that all foods have aromas. Among other things, she helps companies such as Coca Cola represent their products with appropriate language.
Words on the label of "the product can have an impact on what the consumer thinks they're involved with," she said. "Smells are invisible but we are visually oriented so we look for meaning in the visual or verbal context that we're experiencing. When a word comes along, it has the power to supersede the olfactory experience. It's not (called) shoe polish for a reason."
In addition to industry collaboration, Herz founded a company called Scentology which, according to its Web site, distributes "smart scents for positive change." One of the company's three fragrances is Bliss Booster, an orange oil fragrance that decreases feelings of depression. "People should not throw away Zoloft and take Bliss Booster instead," Herz joked, because "smells only have reactions within them as a function of the associations we have to them," but they don't have pharmacological capabilities.
Herz concluded by saying, "My bottom line is that from the point of view of quality of life, the sense of smell is really key. People who have a functioning smell tend not to realize the impact that their smell actually has with respect to that quality. My hope is that this book will help people to realize this without going through the misery of losing it."
