We eat a lot of good things and often we eat them with our eyes looking at the pictures posted by others; we visit intriguing cities with very big and green trees; we love animals and grow colonies of cats and children domesticated more than adorable. Waterfalls, rivers, lakes and mountains, huge waves or calm, we lack nothing.
The shadows of our photos are well-balanced, well-saturated colors, and love is always black and white.
We have the taste of being able to decide who or what to be, and we expect some “likes” for sure!
But who really understands us, are few persons... Few who read till the end our poetry, few the ones who are able to arrive to the last album of photos about our son's first bath, the photo in which he is with closed eyes in the arms of his lovely dad.
Among these few, some advise us, indeed "they are authorized" to do so. And our community is always agree on everything: life, love and relationships, betrayal or loyalty, holidays, places to discover, homosexuality, politics, the world, the TV programs, the employer, the brand of high fashion and the pop ones, is the cat better than the dog (?), a car or a bicycle (?), the scent…
I have often heard and read that the olfactory emotions are different from any other emotion: ancestral and even moving. This consideration is valid only, speaking of perfume, we succeed to emancipate ourselves from the mass opinion, or from the opinion of that critical niche of friends around us, avoiding to relate to a scent after they made the same giving us advises about that fragrance, so that we are conditioning.
The only thing you need is therefore your nose and even before your sensitivity.
Surely someone will observe that our nose is not so reliable and therefore seek help from someone who we consider better than us. True, our nose is unreliable, however, we do not need any advice or help, we need memory. In this way we could define our taste.
So, our nose is not as reliable as our eyes are! But there is one example that I can do to exemplify how our sense of smell works!
When you're in a dark bar drinking a beer, your eyes are able to pick the colors adapting themselves to the dark! If at some point you go out, outside the bar, while the sun shines at the top, in a split second, your eyes would adapt themselves to light.
The same thing would not happen if instead of your eyes to work was a camera!
The ability of our eyes to see in different light conditions is related to our memory, the brain's ability to process an image that presumably we know, allowing our eyes to see.
Our sense of smell works in the same way, as a camera! With the same handicap, always! It "sees" the first color and then another one and yet another! But if it does not have an archive of olfactory memories it cannot exceed the first or the second color! To store memory, our nose not only has to work continuously, but must be closely linked to our brain, that we must strive to create our database that is not spontaneous! There are few smells that we can store spontaneously: the smells of danger (as fire), those of food, those of the stool and those about sex!
Now, we have to remember that our database of smells will not be a database of ingredients!
So we have to define what the smell is! The smell does not correspond to the ingredient, the smell is a sensation very personal with those ingredients.
To give an example, always on the colors: the sensations of “red” are not simply the memory of the red, but above the equivalent emotions arising from that color, influenced by our culture. For me, “red” is the passion, the suffering, the pain but also the strength and fertility, or the night that is soon to come. But sometimes the red could be a really surprise!
For this I always prefer not to talk about ingredients, but about sensations!
Someone is asking me, why! And I always answer that a paint is not only a matter of colors!
Starting from this consideration we should give a name to those sensations related to the smell. How do we can make?
Language and color perceptions are closely related!
The way we see the world affects the use we make of our language and, our use of language affects how we see the world.
The functions of the left hemisphere of the brain can be influenced by the perception of language and visual because this is the hemisphere of the brain that is organized to provide linguistic and logical performances. This is reversed in children, because the visual perception is not yet linked to a center of language. It seems that the children see the color in a pure way, because what they see is not filtered through the lens of language.
Certainly the perception of odors is influenced by our language and the smells are also linked to a visual perception of the raw material that produces them. Do you remember what I was saying about “red”?
Here my quote: “…the sensations of “red” are not simply the memory of the red, but above the equivalent emotions arising from that color, influenced by our culture.”
Culture?
In Viking culture the color of the sky was in the category of green! This produced a major boating skills.
In order to highlight the way in which the perceptions of color change between cultures, you can do the example of how to categorize linguistically certain colors.
Taking again the color range of what we call "red" and "pink" in English.
These two colors represent in English two distinct categories of colors, "red" and "pink", and for sure two different anthology of emotions! If we consider other languages, this same categorization scheme is not clear. There is a fee opposite in China. The distinction of these color is not so prevalent because the colors are in the same category regards language. Red is “hóng” and pink is “fen hóng” or literally "red powder", a linguistic derivation similar to "light blue" in English.
Take the example of an ingredient: wormwood! For an Italian person it means “worm-wood”, and it appears as rot wood!
The same ingredient could be named “Absinthe”! it appears as a drug for poets, it seems related to inspiration and yearning soul.
Another world for this family of plant could be “Artemisia”. The artemisia evokes medicaments or sorceries!
For this I believe in the importance of concept (more than ingredients) that the Nose creates using raw materials!
So the name of the smell is a personal concept influenced by our culture.
If you are not sure about this, let’s start to talk about darkness, or better about the smell of darkness. And what about gothic?
