It is occurring to me now that Asifa Majid must be a
patron saint of Limbic Signal. Besides being the most often cited scientist on this site, she is also, as far as I know, the only academic researching the language of
smell.
I’m not sure where she spends more of her time – with the
people who live in the Bay of Bengal, or at her university in the Netherlands –
but as a result of her work we get to learn more about the rich odor vocabulary
of those people, and about the way all of our minds translate sensory
experience into language.
In this new
work, she compares odor-words used by both the hunting-gathering Jahai
people and post-industrialist Dutch people. And it turns out that the Jahai
actually had words for smell-types whereas the Dutch referred to smells only by
their source. So for example, what I am calling smell-types, are Jahai words
referring to “stinging smells,” vs Dutch words referring to “a garbage truck.”
As a whole, she also found that both groups responded in
similar ways. Whereas the Jahai had more agreement on the descriptors and with
a faster response time, the Dutch gave a wider variety of answers for the same
things and struggled to come up with answers at all.
The one thing they did
have in common – and this is a nod to the role of the limbic system – their emotional responses to the tested odors were all the same. They
know this because they all made the same negative facial expressions in
response to similar smells.
Smell as a Window
to the Human Condition
The use of facial expressions as a way to measure smells
has a long history. Before babies can talk, they can sure make faces, and so
scientists can use those expressions to measure pleasure vs disgust. Or at
least disgust. (I don’t think the markers for pleasure are as clear and
identical across populations, or at least as a measurement for olfactory
hedonics – the pleasure or disgust that smells can cause.)*
But that is a momentary digression – we must now get into
the depths of this conversation about olfaction, perception, culture, and
human-ness. The press
release from Radboud University Nijmegen articulates the crux very
succinctly: “This suggests that although culture shapes language, odors are
perceived in the same way across the globe in diverse cultures.”
First off, this last bit about universal perceptual responses
implies that we have a preference hardwired into us, making some smells good
and some bad, determined on the day our code was written. But we learn what is
good and what is bad, in regards to smell. It is enculturated into us from
before we were born.
If there is a common thread running through all humans
that makes us like some smells and dislike others, it is because we are
constrained first biologically, then culturally. Culture or not, we will learn
that human waste is bad, and that it smells bad, even though we may not know it
at first. It is simply a matter of probability and statistics – chances are we
will all come to find human waste disgusting, and those are not the same
chances as whether someone will find aged cheese disgusting or not. We have to
learn to like aged cheese, and kimchi, and just about all fermented things.
On Lanugage,
Words, and Cognition
Hedonics is easier to talk about; it’s pretty black and
white. The semantics of olfaction, however, that’s the hard part. The core of
Majid’s work deals with the language of smell, and by extension the Whorf hypothesis,
and figuring out what is universal to the human experience and what part is
driven into us by our culture. She compares the opposites, the hunter-gatherers
and the post-industrialists, using a very clever metric – measuring the way
they use language to describe olfactory experiences. She wants to find out what
is left when their respective cultures cancel each other out. (Actually, I’m
not sure what she wants from her work, but that’s what I want!)
Majid’s metric is clever to be sure, but it’s a slippery
one, and for me it brings with it enough trips and falls to write a book, which
I have. And it goes something like this:
"There is no language for smells, because it bypasses the language centers of the brain.”
-Hidden Scents
By some accounts,
I am wrong. But this is about the grey areas, not the black and whites or rights
and wrongs. I’ll continue with a longer passage from a concluding section in my
book where we look at a situation similar but different:
In the Bay of Bengal live the Ongee people. A “nose-wise” society, they treat olfaction with as much importance as Western vision. When the West once asked the Ongee for help in making a map of their land, the Ongee man responded: “All the places in space are constantly changing. The creek is never the same; …. Your map tells lies. Places change. Does your map say that?” (Pandya 1991). Smell is like this. Whether through the meanderings of history, or the chimerical configurations of post-modernity, smell is always changing. The Ongee are right; there are no maps, no categories, and no lexicon to show that.
Pandya V (1990). Movement and Space: Andamanese Cartography. American Ethnologist 17:775–797.
The people in question do not use language in the same
way as the scientists studying their ways, and so the very word “language” must
be clearly defined. Here’s a reminder: in conducting linguistic studies upon
many indigenous people, the first thing the intrepid scientist must do is to
explain what a word is. That's right, the very concept of the sentence as made
of simpler word-parts is unfamiliar if not unknown to certain cultures, and
must be painstakingly explained before any “studying” can take place.
Cultural Influence
Getting to the depth of this subject on the human
condition, I’ll restate an extensive passage from this site, written a few
years ago:
I insinuate not even a whisper of Whorf hypothesis
in this: A common Westerner of the 21st century spends a great deal of time in
the virtual mindspace, very much removed from the physical environment, very
much interacting not with molecules but with thoughts. There is an interstitial
space which exists between the person and the world, and this is the collective
mindspace of culture.
The post-industrialized human does not perform in a cycle
of environmental stimulus and bodily response, but separates the two in time,
opening a place for reflection and deliberation. Subjectively-conscious,
self-reflective thought interrupts our direct connection with the world around
us. Furthermore, systems functioning only via chemical stimuli are
de-prioritized for others better suited to simulation and virtual manipulation.
The rich olfactory vocabulary of Majid’s study groups, is
it not an indication of the direct reliance upon their physical environment?
Instead of it proving that there can be such a thing as a ‘language of smell,’
does it not further support that the two – olfaction and language – are
mutually exclusive? I believe this is a case of apples and oranges, but because
the subject matter straddles disciplines (psychology, linguistics, sensory
studies) it evades such critical analysis.
Concluding Thought
It’s very hard to grasp the extent to which you have
learned from your culture; the totality of your programming can never be
understood by you because that would break the information
law that says a system can never contain a model to fully describe the
system that created it.
*A Note on Negative Hedonics
Negative olfactory hedonics is the most physiologically
“visible,” showing increased heart rate and activation of the amygdala in
response to unpleasant odors. In contrast, neutral and pleasant odors exhibit dormancy
(Alaoui-Ismaïli et al., 1997; Zald & Pardo, 1997, resp.). It is also the
most nominally visible – bad smells occupy more of the odor namespace than any
other distinction, making the hedonic taxonomy quite phobiaphilic (Boisson,
1997). Finally, some odor specialists postulate that such negatively valenced
stimuli are processed in two neurologically distinct ways: a “quick and dirty”
route for potentially harmful substances and a more “cognitively complex” route
for pleasant/neutral odors (Rouby & Bensafi, 2002: 154-55). –taken from Hidden Scents
Alaoui-Ismaïli
O, Vernet-Maury E, Dittmar A, Delhomme G, & Chanel J (1997). Odor Hedonics:
Connection with Emotional Responses Estimated by Autonomic Parameters. Chemical Senses 22: 237-48.
Boisson
C (1997). La Dénomination des Odeurs: Variations et Régularités Linguistiques.
In: Olfaction: Du Linguistique au Neurone,
ed. D Dubois & A Holley. Intelligentica
1(24): 29-49.
Rouby
C & Bensafi M (2002). Is There a Hedonic Dimension to Odors? In: Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, ed. C
Rouby, B Schaal, D Dubois, R Gervais, & A Holley, pp. 140-159. Cambridge,
U.K: Cambridge University Press.
Image source:
stenographer: https://hackaday.com/2015/07/06/stenography-yes-with-arduinos/
Image source: Stenographer, Mike Gifford, 2014
Notes:
Radboud University,
2018
Asifa Majid et al. Olfactory language and abstraction
across cultures, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences (2018). DOI:
10.1098/rstb.2017.0139
Links to more of
Majid’s work:
Current Biology, Majid and Kruspe: "Hunter-Gatherer
Olfaction Is Special"
Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak
the right language. Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult. Cognition, November 2013.
Asifa Majid interviewed by cognitive scientist Jon
Sutton: The Content of Minds in The Psychologist, July 2016.
Links to Posts
related to Majid’s work, language, and cognition:
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