Because of its key role in navigation, odor-detection and
spatialization go hand-in-hand. A paper from McGill's Department of Psychiatry
and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute gives evidence
to support this relationship.
The hippocampus, which is the central location where
spatial memories are "stored," is a key part of the olfactory system.
The two – space and smell – are so closely related that they can become
difficult to disentangle.
There is a great philosophical essay about the ontogeny
of a salamander (see Hosek and Freeman below) in which a creature develops its
identity (if questionably-sentient creatures can be said to do so) by way of
olfaction. This creature, as with many others, interfaces its environment primarily by smell,
especially in the beginnings of its life. The decisions that it makes then are
in response to olfactory information, which through iterated reinforcement forms
the foundation of its self.
I was so impressed by this idea that I was compelled to
write a short essay myself about space, information and dimensionality, as
narrated via the odyssey of the Eukaryote evolving through the epochs to its
present-day instantiation as a self-aware human. It can be read here.
***
On this relationship between navigation and olfaction, I
am reminded of a comment I received more than once when I was first telling
folks about my book on smells – "What is it about architects and
smells?" I studied both architecture and olfaction, and apparently, I'm
not the only one.
That was something I couldn't answer at the time; I had
never heard about it. As I began to meet more people involved in an olfactory
occupation, be it writing about fragrance or designing olfactory experiences, I
did notice a few interdisciplinary architects scattered among them.
Now it occurs to me quite clearly – architects are not
experts at navigation so much as spatial perception in general, and
specifically on moving through space.
Whereas the painter is concerned with the way the eyes move through two
dimensions, and the sculptor thinks about eyes moving in 3-D, the architect is
concerned with the moving body.
The late architect Michael Graves made this the thrust of
his speech as he opened his own School of Public Architecture at New Jersey's
Kean University in 2015(ish?) – he told us that in designing a building, the
human scale is the only one that matters. The way we feel in a space is the primary
criterion when evaluating it. If you think about it, a building is like a body
for our body.
***
Architects don’t have to learn much about proprioception, but maybe
they should. Proprioception is the feeling that we have of our own bodies,
where the parts are, how they're related, what they're doing, and whether we
should move them out of the way of danger. (Anybody ever see the hand-smashing phantom limb
trick? This is a good example of the power of proprioception.)
As we move through a building, our proprioception
recognizes and records not only our own bodies, but the “bigger body” that
we're in, whether it’s a building or a backyard. Before there was such a thing
as architects or buildings (i.e., before we were human), we used olfaction as a way to calibrate our
proprioception, and to navigate this bigger body that we’re in.
It seems I’ve done a pretty good job of navigating myself
into the part of this post that I now have no idea how to get out, so I’ll have
to leave it there. Architecture and olfaction make a good pair.
Notes:
Oct 2018, phys.org
Louisa Dahmani et al, An intrinsic association between
olfactory identification and spatial memory in humans, Nature Communications
(2018). DOI:
10.1038/s41467-018-06569-4
Hosek R J & Freeman W J (2001). Osmetic Ontogenesis,
or Olfaction Becomes You: The Neurodynamic, Intentional Self and Its Affinities
with the Foucaultian/Butlerian Subject. Configurations 9: 509–541.
School of Public
Architecture, Kean University
BBC, 2010
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