Smellosophy

An NRC Handelsblad Book of the Year

"This is a special book. It teaches readers a lot about olfaction. It teaches us even more about what philosophy can be." - Times Literary Supplement

"Lively, authoritative. Aims to rehabilitate smell's neglected and marginalised status." - Wall Street Journal

"Barwich argues that we could discover far more about consciousness if we would only relinquish our old-school fixation on sight." - Harper's

"Offers rich discussions of olfactory perception, the conscious and subconscious impacts of smell on behaviour and emotion, and the physical and behavioural details that determine what odours we inhale, furnishing broad insights into the psychology of olfaction." - Science

Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli "spark" neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell—only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience—doesn't work this way. So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?

A. S. Barwich turned to experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the mechanics and meaning of odours. She discovered that scents are often fickle and do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Upending existing theories of perception, Smellosophy offers a new model for understanding how the brain senses and processes odour.