James Nestor's Breath meets Mary Roach's Gulp in a fascinating tour of our most essential sense
for perceiving the world around us--and the story of how it became our most neglected. Smelling
is one of the most natural things we do. We take over 20 000 breaths a day interacting with a
host of scents with each one. Smell is also one of our most sensitive and refined senses few
other mammals surpass our ability to perceive scents in the animal kingdom. Yet as the
millions of people who lost their sense of smell during the COVID-19 pandemic can attest we
too often overlook its role in our overall health. Now one of the world's leading researchers
on smell Jonas Olofsson reveals the fascinating science behind this forgotten sense. Drawing
from cutting-edge original research Olofsson reveals not only that the human sense of smell is
extraordinarily sensitive but how it engages our brain's full capacity. In fact olfaction
begins not in the nose but in the brain even before an odor's molecules reach our smell
receptors. Our memories personalities preferences and expectations shape the way we interact
with scents with profound implications for how we perceive the world around us. With playful
curiosity and a breadth of scientific interest across neuroscience psychology linguistics
and even literature The Forgotten Sense reveals the wonders of smell and all that we lose in
neglecting it. We meet ancient philosophers who prized smell as well as the nineteenth-century
scholars who associated it with "beastly" instincts and charted its devaluation for over a
century. Olofsson untangles the role of smell in human evolution and answers the question of
why two people can interpret the same smell differently. And crucially we see smell as the
intellectual exercise that it is with invaluable insight into how we might train our brains to
strengthen and even regain our sense of smell after illness. For readers of Bill Bryson and
Steven Pinker The Forgotten Sense reveals the depths of the most understudied function of
human life.
