The song of human sensory experience

There are a number of things that Diane Ackerman writes about in this chapter that I find interesting, but there was one quote in particular that reframed my entire perspective on the sense of smell: 

“Breaths come in pairs, except at two times in our lives—the beginning and the end. At birth, we inhale for the first time; at death, we exhale for the last. In between, through all the lather of one’s life, each breath passes air over our olfactory sites. Each day, we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe—two seconds to inhale and three seconds to exhale—and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems. Inhaling and exhaling, we smell odors. Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. We live in a constant wash of them.” 

At first this came across to me as a dramatic, romanticized characterization of what I considered to be a usually fairly mundane sensorial experience. I’ve always been familiar with smell’s association with memory and I’ve experienced those intense moments where a fragrance has whisked me back in time or to a completely different place, but in general, smell is something that is most often tucked away from the forefront of my mind. This quote both makes me understand my own perspective, and grants me a new one. Breathing is not something we often think about, but it is obviously such a vital and central part of what it means to be alive- literally. The times when we are thinking about breathing are often times that we are practicing mindfulness or meditation. Ackerman establishes the functional connection between breathing and smell here, but also highlights their similarities as undertones of human experience. As Ackerman details in this quote, we are perpetually inundated with all kinds of smells. It’s almost unavoidable but often goes unnoticed, unless we encounter a smell that grabs our attention.

If I were to create an analogy for human sensorial experience, I might compare it to a song. Within this analogy, I think that the sense of smell can be considered like the rhythm section. It provides the underlying pulse (kind of like inhaling and exhaling), harmony, and color upon which the melody can work. While the melody might often be the immediately noticeable component, the cohesiveness of the song relies on structure and framework that the rhythm section has established. As horribly cliché as it is, this sort of renews the meaning of “stopping to smell the roses.” A heightened focus on smell might have a similar effect in a mindfulness exercise as a focus on breathing. As a side note, it's also interesting how this analogy plays into another point of Ackerman's, that being the difficulty of describing smells and the tendency for us to compare them to other senses or to describe them through metaphor.