New and upcoming perfume books for 2016: My Life by Jo Malone, An Odyssey of Flavours and Fragrances from Givaudan, On The Scent by Paolo Pelosi, and Aphorismes d’un Parfumeur by Dominique Ropion.
A new biography from Jo Malone, founder and former owner of the eponymous brand and founder / owner of the newer brand Jo Loves…
Those associations can then be used to trigger the reward system even when the perceived reward is smaller than the actual one. Take vanilla. Vanilla isn’t actually sweet. It’s quite bitter. But in the Western world, we have come to associate it with sweet foods, and so, to us, it signals sweetness. When we smell it, our sweet receptors go on high alert—and the food we eat tastes sweeter than it otherwise would.
— Maria Konnikova writes about the emerging field of neurogastronomy and Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant The Fat Duck. Read more at This Man Will Transform How You Eat at New Republic.
In the study, six male and six female donors provided odour samples without fragrance, wearing their own fragrance, and wearing an assigned fragrance. Then 296 female and 131 male participants - average age mid-20s - were asked to choose, which ones were from the same individual. Psychology PhD researcher Caroline Allen, of the University of Stirling and lead author of the report, said participants matched a person's body odour with their chosen perfume "at above chance levels".
— Read more at Study links people's natural scent to chosen perfumes : Your favourite perfumes always smell like... you! at Daily Times.
Recent research found that a diminished sense of smell predicted frontal lobe damage in 231 soldiers who had suffered blast-related injuries on the battlefield. In the Department of Defense study led by Michael Xydakis of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, subjects with low scores on a smell test were three times as likely to show evidence of frontal lobe damage during brain imaging than those whose sense of smell was normal.
— Read more at Smell Tests Could One Day Reveal Head Trauma and Neurodegenerative Disease at Scientific American.
I should think we might fairly gauge the future of biological science, centuries ahead, by estimating the time it will take to reach a complete, comprehensive understanding of odor. It may not seem a profound enough problem to dominate all the life sciences, but it contains, piece by piece, all the mysteries. Smoke: tobacco burning, coal smoke, wood-fire smoke, leaf smoke. Most of all, leaf smoke. This is the only odor I can will back to consciousness just by thinking about it.
— Lewis Thomas, quoted in The Poetics of Smell as a Mode of Knowledge at BrainPickings. Hat tip to Becca!