Scents

Nosenography (10-05-17)

Canniford, Riach, and Hill have coined a new term: “nosenography.”  They report that “Nosenography is a theoretical and methodological commitment to uncover the presences and practices of smell, an often-ignored sensory feature of market and consumption spaces. . . . smell is a dynamic and unruly force that. . . . (i) encodes spatial assemblages with meaning and power, (ii) identifies and directly links people with spaces and (iii) punctuates movements and change in these spaces.

Rosemary and Working Memory in Children (05-12-17)

Moss and Earle tested the effects of smelling rosemary on working memory in children.  They found that “Exposure to the aroma of rosemary essential oil can significantly enhance working memory in children. . . . A total of 40 children aged 10 to 11 took part in a class based test on different mental tasks. Children were randomly assigned to a room that had either rosemary oil diffused in it for ten minutes or a room with no scent. . . . Analysis revealed that the children in the aroma room received significantly higher scores than the non-scented room.

Communicating by Smell (04-17-17)

De Groot, Semin, and Smeets provide additional information about how scents influence how we interact with each other.  Since current, generally available, technologies do not support human communication via smells, face-to-face meetings will remain important for the foreseeable future.  As de Groot and his team report “Humans use multiple senses to navigate the social world, and the sense of smell is arguably the most underestimated one.  An intriguing aspect of the sense of smell is its social communicative function.  Research has shown that human odors convey information about a range of

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