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 marginalized 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 behavior and emotion, and the physical and behavioral details that determine what odors 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 odors. 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 odor.

Author Biography

A. S. Barwich is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington. She has been a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society and has held a Research Fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Vienna. Her website is www.smellosophy.com.