Haunted Literary Smellscapes of America

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

H.P. Lovecraft
The Tomb (1917)

Nasal Invasion: The Ticket to Summer Escapism

There is no better way to beat the oppressive heat and humidity of a New Jersey summer than to head into an air conditioned theater and watch a schlocky horror movie. Three years ago, Piranha in 3D had all the key elements: gratuitous toplessness, gore, and a cast of has-beens (Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Lloyd) and B-listers (Jerry O’Connell, Elisabeth Shue).

This year World War Z filled the bill with tons of gore, thousands of rampaging zombies, and Brad Pitt atop a cast of nobodies. It was a little short on gratuitous toplessness, but entertaining and thoroughly forgettable.

A key plot point in WWZ (yes, spoiler alert, but honestly, if you haven’t seen it yet what are the odds you ever will?) is that the flesh-eating zombies eat only healthy people—those infected with deadly diseases are functionally invisible to them. That got me thinking: there’s a lot of good horror movie material lurking in the olfactory system.

Consider this: the olfactory nerves, which run from the sensory membrane of the nose to the olfactory bulbs at the base of the brain, are unmyelinated. The absence of a myelin sheath leaves the nerve cells especially vulnerable to infection by viruses (e.g., influenza) and by that creepy quasi-life form know as the prion, which causes brain disease and dementia (e.g., Creutzfeld-Jakob and kuru). In other words—high concept alert for Hollywood screen writers!—the nose is a pathogen’s freeway to the brain. The point was driven home recently by Japanese scientists who squirted radioisotope into the nose of test subjects and watched it get transported up the olfactory nerves and into the brain within 24 hours.

It’s also been pointed out that the vomeronasal system (a.k.a. the accessory olfactory pathway) is a potential route for neuroinvasion by neurotropic microbes. [Neuroinvasion! Great movie title.—Ed.] The vomeronasal system is the neural pathway activated by sex pheromones. Right there you have all the plot elements for a summer blockbuster: zombifying microbes from the deep mud in Crystal Lake hitch a ride up the noses of randy, pheromone-drenched summer camp counselors. [Gratuitous toplessness!—Ed.] Only Brad the nature counselor and Cindy the vain, slutty cheer squad counselor, remain immune. (He has runny-nose ragweed allergy, and her vomeronasal organ was severed during a nose job.) Together, can they save Camp Runamucky from the Zombie Pheromone Massacre?

Okay, I can already hear grumbling from the Universal lot that zombifying microbes are not visually dramatic enough to attract the target demo. To that I say: Ferrets! That’s right—nasty, weasel-like ferrets. An Australian research team has demonstrated that the H5N1 or bird flu virus travels up the ferret olfactory nerve pathway from the nose to brain. The nose is “a major infection route for this virus strain.” Once up the nose, the virus gets into the cerebrospinal fluid. [That’s when you turn zombie.—Ed.]

So here’s the idea (Hollywood High Concept Alert!): A group of animal rights activists acquire a mutant, zombifying strain of H5N1 virus while liberating chickens at a factory farm. Before going zombie, they liberate hundreds of mink from a nearby fur farm. After Brad, the local sheriff, guns down the animal rights zombies, he gets called to the nudist resort at Crystal Lake where vacationers are being attacked by infected minks. Can Brad and his deputies save the world from Rampaging Nudist Zombies?

Every once in a while, the science nerd plays a critical role in a summer monster movie (think Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day). For that to work, you need a plot twist that only a scientist character can provide. Writing in the journal Virulence, German scientists at the Centre for Experimental and Clinical Infection Research note there are biological mechanisms that fight neurotropic viruses coming up the olfactory nerves. For example, there is a Type I interferon-dependent response in the glomerular layer of the olfactory bulb. [Boooooring.—Ed.] The take-away for the aspiring screen writer is that Brad, the brilliant and ridiculously good-looking immunologist at UCLA, can be shown working his Pipetman with furrowed brow as he comes up with an ingenious cure for the zombie virus that began with pole dancers in West Hollywood. [Pole dancers. Yes.—Ed.]

Strip Club Zombie Apocalypse will need some intense Michael Crichton-style visuals to establish Brad’s science cred and that’s where a recent PLoS ONE paper comes in handy. Cue titles:

Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases
Centers for Disease Control
Fort Collins, Colorado
11:45 a.m.

The research team tracked the progress of Western equine encephalitis virus up the nose of lab mice, using in vivo bioluminescence. In other words, they genetically engineered the virus with the firefly luciferase gene; when they applied luciferin to the infected mouse brain tissue, the virus particles would glow. [Neato.—Ed.]


[via PLoS ONE]

Every summer blockbuster needs a sequel or two, and the neuroscience literature on neuroinvasion provides ample material. For example, human herpesvirus-6 is associated with “a wide variety of neurological disorders” [Including zombie-ism?—Ed.] and appears to infect the brain via the olfactory pathway. Even more fiendishly, the virus may replicate within the glial cells that usually protect the olfactory neurons. Then there is the Neisseria meningitidis bacterium, which “is able to pass directly from nasopharynx to meninges through the olfactory nerve system.” It leaves around 50% of survivors with lasting neurological damage. [And a taste for human flesh?—Ed.]

And let’s not forget about Nipah virus: “During the first documented Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia and Singapore in 1998-1999, 276 cases of Nipah virus encephalitis were observed, with 106 fatalities.” A recent experiment with Syrian hamsters found that the virus gets into the brain via the olfactory epithelium. “Entry of Nipah virus into the CNS occurred rapidly, within 4 days of inoculation.” That’s great thriller material: Brad has 96 hours to save his girlfriend from the zombie virus.

But I think the perfect nasal neuroinvasive sequel is the one that takes us back to Crystal Lake, in whose warm water we are likely to find the thermophilic ameba Naegleria fowleri. This is the pathogen that causes primary amebic meningoencephalitis which, as a recent paper reminds us, “is almost universally fatal.” You can get it by diving into a lake and getting water up your nose. [Ameba! Everyone out of the water!—Ed.] Or, you can get it trying to be healthy and using a Neti pot full of N. fowleri-contaminated water to irrigate your sinuses.

Anyway, it’s been fun spitballing script ideas. Enjoy your stay at Crystal Lake. Keep your nose clean and don’t worry about that guy in the hockey mask.

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

 

There are many reasons to mourn the passing of Ray Bradbury. Here at FirstNerve, we think of the effortless way he brought smells to bear in his fiction. Read Fahrenheit 451 with your nostrils open. You’ll have nightmares about the Mechanical Hound, but also know that freedom has a scent. Then read about the Happylife Home in The Illustrated Man and see how a description of smell can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Ray Bradbury, dead in Los Angeles at the age of 91.

Quick Sniffs

Fragrance fight!

John Derbyshire’s sophisticated nostrils twitch with eldritch delight at the thought of an H.P. Lovecraft perfume. 

Mark Ecko . . . new fragrance . . . yadda yadda.

Smelling a Rat: John Mack’s Alien Abductees

Whitley Strieber, in his best-selling book Communion: A true story, used the supposedly unimpeachable evidence of smell memory to support his account of abduction by aliens, even as he systematically altered the recalled smells to fit his narrative. This sleazy maneuver is certainly one of the more creative uses of the myth of immutable Proustian odor memory. But Strieber wasn’t the only one to invoke smell in support of UFOs.

John E. Mack was a Harvard University psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent years taking alien abductees seriously. He was impressed by “the extreme consistency of the stories from person after person.” He argued that this consistency was so strong that any theory of abduction narratives—debunking or affirming—had to account for it. Such consistency ruled out medical disorders; it was something “you would not get simply by stimulating the temporal lobes. You would get very variable idiosyncratic responses that would differ a great deal from person to person.”

According to Mack, smells were invariably part of the ambience aboard alien spacecraft. In his 1994 book Abduction: Human encounters with aliens, he summarized the experience of typical abductees:

Once inside they may at first find that they are in a small dark room, a sort of vestibule. But soon they are taken into one or more larger rooms where the various procedures will occur. These rooms are brightly lit, with a hazy luminosity from indirect light sources in the walls. The atmosphere may be dank, cool, and occasionally even foul-smelling.

Later in the book he says: 

Once inside the craft the abductees see varying numbers of alien beings [ . . . ] who are engaged in a rather businesslike way in preparing to administer various procedures. The inside of the craft is generally rather cold, emotionally and physically, sometimes with a musty smell, with computer-like consoles along the walls. The walls tend to be white and curved, although black floors are sometimes described.

Perhaps it’s to be expected that alien spacecraft are consistently dank, musty, and foul-smelling, what with all the anal probing, sperm sampling, and embryo extracting going on. There’s only one problem: the case histories in Mack’s own book contradict his generalizations.

Mack devotes a chapter to each of thirteen individual case histories. Only three abductees mention smell at all. At 23% of the total that’s hardly an impressive rate of person-to-person consistency. Mack clearly overstates the true frequency of smell reports.

Another problem emerges from the detailed accounts. Here’s the woman named Jerry:

In one of the three episodes in 1991, Jerry recalls being taken by taller, more human-looking, fair-skinned, blond beings to what seemed like the top of a very large building with illuminated equipment in it. She had the sense that she was at a beach or a seashore, as she heard the wind and the water breaking, felt a breeze, and smelled the sea.

A woman named Catharine relates her abduction experience while under hypnosis. On board the alien ship she is confused by the apparently illusory size of its rooms; she finds herself in a forest and realizes this doesn’t make sense.

After the regression she reflected that she ‘looked way off in the distance’ and ‘could see walls, but it didn’t make much sense in context.’ She said that the forest even smelled like one and contained pine trees. She estimated it was ‘high school gym size.’

Finally, there’s the man named Dave:

His fear mounted in the session [of hypnosis] as he told of being forced onto a table on his back in a round, gray room in which there is an ‘earthylike’ smell. Several beings gathered around ‘to do something to me.’

Soon enough Dave gets anally probed. 

In sum, we have sea breeze, pine forest, and earthy-like smells. Of these, only the last might qualify as dank or musty but it’s certainly not foul-smelling. So at best only 8% of Mack’s subjects report the supposedly consistent smell phenomenon.

Early in the book Mack says

Particular sounds, smells, images, or activities that are disturbing for no apparent reason may later prove to be connected with the abduction experience.

As I described in What the Nose Knows, PTSD can be triggered by smells. The trouble with Mack’s claim that disturbing real-world smells are linked to abduction experiences is that he provides no examples at all.

So what to make of all this? Based on a narrow, nostril-centric view of his accounts, John Mack was an inaccurate summarizer of his own data. Perhaps this was due to sloppiness. Perhaps it was deliberate misrepresentation. Or perhaps, as his own interviewees may have done, Mack absorbed and retold an idealized account of alien abduction that simply doesn’t square with the details of a particular case. In any case, the whole exercise stinks.

Another Fantasy Supersmeller: Tarzan of the Apes

The idea of supersmellers is a popular one. Novelists are particularly taken with characters who have an extraordinary ability to detect and identify odors. Patrick Süskind’s nasty little novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a prime example. The story’s creepy anti-hero Grenouille can pick up scents at great distance and describe their components with uncanny precision. This idiot-savant of perfumery fetishizes the smell of virgin women; when he seeks to extract their bodily essences he becomes a serial killer.

Other literary supersmellers, such as Saleem Sinai in Salmon Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, are less macabre. Some, like the characters in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume, are downright comic. 

Despite their frequent appearance in literature, I don’t know of a single documented case of a real-life smell genius. Sure, some people have very sensitive noses. Others have a flair for creating pleasing combinations of scent. But professional perfumers have ordinary noses. When they encounter a new perfume they smell it from the top down. They recognize a general type—a chypre for example—look for a distinguishing twist and only then search for specific notes that make it unique. In other words, a perfumer smells the forest, not the trees. In contrast, fictional characters like Grenouille turn psychological reality upside down: they recognize individual flowers before noticing the bouquet. Their abilities aren’t an exaggeration of normal smelling—they’re a contradiction of it.

When I gave a talk at the Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village a while back, an older gentleman had me sign his copy of What the Nose Knows. He wore oversized glasses, was poorly shaved, and his shirt pocket was stuffed with pens, scraps of note paper, bus schedules, and betting slips from Aqueduct. A classic Village oddball. As I handed back his book, he asked me if I was familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was. Did I know that Tarzan of the Apes had an extraordinary sense of smell? I did not. Despite appearances, something told me this geezer knew what he was talking about.

Well, I finally got around to tracking down his lead and guess what? The old dude was right. Here’s the passage, from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, the fifth book of the Tarzan series, first published in 1918:

Though the spoor was two days old, and practically obliterated in many places, Tarzan followed it with comparative ease. A white man could not have followed it twenty paces twelve hours after it had been made, a black man would have lost it within the first mile; but Tarzan of the Apes had been forced in childhood to develop senses that an ordinary mortal scare ever uses.

We may note the garlic and whiskey on the breath of a fellow strap hanger, or the cheap perfume emanating from the person of the wondrous lady sitting in front of us, and deplore the fact of our sensitive noses; but, as a matter of fact, we cannot smell at all, our olfactory organs are practically atrophied, by comparison with the development of the sense among the beasts of the wild.

Like many of his generation, Burroughs the armchair Darwinian casually incorporated spurious ideas of racial gradation into his evolutionizing. He also subscribed to the popular view that the human sense of smell has devolved through disuse—a misconception he shared with Sigmund Freud and the pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Freud thought that only children and neurotics paid attention to smell and that healthy adults grew out of it. Ellis believed that smell had long ago given way to vision. For Edgar Rice Burroughs, however, biology was not destiny. Raised as an ape, even Tarzan’s feeble human nose became capable of great things.

Nose of the Robo Dog

In “Our Olfactory Destiny,” the final chapter of What the Nose Knows, I look ahead to what the future might bring in terms of smell. One topic is electronic noses: chemical sensors linked to neural network software. Today, these smelling machines are focused on specialized tasks such as tracking quality control in food ingredients. My guess is that robotic noses will eventually take over the dirty and dangerous jobs that humans don’t want: monitoring emissions from animal feed lots and sewage treatment plants, or searching for land mines.

I also describe how many e-nose labs are using materials and designs that mimic real biological noses. One group in Britain, for example, has lined its e-nose with synthetic snot—a 10-micron-thick layer of odor-retentive polymer called Parylene C.

DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—recently funded a multi-institutional project called RealNose that seeks to design an electronic device modeled on a biological one: the dog. The goal is to understand the principles of fluid dynamics and odor transport in the dog nose and apply them to an artificial system. Pretty cool.

Members of the RealNose team include several mechanical engineering professors at Penn State University, whose contributions are described in this article.

Exit question: Will an electronic dog nose try to sniff its own butt?

Home, Sweet Home

This is cool.

Prolitec, Inc. today unveiled the Air/Q(TM) Whole House Air Freshener(TM) (WHAF) -- the first fully adjustable, HVAC-integrated home air freshening system.

Reminds me of the holodeck-like nursery in the Happylife Home, from a story in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions; on all sides, in colors reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

“Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air.

Kinda cool but kinda creepy.

Robo Spritzer: The Full Facial

What could be creepier than the department store ladies who offer to spritz you with a cologne sample?

Easy: An in-store kiosk equipped with a real-time video-image analyzer that scans your face, sizes you up, and hits you with a gender appropriate scent. From the manufacturer’s press release:

VidiReports software . . . detects human faces in the vicinity of
the dispenser, estimates the corresponding gender of prospective
customers and sends that information to the Scentys4 dispenser,
which instantly selects the appropriate fragrance.

VidiReports can be easily configured to set the prefered detection
distance and the strategy to be employed when several faces are
detected.

Attention all Scentys4 units: Do not spritz until you see the whites of their eyes!

The TargetScent kiosk is the brainchild of Presensia, a French company that develops interactive scent dispensers, and Quividi, an outfit that creates audience measurement solutions.

Cool technology? Certainly. Innovative application? No doubt. Does it give you the heebie-jeebies? Well, check out this Swiss-French video and get back to me.

Odorprints on a Wanted Poster

In Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451, the fire department uses a hellish Mechanical Hound to track a person down based on his individually unique body odor. The “sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils” of the Hound pick up the scent. Its electronic brain is programmed to recognize ten thousand individual BO profiles. After cornering its prey the Hound dispatches it with a lethal injection from a retractable fang.

I thought of the Mechanical Hound the other day when I spotted a juicy headline on Drudge: ‘Odorprinting’ will identify people. I clicked on the item with my usual mix of emotions. Would this be a story about real technology or some type of National Enquirer nonsense?

The linked report from the Telegraph quotes Jae Kwak, a scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. According to Kwak, genetically-based body odors are as unique as fingerprints; he thinks it may be possible to build devices that identify people based on their BO.

Intriguing. But in world of science-by-press-release it pays to be skeptical of media stories. Kwak could be a quack. Far better to examine the actual study that brought him to the Telegraph’s attention: in this case a paper in the open-access, online journal PLoS ONE.

The needle on my Bogosity Meter twitched as soon as I began to read: the experiment has nothing to do with humans—it’s about two strains of highly inbred mice.

I’m very familiar with these mice: I studied them years ago when I was on the faculty of the Monell Center. Originally bred for cancer research, the strains are genetically identical except for a set of genes that controls immune response. These so-called MHC genes are associated with a strain-specific scent. Mice can smell the difference and prefer to mate with mice of the other strain (a case of “opposites attract”). In addition, the mousey BO is distinct enough that humans can smell the difference between the two strains. (An experimental result of mine that I published here.)

It is widely believed that diet alters body odor. If so, can diet obscure MHC-linked BO differences? This is the question Kwak and his colleagues set out to answer using the two mouse strains and two kinds of commercially produced mouse chow. They trained “sensor” mice to recognize the scent of urine from mice with a specific combination of MHC type and diet. Then they let them choose between mice differing in various combinations of genes and diet. The result? The sensor mice failed to pick out the MHC-linked scent. In a direct match-up, diet-related BO overwhelmed the differences in genetically-based BO.

Other mice were trained to recognize a particular MHC scent from mice fed the same diet. Once trained, they were able to pick out that MHC scent from mice fed another type of diet. In other words, the genetically-linked BO signal persists amid stronger dietary signals and properly trained mice can find it. Chemical analysis revealed forty-nine molecules in mouse urine that vary with diet and MHC type. From these, Kwak and colleagues were able to construct a statistical model that predicts MHC type as accurately as the trained sensor mice. Pretty cool stuff.

Kwak et al. go on to claim “it should be possible to develop a detector to identify individual odortypes that can ignore environmental perturbations such as diet variation.” Once again the needle on my Bogosity Meter bounces a bit. Why? Because the mice in question weren’t recognized as individuals (Bob, Jane, John, Wendy, etc.) but as members of genetically identical groups (the Smith-family clones versus the Jones-family clones). Clonal sibship is one thing, individual identity is another. A device to “detect individual odorprints in humans” is several leaps of logic away from the results of this study.

In Fahrenheit 451, the fugitive fireman Guy Montag successfully evades the Mechanical Hound by swapping clothes with an old man, dousing himself with whiskey, and floating down a river. If pursued by trained mice from Monell, he could simply have popped a breath mint and taken it easy.