smell

changed “more than other senses combined.” The low-hanging fruit was restoring the “hunter-gatherer sensitivity” (odor receptors, olfactory bulb) rudimentalized in the millennia of settled communal living; also, alarm and repulsion reflexes were removed for many classes of smells (largely gone from human environments anyway). It soon went beyond resetting the evolutionary clock: the least critical of the senses, smell — a “channel of greatly underutilized bandwidth,” a bioinformational sandbox — was where Change tinkerers could experiment with relatively little risk. At the same time, smell has a dedicated feedline into memory and emotions: even the first modest cleanups precipitated a “smell revolution” (scent books, maps, clocks, new words and esnes for smells) — rediscovered the gusto lost in the sterile eatfree world; deep breath became “the new swallow” — new gluttony of voracious sniffing, “mouthing,” “airwhaling,” with mouths taste receptors (“nose is not enough”) readapted for stereo smell; arfs rise at the time may have to do with its capacity to record and replay smells.  ■    Entirely new receptors, repurposed from the immune system, respond to genome traces in the air; for example, you can sense how different someones genomic halo is from yours — which “feels like a vague memory of a text where zero-similarity fragments are noise, parts that exactly match are transparent, and slight deviations stand out the most.” You cant quite analyze a lifesmell but you can recall and recognize individuals, species, localities, biomes without unreliable phenotype comparisons; when emotionally positive, a genomic smell reinforces “a sense of belonging” — “a new foundation of family bonding” for any scope of “family” from blood relatives to a whole biology.

< Slow  |  something bigger >

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License