The Scent of Desire Quotes

“The fruit durian (also called jackfruit),”
― Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell

“The theory is that with the emergence of full color vision we lost the need for detecting the world so keenly with our sense of smell, and there was essentially an exchange in importance between these two senses in primate evolution. The better you can see, the less acutely you need to smell. Animals, including humans, either have excellent color vision or an excellent sense of smell, but not both. The finite size of the human brain is to blame. The human brain is limited to between 1,300 and 1,400 grams in weight. Having a highly complex sense of both smell and vision would take up too much brain space and so these functions had to compete with each other for which had the better survival value. It seems superior visual detection was better for our ancestors’ survival than superior olfactory acuity, and the advantages offset the limitation to our sense of smell; hence, the large proportion of pseudogenes in our olfactory code.”
― Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell

“For humans to be able to smell a chemical, it must be of low molecular weight,* volatile, and able to repel water, so that it can stick to our olfactory receptors.”
― Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell