iii: Anthroposophical Views
…and then skipping over puddles again Dora Wagner The very nature of the nose is to love fragrances Lü Bu We; 300 - 235 BC
Dazzling, heady, purifying, empowering, touching and gently earthy, that's how I would describe the pleasing fragrance that often accompanies a summer rain. When, after a long period of warm, dry weather, the first raindrops touch the ground, the air immediately gives off this unique, unmistakable perfume of the Earth. ’Petrichor’, created by rain falling on parched soil, is a neologism, invented by mineralogists in the 1960s, when investigating the smell of rain (Baer et al., 1964). The word is made up of two Greek parts, πέτρα (petra) for stone and ἰχώρ (ichor), which roughly stands for 'blood of the gods'. So, the compound means 'blood of the gods from the stones'. With this, the mineralogists wanted to express that this typical summer smell can arise wherever rain meets earth— not only on grass, but also on the city’s asphalt. At the very first contact between your nose and this scent, an unbelievable variety of impressions emerge— including memories of jumping with all your might into puddles and having a lot of fun. Because the human sense of smell can distinguish more than a trillion different scents (Keller et al, 2014)— far more than our eyes and ears combined —it is mainly our nose that evokes these Proustian moments, these sensory experiences that trigger a rush of memories, seemingly forgotten, taking us back to childhood days.
Olfactory perception is the oldest human sense, the only one that is fully developed in the womb, and the first one we use after our birth. Newly born human babies cannot see well, so they follow their nose, diving to their mother's breast by simply smelling the milk and trying to find the source of the scent. In childhood we tend to determine which scents we will like or hate for the rest of our lives. The first stage of olfactory detection is two mucous membranes in our upper nasal area, each roughly the size of a £1 coin, about 4 cm². Between two and five million olfactory receptors are located on the hairs in our nose, which protrude into the watery, proteinaceous layer of our nasal mucosa. Each of these olfactory cells, which are renewed every four to six weeks, specialises in a particular scent component. The odour that we suck in through our nostrils triggers biochemical reactions in these cells. All this information is processed by the olfactory bulb, amplifying the cells’ reactions 100-fold and generating electrical impulses that are transmitted directly to the front of the brain for further processing. Smells take a very fast and direct path to our limbic system, via the amygdala and the hippocampus— the regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory. That’s why fragrances have a much deeper impact on our
