Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell (Penguin Press Science) Book

Smell is the Cinderella sense, says Lyall Watson. Humans are smelly creatures, but we spend millions pretending we aren't, blanking out the signal. We little realise how large a role it plays in our likes and dislikes, our intuitions about people and places. Watson's lively and engaging attempt to make us realise that smell rules features a great deal of natural history--outlining the way creatures of all kinds are linked by the myriad molecules they secrete and detect, an odournet. More surprising is his account of the recent rediscovery of Jacobsen's organ, a secondary chemical detection region high in the nose which is linked to the oldest regions of the brain. This, says Watson, registers different substances from the smells we are conscious of, including powerful chemical signals from other humans. It gives us an unrecognised sixth sense. If only we cultivated this sense we could all perform olfactory miracles, and our oldest way of extracting information from the environment would once again come into its own. As he admits, this is speculation. The fact is that humans long ago decided to devote most of their brains to vision and language skills. But smells still speak to us at a deep level, and Watson's consistently entertaining book reminds us how many spells they weave. --Jon TurneyRead More