Picking up from this thread:
Regarding my quest(ion) on the science behind how one (a perfumer to be?) learns, memorizes, recognizes and recalls smells. Your input is welcome :)
Here is the latest from DrSmellthis:
No abrasion whatsoever taken fom your post. Was just trying to characterize information and it came out wrong.
I believe perception in the general population is significantly synaesthetic, and that article and its references aren't a bad intro to that. It gives several examples where the different perceptual areas of the brain work together, and reviews cases where someone loses a sense like hearing and brain perception adjusts to compensate with dynamics between different areas of perception, in addition to the example from the previous post. It dovetails with issues of brain plasticity, the ability of our brains to grow, change and adapt.
I don't think it's an accident that people describe smells in terms of other senses, and I would wager you could see it on funtional brain imaging. For example, while smelling and describing one's favorite smells; one should detect some activity in, say, visual or auditory regions, and so on.
Some of the research has been done, some hasn't, like with anything. But I believe "structures of perception" flowing via perceptual areas of the brain and their interaction, are shared between senses.
Subjectively, it is also common for smells to trigger rich memories involving multiple kinds of sensory information. That is because the smell was not just stored as a discrete smell in the first place, but as a narrative memory, a part of a life story, with all the elements stories contain.
So smelling something is rarely an experience of simply processing odor chemicals as new, discrete and isolated stimuli, which we process as a mere collection of raw olfactory properties. But rather the smell perception itself is at once laden with meaningful associations.
So essentally, one would need to use terms of "metaphor" (expressing something in terms of something else, put one way) to accurately characterize our original neurology, perception, and experience.
In the past metaphor has been regarded as a kind of "lie", like myth; whereas in a sense it is starting to look like the most accurate way to characterize the world, by grounding everything in the original experience which involves multi-sensory, associative neurology.
There are any number of interesting potential implications of that, for me, involving philosophy of science and perception; education; and society. For example, it would suggest the fundamental importance of art; and a proper role of artists, to bring people in touch with their their own realities/experience, since art is the medium of metaphor. It would also suggest the value of educating young people in the arts; especially for the purposes of general brain development, consistent with other research on that topic.
The study of smell is full of potential insights about various areas of life (e.g., human sexuality), which is one thing that makes it fun.