Jonas K. Olofsson and Jay A. Gottfried, ‘The Muted Sense: Neurocognitive Limitations of Olfactory Language’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 314-21.

In this paper an idea that seems to be quite well-established – that we are less good at naming the things we smell than the things we see – is given a neuroscientific spruce-up. Olofsson and Gottfried present a neural foundation for the phenomenon.
      One reason why we are not very good at naming odours may be that our brains encode the smell as a single unit. We are able to identify visual objects by features and parts – a particular kind of ears, a particular kind of tail, a colour, bring the name ‘fox’ pretty quickly – but we can’t do that with smells so easily.
      However, Oloffson and Gottfried think that the key problem is that the olfactory system in the brain doesn’t connect with verbal systems in the same way that the visual system does. When we see something, they argue, on the basis of imaging experiments, ‘a rich network of cortical connections enables parallel and iterative access to feature-selective detail, allowing the assembly of richly endowed visual object configurations and, critically, offering multiple entry points into the lexical-semantic network’.
      Whereas when we smell something, the issue of ‘valence’ – attractiveness or aversiveness – comes in very strongly, and emotional encoding seems to drown out the possibilities of articulation. As they say, ‘olfactory objects are endowed with emotion, value, memory, and experience… the ability to enrich these configurations with lexical-semantic content is relatively meagre. This limitation poses an initial challenge to generating odour names’. Another way of putting this: ‘olfactory representations might thus be conducted to the language network in an unconstrained, indeterminate format, causing unspecific activation of latent object concepts’
      The article takes an interesting turn towards cultural differences, because of course it’s worth asking whether this is a phenomenon of particular cultures. They cite research carried out among nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Malay peninsula. Although the Jahai language handles smells quite differently, ‘odour naming accuracy… was well below colour naming accuracy in English’, and this is ‘compatible with the notion that olfactory object naming is limited’.

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I want to do something with this, because it seems to me that the link between smell and articulation might be something that arises interestingly in literature. I suppose there may not be lots of illuminating moments when someone asks ‘what’s that smell?’ – but I’d be happy to hear about them. There may also be a question about whether it’s legitimate to take naming failure into a more general struggle to describe odours, but the Oloffson and Gottfried paper suggests that it is.
      So, as a first literary instance of the phenomena addressed in the scientific literature, I offer a moment in D.H. Lawrence’s short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. At this point in the story, a mother suspects that her husband is out drinking, hence the sardonic tone:

The child put the pale chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring:
‘Don’t they smell beautiful!’
Her mother gave a short laugh.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.’
She looked at the children. Their eyes and their parted lips were wondering. The mother sat rocking in silence for some time.

Her description of the quality of the chrysanthemum smell delivers exactly the ’emotion, value, memory’ mentioned above. The child’s invitation to consider the smell as a smell, to make ‘beautiful’ more specific, elicits a precise autobiographical account. Of course, the mother’s memory is not only prompted by an olfactory experience, but it still suggests a literary awareness of the constraints on the language of smell.
      Thanks to this interesting site it is easy to compare this version of the story (from The Prussian Office and Other Stories, 1914) with Lawrence’s earlier drafts. In the uncorrected proofs of 1910, and the English Review text of 1911, the mother’s speech is slightly different:

‘Hateful!’ she said. ‘I hate them. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his coat. When I smell them I could always think of that, me dragging at him to get his coat off.’

This is the proof version. The extra sentence at the end is also in the English Review, though in that version the more emphatic beginning is removed. It’s interesting that Lawrence subsequently removed the most explicit description of the evocative power of smell. The 1914 version is very effective in its understatement; we know, perhaps, that she is trying to protect herself from a rush of emotional associations.

Elizabeth A. Kensinger, ‘The Future Can Shape Memory for the Present’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 179-80.

It’s an everyday scenario. Imagine I show you a series of images – of, say, boats, and, oh, I don’t know, cacti. You’ll remember some of the boats and some of the cacti. But if I were to show you a second series after the first, in which each boat image is accompanied by a moderately unpleasant electric shock, here’s the thing: you’re likely to remember the boat images from the second list better, because of the shock association, and you are also likely to remember the boats from the first list better too. So that is what is meant by the ‘future’ shaping memory for the ‘present’, though those terms are difficult to use precisely, and always fleeting. Categories and significances can intervene in our memorial processes as if in retrospect; the reasons for remembering something well at the time can be filled in later.

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If a character coughs on page 74 we may have an inkling that it will become significant later; good writers and bad writers may all enable this. If a character dies of a terrible lung disorder on page 97 a bit of hindsight bias may lead us to claim that we saw the significance of the cough first time around, even if we didn’t. What Kensinger is suggesting, perhaps, is that sometimes it’s possible that we genuinely will remember things because of the significance they acquire later. For a while the cough is suspended, along with numerous other things, in a time-limited rememberable state, awaiting some future trigger to seal its fate. This is surely something that novelists work with; often there are layers of irony. In Martin Amis’s The Information, for example, I remember that he pauses in a knowingly laboured way on a quirk of one character’s speech, because it will become pivotal in the plot, toying with the reader’s perspicacity but also with a reader’s desire for a surprising turn.

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It makes me think of Shakespeare again, and of a scene I have written about more, perhaps, than any other: the coming-to-life of Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale, which may alternatively be seen as the discovery that she has never been dead, or a statue, at all. I have already written in this blog about surprise and spoilers in relation to this scene. The post is even called ‘Spoiler Alert‘; it’s about how we might understand the quality of audience surprise in the scene. One thing that could be added to the picture is the way in which this essay suggests our memories for details may be affected by later significance. If we decide that the whole thing is a big trick, then we may be all the more retrospectively alert to certain clues. In a providential drama like The Winter’s Tale, the outcome might be the thing that matters, and everything that precedes it is either rendered significant, or rendered invisible.
      It made me think of rhyme, too: how the first rhyme word is made into a rhyme, remembered as such, only when the second rhyme word appears. Perhaps the patterns of literary form, not just plots and events, exploit this future-retrospect in all sorts of interesting ways.

Carolyn Parkinson and Thalia Wheatley, ‘The Repurposed Social Brain’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 133-41.

This paper has a premise with broad implications. Parkinson and Wheatley argue that the subtleties of human social intelligence must result from the ‘evolutionary repurposing’ of neural circuits that perform different functions (either non-social, or social in a much more rudimentary way) in other species. This repurposing could occur over an evolutionary timescale or it could occur within a lifetime as a result of cultural training. Identifying and understanding such repurposings could offer a lot of insight into human cognition.
      My first thought was about embodied metaphor: as this post discusses, metaphorical language and the brain’s motor and sensory circuits appear to be connected. So it was helpful that Parkinson and Wheatley discuss the matter: as they see it, such connections may, but need not, suggest the repurposing of neural circuits. (Actually, has another, sceptical look at the ’embodied simulation’ field that underlies some of the metaphor work; debates continue…)
      A better example, in their view, is imaging evidence that assessments of space, and assessments of social ties, involve activation of the same neural areas, and may thus suggest the social repurposing of more basic mechanisms. Their favoured instances of possible cultural repurposing relate to literacy: learning to read seems to make one less good at certain visual tasks, because those mental circuits have been turned to other use.

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      My attention was caught by one of their ‘Outstanding Questions’: ‘How are sociocultural inventions (e.g. stratified hierarchies in social organizations, musical forms) constrained by the neural niches that they co-opt?’ Poems are sociocultural inventions, and how wonderful it would be to find evidence that our poetic experiences result from the repurposing of circuits that otherwise help us do specific sorts of seeing, hearing, feeling, measuring, etc.
      I suppose one limitation is the inevitable multiplicity in the cognitive processes relating to literature, whereas their examples might be more easily abstracted. probably engages quite a lot of circuits. Music, though, makes us move as well as hear, and does things with time as well, and so on, so perhaps the thing that matters is identifying a specific repurposing, gaining an insight (say) into whether certain identifiable neural areas have been repurposed to get the spring of the .

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If repurposing is a thing you like, try this:

I rather wish I hadn’t thought of it. I’ve had a couple of years off from watching OK Go videos, but I seem to be falling back into it again. One is never enough. The marching band one is great too.

In an earlier post I discussed an article by Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, in which they wondered about the cognitive benefits of reading Jane Austen. Since then I have been mulling over their last paragraph, which I think is very insightful. Here is most of it:

In the past, efforts to find a scientific justification of literature have encountered a seemingly insuperable contradiction: employing science to validate literature has implied that science is the more fundamental practice, tacitly undermining the reputation of literature instead of strengthening it. Many literary critics have therefore rebelled against scientific justifications, preferring instead to place literature in a separate sphere that stands as its own de facto justification. Yet as science has increasingly been promoted as useful, relevant, and progressive, this segregation has backfired, implying that literary studies is impractical, irrelevant, and antiquated. As a result, literary scholars have found themselves in a bind: they can oppose science, and find themselves marginalized, or they can embrace scientific theories and contribute to this marginalization themselves.

Having identified this problem, they present their approach as one which preserves ‘the usual order [i.e., the way in which evidence and hypotheses are handled] of both scientific and literary research’:

Beginning with a historical investigation of the development of a particular literary form and then transitioning into empirical verifications, it reveals as a tool that emerged over time as a practical means for addressing the physical distinctness of minds. Seen in this way, FID is a distinctly literary response to an environmental concern, providing a scientific justification that does not reduce literature to a mechanical extension of biology, but takes its value to be its own original form.

I really just want to quote this as, more or less, music to my ears. The antipathy of literary critics to scientific justification is perhaps unnecessary, but it’s clearly understandable given the way our cultural environment is structured. The ‘double bind’ they identify is just the thing that this blog, as well as their article, aims to address. And their analysis of Adam Smith and Jane Austen prizes, I think, what their works know about the functioning of minds, and sees them as self-standing sources of insight that are enhanced by, and enhance (more so, I think, in this case), their encounters with science.