Feeding the Fifth Sense - Jan Edwards
There are a great many pages medically analysing how smells will conjure memories, both good and bad. Entire industries have been built around this connection as perfumers concoct fragrances that seek to convey a vast array of emotions and feelings: from desire to power, vitality to relaxation. And of course the sense of smell is inextricably linked with that of taste. We each have many thousands of taste buds to detect the five basic sensations : sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami (word for savoury taste distinct from pure saltiness). We can google just about everything, and imagine how something feels and to a lesser extent hazard a guess at a flavour. Invoking a scent/odour/smell/pong or any other word of choice is often overlooked when writing. There are experiments in theatres which started some years ago with cloth pads soaked in oils and the odours wafted around by fans and became more sophisticated machinery (we’ve all had exp...