My multi-disciplinary approach to the study of smell is motivated by the subject matter itself. Research on smell encompasses a vast array of scientific fields, from psychology to neuroscience to chemistry, as well as the humanities, including philosophy of mind, cultural history, and anthropology of food. This methodological pluralism clarifies my scholarly trajectory, which began with philosophical investigations and developed into experimental practice in my recently finished laboratory. My model, which arose from the integration of philosophical and historical studies, is currently being implemented in empirical designs in pursuit of a genuine alternative to how the brain processes the statistical distribution of ecologically unpredictable elements.
From Philosophy to Science…
Philosophical inquiry into the history of smell revealed to me a dilemma. It turns out that the characteristics that led people to disregard olfaction in the past are the same ones that make it intriguing to science and naturalistic philosophy today. To begin, there is considerable individual variation in olfactory perception. However, variation does not automatically imply subjectivity. So, what might the underlying causes and functions be? Second, volatile airborne elements are difficult to control environmentally and harder for the brain to predict than photons in sight. Perhaps the nose does not monitor enduring objects in a noisy environment, as Gibson and Marr proposed for vision, but environmental change itself. Such ecological situatedness and context reliance present olfaction as an excellent paradigm for sensory learning and other forms of cognition, including memory. Olfaction, I believe, requires a process philosophy of nature and mind.
I sought to synthesize the various disciplinary perspectives on olfaction and provide conceptual direction, much like Dobzhansky did in his Genetics and the Origin of Species. I interviewed 45 experts over 3 years for my first monograph Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind (2020, Harvard UP), including 2004 Nobel laureates Linda Buck and Richard Axel, perfumers including Christophe Laudamiel (creator of fragrances such as Polo Blue) and Harry Fremont (co-creator of CK One), and other pioneers in the field. This provided me with a unique perspective on the nature of smell and the facets of its multidisciplinary investigations. Smellosophy, reviewed in outlets such as Science, Mind, and The Wall Street Journal, was quickly “becoming a core reference work in the field.” Yet my book reached beyond olfaction. As a fellow philosopher, Rachel Frazer noted: “It [also] teaches us even more about what philosophy can be.”
It was 2018, a few months before arriving in Bloomington, when Gordon Shepherd, a prominent neuroscientist and founding father of modern olfaction, took me aside to ask: “Have you ever thought of going experimental?” In response to his call, my lab combines olfactometry (involving a custom-built instrument for the controlled measurement of odor responses) and EEG (electroencephalography). I recently concluded my first experiment, in which I developed a paradigm to establish a temporal event pipeline in olfaction comparable to that in vision, audition, and language studies. In effect, my lab work addresses two significant issues in one go: First, can we measure what the brain defines as similar stimuli in olfaction (to this day, we lack a stimulus-response model in olfaction – a channeling to which machine-learning has proven unsuitable). Second, can we measure at which temporal stages the brain processes this information?
… and back to Philosophy with Science
There may have been a touch of madness in my 'undisciplined' move toward experimentalism, but it was accompanied by a welcome return to philosophy. Hours and hours of calculating and preparing chemical mixtures in my lab forced me to think about the body as an epistemic part of measurement in standardized laboratory settings.
Olfaction, in my interests as a philosopher with a strong historical bend, has always been a rich basis from which to probe the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. Meanwhile, my interest in olfaction has a bold but honest long-term goal. Most modern conceptions of consciousness are based on visual experience. But what if we examined the sense that stands on the verge of conscious awareness? What if we instead examined awareness in consciousness using olfaction?
From Philosophy to Science…
Philosophical inquiry into the history of smell revealed to me a dilemma. It turns out that the characteristics that led people to disregard olfaction in the past are the same ones that make it intriguing to science and naturalistic philosophy today. To begin, there is considerable individual variation in olfactory perception. However, variation does not automatically imply subjectivity. So, what might the underlying causes and functions be? Second, volatile airborne elements are difficult to control environmentally and harder for the brain to predict than photons in sight. Perhaps the nose does not monitor enduring objects in a noisy environment, as Gibson and Marr proposed for vision, but environmental change itself. Such ecological situatedness and context reliance present olfaction as an excellent paradigm for sensory learning and other forms of cognition, including memory. Olfaction, I believe, requires a process philosophy of nature and mind.
I sought to synthesize the various disciplinary perspectives on olfaction and provide conceptual direction, much like Dobzhansky did in his Genetics and the Origin of Species. I interviewed 45 experts over 3 years for my first monograph Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind (2020, Harvard UP), including 2004 Nobel laureates Linda Buck and Richard Axel, perfumers including Christophe Laudamiel (creator of fragrances such as Polo Blue) and Harry Fremont (co-creator of CK One), and other pioneers in the field. This provided me with a unique perspective on the nature of smell and the facets of its multidisciplinary investigations. Smellosophy, reviewed in outlets such as Science, Mind, and The Wall Street Journal, was quickly “becoming a core reference work in the field.” Yet my book reached beyond olfaction. As a fellow philosopher, Rachel Frazer noted: “It [also] teaches us even more about what philosophy can be.”
It was 2018, a few months before arriving in Bloomington, when Gordon Shepherd, a prominent neuroscientist and founding father of modern olfaction, took me aside to ask: “Have you ever thought of going experimental?” In response to his call, my lab combines olfactometry (involving a custom-built instrument for the controlled measurement of odor responses) and EEG (electroencephalography). I recently concluded my first experiment, in which I developed a paradigm to establish a temporal event pipeline in olfaction comparable to that in vision, audition, and language studies. In effect, my lab work addresses two significant issues in one go: First, can we measure what the brain defines as similar stimuli in olfaction (to this day, we lack a stimulus-response model in olfaction – a channeling to which machine-learning has proven unsuitable). Second, can we measure at which temporal stages the brain processes this information?
… and back to Philosophy with Science
There may have been a touch of madness in my 'undisciplined' move toward experimentalism, but it was accompanied by a welcome return to philosophy. Hours and hours of calculating and preparing chemical mixtures in my lab forced me to think about the body as an epistemic part of measurement in standardized laboratory settings.
Olfaction, in my interests as a philosopher with a strong historical bend, has always been a rich basis from which to probe the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. Meanwhile, my interest in olfaction has a bold but honest long-term goal. Most modern conceptions of consciousness are based on visual experience. But what if we examined the sense that stands on the verge of conscious awareness? What if we instead examined awareness in consciousness using olfaction?