Discovering the What and the Wherefore: Scents and Sensibility

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This is a past event that happened on April 13th, 2024 at 2:30PM.

As the first sense to engage the world “remotely”, beyond the boundary of an organism’s body, olfaction delivers news from “over there”. But whereas it adumbrates a space beyond, what kind of space, what sort of world does it proffer? Smell engages the world as a series of pathways laid out on gradients. What is that wonderful aroma and how can I get to it? Eww! What is that and how do I move away? More a path-wise world than a Newtonian one, the space of olfaction is about orienting the animal toward what is meaningful in its environment.

Smell creates an ambiance, an affective and drive-related milieu, and it also strongly evokes memories of such settings. We have learned that body odor elicit feelings of personal attraction and repulsion. And yet, many of these interactions between the olfactory surround and our motivations, our inclinations, our personal history, carry on below the surface of consciousness. As this ubiquitous but often subtle background to our lives, scent has played a prominent role in cultural history.

Participants:

Clare Batty

Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Kentucky
Research Fellow, Centre for Olfactory Research & Applications at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London

Clare Batty is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky and Research Fellow at the Centre for Olfactory Research and Applications at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Her research interests are in the philosophy of perception and in particular the philosophy of olfaction. She has published numerous papers on the nature of object representation in... read more! »

James Bower

CEO, Numedeon Inc.
Computational Neuroscientist

James M. Bower is a Visiting Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Bio-computation Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, UK as well as an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. He was previously a professor in the University of Texas System and at the California Institute of Technology. He received his... read more! »

Andreas Keller

Neuroscientist & Philosopher

Andreas Keller is a New York-based academic with PhDs in neuroscience and philosophy who is interested in olfactory perception. He has over a decade of experience in olfactory psychophysics and the clinical aspects of olfaction. The results of his experiments have shed light on human olfactory capacities, on the relation between the structure and smell of odor... read more! »

John McGann

Director, Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University
Professor of Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience, Psychology Department, Rutgers University

Dr. John McGann is the Director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science and a tenured Professor of Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience in the Psychology Department at Rutgers. He runs the McGann Laboratory on the Neurobiology of Sensory Cognition, which uses the olfactory system of humans and rodent models to explore how organisms learn about and interpret their... read more! »

Dmitry Rinberg

Professor, Department of Neuroscience & Physiology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, joined the field of neuroscience after having completed his Ph.D. in Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research comprises 3 core domains: deciphering the fundamental principles of neural coding, exploring olfactory information processing in the brain, and... read more! »

Mark Smith

Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina
Claude Henry Neuffer Chair of Southern Studies, University of South Carolina

Mark Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History and Claude Henry Neuffer Chair of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, where he is also Director of the Institute for Southern Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Smith specializes in the history of the senses and is author of a Sensory History Manifesto and editor of Smell... read more! »