Alan Hirsch leans forward across his cluttered desk. “We had one woman from Florida call who said she had an increased ability to smell,” he says. “We said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but she said ‘No really, I can smell a fire miles away.’ So we told her to come here . . . and she was right! Her ability to smell was more than a hundred thousand times better than normal. Her ability to smell was about a hundred times better than your dog’s. It approached that of a cockroach. . . . It was as if she could see in color, and the rest of us could only see in black and white.”
Subliminal seduction, through the nose? Hirsch thought it was possible. Further experiments–at jewelry counters, for instance–supported the conclusion that pleasant odors at undetectable levels increased profits. But when he presented his findings to a group of colleagues at a meeting in Las Vegas, he ran into a dilemma. “Somebody got up and said, ‘Dr. Hirsch, you’re not causing people to spend more money in the presence of odors. What you’re doing is causing the salesperson to be more friendly, and they’re selling better!’ It was a hard argument to argue against.” Nonplussed, Hirsch spent the rest of the day wondering how to find a value-neutral vendor, how to “get rid of the salesperson.” He found himself wandering the hotel’s casino, surrounded, he suddenly realized, by a veritable forest of insensate pitchmen: slot machines.
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After a three-week study Hirsch had the evidence he needed. The presence of the floral smell, even at subthreshold levels, dramatically increased the action of the handle. And as the level of odor went up, the increase was correspondingly higher: scented machines made up to 54 percent more money than odorless machines. It seemed to be further confirmation of the power of subthreshold odors to empty pockets, and the concurrent ethical and even legal questions surrounding subliminal marketing appeared to loom large. But Hirsch, the man who once wrote a letter to the New York Times warning that “research is now making strides to discover and manufacture odors that can be used . . . to control the consumer’s emotions and thought processes,” now saw things differently; in fact he found the study’s results reassuring. “And I’ll tell you why,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “Businesses won’t want to use subthreshold levels, because they have a greater effect at high levels!” Saved by the profit motive.
Odors are volatile molecules suspended in the air. These molecules travel through the nostrils to land behind the bridge of the nose on the olfactory epithelia, two mucous-coated patches about the size of a dime. There the molecules bind to receptors–i.e., neurons–on the olfactory nerves, which carry the message straight to the brain’s olfactory bulbs. This direct path to the brain makes smell unique among the senses. The cornea and the eardrum both act as physical barriers between neurons and the outside world; odors, in effect, land directly on the brain’s doorstep. And what is often perceived as taste is actually mostly smell, since the tongue is only capable of discerning four flavors–salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. Any shading beyond this narrow repertoire is courtesy of the nose.
And yet smell research is something of a biological backwater. It’s still not fully understood how odor molecules are “read” by the olfactory epithelia, for instance, and until recently there was no answer for a question that is central to understanding smell: what is it that prevents odors from lingering in the nose, piling on top of each other, creating olfactory havoc? It’s now thought that after the volatile molecule has sent its message, enzymes similar to those used by the liver to detoxify blood flood over the olfactory epithelia. Within a second or so, the enzymes have dispersed the odor molecules, cleansing the system and preparing it for the next smell. But many mysteries remain, and laboratories devoted to unraveling them are few and far between.
Others have included a woman who complained of an omnipresent smell of vinegar; CAT scans showed nothing unusual, but the smell persisted for years. Or the patient whose growing conviction that he didn’t smell “right” caused him to begin to withdraw socially; later he came to believe that he was dead inside, and explained the stench he smelled emanating from every pore as the result of internal putrefaction. These are examples of olfactory hallucination, or phantosmia, and they are usually either indicative of an underlying mental health problem or the result of trauma to the limbic area of the brain. Hirsch regularly treats patients with phantosmias. As a matter of fact, he had one once himself.
But companies like R.J. Reynolds hope you’ll forget that if your nose tells you to. As sociologist Anthony Synnott has pointed out, odor “is a significant component of our construction of reality and our construction of moral reality. The fundamental hypothesis is simple: what smells good, is good. Conversely, what smells bad, is bad. The phrase ‘Ummm! That smells good!’ neatly equates the physical-chemical and symbolic-moral realities.” And reality is slippery. The food-additive factory at Irving Park and Western may give the neighborhood the sweet smell of butterscotch or wild cherry, but who knows what really goes on inside?
