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I’d like to challenge my academic friends to stop giving random odors to college sophomores in the psychology lab, and start observing odor fluency where it happens naturall — in creative people actively engaged with smell. We need to take a fresh look at how they express olfactory experience in their finished work and at the role of smell in the act of creation. As a first step toward characterizing olfactory genius, we can look for the psychological traits of the olfactively minded artist. I’ll kick things off by proposing three of them: awareness, empathy, and imagination. […]
To portray scent in a believable way and have it resonate emotionally, an artist must be alive to smells in the real world. The odor-aware artist is by nature a scent seeker who finds the smells of things, places, and people intrinsically fascinating. He thinks in smells and finds them to be distinct and almost palpable, not wispy and transparent.
— Avery Gilbert, What the Nose Knows. The Science of Scent in Everyday Life
Crown Publishers, New York, 2015, pp. 142-143 (cap. 7: “The Olfactory Imagination”)
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