Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

Yeah.

But also slightly related, I think, but I'm on a slight tangent.

Smell is the only sense that we can create new, completely new sensory perceptions for.

So you can't imagine...

a new color for instance it's not possible but for smell because we've gotten so good at synthetic perfumery we can create entirely new smells that nobody has ever smelled before which i think is pretty remarkable

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, incense firstly was the kind of earliest way in which we produced perfumes, or at least produced fragrances.

And incense are these naturally occurring materials that when burned release their fragrance.

It used to be absolutely fundamental to especially practices related to religion.

But it was also, you know, since antiquity used in the households, like personal household altars, it became kind of synonymous with offerings to the gods.

perhaps the most special kind of offering because it offered a kind of proximity to the divine because smell is taken into the body.

And so it offers that kind of connection.

don't we why don't we read more about that well okay one answer is that censorship was a thing for a long time it was too sexy it's too sexy um you know if you were to take for example james joyce's ulysses which obviously was kind of heavily condemned for being too erotic and obscene

partly because of certain scenes that revolved around smell.

You know, there's this kind of much quoted scene that became prominent in the trial for Ulysses, the obscenity trial, where Bloom is seated above his own rising smell on the toilet.

He's reading the newspaper.

Oh!

And that absolutely shocked people, even though it's a super mundane thing.

You know, everybody at some point...

in their day or week, depending on how much fibre you eat, is sat on the toilet above their own rising smell.