Rachel Herz
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Rachel Herz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think everybody should be doing this, regardless of the sensibility of your sense of smell, at least once a day, every day. And this is because our sense of smell is directly involved with the health of our brain and our body.
Part 2. To smell is to judge. i was in the back seat of the car on a beautiful summer day and the windows were rolled down we're going through pastoral landscape and all of a sudden from the front seat my mom says oh i love that smell she says it it's got to be good it's this
beautiful day i'm all really happy so i make this connection between positivity and scent and i disclosed this on the playground when i was about seven years old i made this comment that oh i love that smell i actually still didn't know what it was called at this point And then everyone turned to me and yelled, ooh, that skunk, you're so weird.
And I was met with derision and screeches and children pointing fingers at me and running away.
So the culture around me tells me that skunk is a bad smell. So I would say I have learned that. And yet I have this personal experience, which is really positive, And that's actually going to supersede the cultural aspect of it. So it's a multi-layer system between sensitivity, cultural learning, and personal experience. And it's the meaning which determines how much you like it.
So for instance, the immigrants who moved in next door, you know, using the smell of both food and then the smell of the person who eats that food as being other and bad and not part of my tribe and someone or a group that should be pushed away from who I am. So it's not pure. The scent is very much tied up in the culture.
It's very much tied up in the particular moment in that instance in time, let's say politically, where whatever is going on, that that scent then takes that meaning and where it's coming from.
Part three, to smell is to remember.
Scent memories are bringing back a very discreet episode that's, you know, fully fleshed out as one moment in time. That's a very special kind of specific time travel that scent enables us to experience. And in a way that other sensory experiences don't because we feel much more back in that original time and place. It's so much more visceral.
Like we've actually kind of moved from now to back then.
Who we are is a collection of the stories of our past and our life narrative is how we define ourselves and our life narrative is dependent upon remembering who we are and the things that have happened to us. And absolutely, scent is the key to that.
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