Patrick Süskind’s book “Perfume” tells the story of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris on July 17, 1738, under the poorest of conditions. From the very beginning, he is afflicted with the flaw of having no body odor of his own – a flaw that isolates him from people and makes him an outsider. It is not until he is 25 years old that he recognizes his own lack of smell as a result of a dream sequence, which is an extreme shock experience for him. So much for the fiction of the book. The fact is that every person has a certain inherent odor, but he himself does not perceive it.
Why do we not perceive our own smell?
Scents act through the nose directly into the brain: via the olfactory cells in the nose, the information is transmitted to old centers of our brain. Incidentally, the nose is the only sensory organ that conducts its impulses directly to the brain without any other nerve cells intervening. Thus, this information bypasses the cerebrum and escapes human conscious perception.
Since we are constantly confronted with scents and smells everywhere, our brain must protect itself from an overload of information – the nervous system therefore ignores the smell of its own body. Only when there is a strong change in body odor, such as heavy sweating after sports or neglected personal hygiene, do we perceive an inherent odor, because it then rises demonstratively to our noses.
À propos…
In contrast to the sense of smell of animals such as a dog or a predatory cat, the human sense of smell is relatively underdeveloped. However, we humans can still distinguish about 10,000 different scents.
