Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins

Author:Jackie Higgins [Higgins, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature, Animals, General, Science, Life Sciences, Biology, Zoology, Ethology (Animal Behavior)
ISBN: 9781982156558
Google: rqU1EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1982156554
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

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The bloodhound exemplifies how we consciously smell the world around us. The moth exposes an unknown side to this known sense: how we subconsciously smell our partners in love. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test.” Little did he know, we love and lust in ways that we neither understand nor control. Attraction is guided perhaps by pheromones but certainly by odors. “People are skeptical because it goes on ‘right under our nose,’ ” Claus Wedekind told me, while Martha McClintock suggested such knowledge is intimidating because “when it comes to sex and love, people really want to believe they are in control.” The potent promise of subconscious smell extends beyond the sphere of desire. “Pheromones are not just about sex,” said Tristram Wyatt, listing how animal pheromones influence families and friendships, as well as induce fear and flight. “There could be all sorts of things that humans do with pheromones that we simply don’t know at the moment.”

Ultimately, the field of pheromones and other subliminal smells has sparked controversy because it poses fundamental questions about all aspects of our lives: how we think, how we feel, even whether we have free will. When Jean-Henri Fabre died, the New York Times mourned his loss with an article on October 11, 1915. His words guide us from beyond the grave: “Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a position to know the depths of the ocean? Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from the archives of the world before we possess the last word that the gnat has to say to us.” The same goes for the last word that his giant peacock of the night has to say about our sense of smell and its secret dimensions.

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