The Greatest Science Books of 2016
10.BEING A DOG
“The act of smelling something, anything, is
remarkably like the act of thinking itself,” the
great science storyteller Lewis Thomas wrote in his beautiful 1985 meditation
on the poetics of
smell as a mode of knowledge. But,
like the conditioned consciousness out of which our thoughts arise, our
olfactory perception is beholden to our cognitive, cultural, and biological
limitations. The 438 cubic feet
of air we inhale each day are loaded with an
extraordinary richness of information, but we are able to access and decipher
only a fraction. And yet we know, on some deep creaturely level, just how
powerful and enlivening the world of smell is, how intimately connected with
our ability to savor life. “Get a life in which you notice the smell of
salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes,” Anna Quindlen
advised in her indispensable Short Guide to a
Happy Life — but the noticing eclipses the
getting, for the salt water breeze is lost on any life devoid of this sensorial
perception.
Dogs,
who “see” the world
through smell, can teach us a great deal about that
springlike sensorial aliveness which E.E. Cummings termed “smelloftheworld.” So argues cognitive
scientist and writer Alexandra Horowitz, director of the Dog
Cognition Lab at Barnard College, in Being
a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell— a fascinating tour of what Horowitz calls
the “surprising and sometimes alarming feats of olfactory perception” that dogs
perform daily, and what they can teach us about swinging open the doors of our
own perception by relearning some of our long-lost olfactory skills that grant
us access to hidden layers of reality.
Art by
Maira Kalman from Beloved Dog
The book
is a natural extension of Horowitz’s two previous books, exploring the subjective
reality of the dog and how our human
perceptions shape our own subjective reality. She
writes:
I am besotted with dogs, and to know a dog is
to be interested in what it’s like to be a dog. And that all begins with the
nose.
What the dog sees and knows comes through his
nose, and the information that every dog — the tracking dog, of course, but
also the dog lying next to you, snoring, on the couch — has about the world
based on smell is unthinkably rich. It is rich in a way we humans once knew
about, once acted on, but have since neglected.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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