Feline Fetish
She will blissfully nose dive into a freshly removed shoe.
Compared to humans, much of a four legger’s brain is devoted to nasal memory. This may not be surprising, given their sensory flux with a nose close to the ground. Their memories, thoughts and reveries may be rich and exotic to us.
“The past still lives in us …[it] has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment! … An hour is not merely an hour! … It is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places and climates! So we hold within us a treasure of impressions, clustered in small knots, each with a flavor of its own, formed from our own experiences, that become certain moments of our past.”
— Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
Translation from the French: the olfactory system is a direct activation path for stored memories, at a deeper and more multidimensional level than the other senses, consistent with its primitive evolutionary role in associative memory. The electrical signals from the olfactory tract route to the limbic system, the most ancient part of the brain, the hotbed of our most instinctual and primitive emotions.
Four leggers have a much larger olfactory epithelium (the sensory receptor sheet) with many-fold more receptors. And they have more types of sensory receptors, so they encode odorants in a higher-dimensional representation (like vision in birds). Humans have about 350-400 distinct receptor types, whereas mice have 1000. Many of these receptors are co-activated by the same odorant, so biological olfaction is inherently a high dimensional representation system.
A mind-blowing example: dogs can identify whether two humans are identical twins or not by scent alone.
Leave a Reply