Do We Smell More of the World or Are We Aware of More of Them?

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The amount of sensory input we get from smell is enormously larger than what we're consciously aware of, right? We filter out all the background very effectively. And that made me think of an interview I did recently with Robin Carhart Harris about the use of psychedelics in to treat patients and just for therapeutic reasons because apparently, like if you take LSD or something like that, psychedelic that makes you see visions and so forth, the argument is that those visions are always there, but our brain filters them out. It's actually not that far removed from vision. As soon as you train yourself to know what to pay attention to, you start to perceive more qualities, more things,. The nice thing

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. But not all senses are created equal; in practice, we tend to privilege vision, with hearing perhaps a close second. Ann-Sophie Barwich wants to argue that we should take smell more seriously, and that doing so will give us new insights into how the brain works. As a working philosopher and neuroscientist, she shares a wealth of fascinating information about how smell works, how it shapes the way we think, and what it all means for questions of free will and rationality.

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Ann-Sophie Barwich received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, University of Exeter. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington. She has previously been a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at The Center for Science & Society, Columbia University, and held a Research Fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna. Her new book is Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind.

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