Research Explores the Link Between Your Sense of Smell and Your Sexual Desire
New research adds onto decades worth of research showing that smell is a crucial facet of human attraction.
Here on The Science of Sex, I’ve covered the sense of smell in human sexuality a lot (here, here, and here).
Anyone who’s been subscribed knows I’m a big proponent of using more than your senses of sight and touch in sexual encounters. And by augmenting the intentional use of senses other than sight into your sexual repertoire, I assure you, no matter who you are, no matter how kinky or vanilla, you can open up a hidden and mystifying worlds awaiting you inside of your own brain.
I borrowed this idea from the unrivaled (in his time) French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), to whom my thinking about human sexuality is deeply indebted.
At a time when thinkers like Freud, Einstein, and William James were turning to the outside world, exploring it with the new discipline of science that was just hitting its stride, Bergson decided to turn inward. He explored life and the world from within consciousness itself. Einstein thought about time, Bergson coined what he called duration, an experience wholly separate from time.
Time happens between two points. Duration happens without limits, it just endlessly moves on and all of evolution, according to Bergson, is one long process of duration, like a super-organism, of which we’re a small part, the tiny cells that make up the long process of the evolution of the universe.
In the macro world, the one we live in, time is fixed. The Einsteins and the much-later quantum physicists of the world were chasing the edge cases where the rules of Newtonian physics didn’t apply, like astrophysics. But those exceptions prove the rule. Overwhelmingly, no matter where you are in the world or what you’re doing while you’re there, eight o’clock is eight o’clock and five minutes is five minutes.
The same can’t be said of duration, which is both fluid and seamless.
Some experiences gruel on endlessly, while others fly by in an instant. The long workday drags out as you impatiently stare at the clock, anticipating the moment you go home. The sex you’ve been waiting all day for seems like it’s over in seconds, even if it takes twenty minutes. Your mind is so lost in the orgiastic sensations, the world around you disappears, and, next thing you know, it’s over. Then you’re back to work.
Our afternoon might trudge on slowly while our Friday night flies by in a flash.