105 | Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Science and Philosophy of Smell

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	21 who is listening to this in the future, 100 years from now, who knows? I don't know,
0:08.5	1000 years from now, how long are people going to be listening to the Mindscape Podcast?
0:12.1	No one can tell. But this is being recorded in the midst of what is still kind of a quarantine
0:18.0	for the COVID-19 pandemic chasing around the world. In some places in the world, things are looking
0:25.1	up a little bit, not everywhere, where I am in Southern California, not really looking up right
0:30.4	now. But what I want to talk about today is actually not viruses or pandemics, but the metaphor I
0:37.6	just sneaked in to that little intro there. I was talking about things looking up. Turns out that
0:43.7	if you think about it, we use these visual metaphors all the time for things that have nothing to do
0:49.2	with actual vision. When I say that things are looking up in certain parts of the world,
0:52.9	I don't mean that the people there are looking into the sky or at their ceilings or anything like
0:56.8	that. But vision is something that gives us such clear and distinct information about the world
1:02.9	around us that we tend to privilege it over the other senses. So today's guest, Ansofi Barvich,
1:10.0	is against that. She thinks that we are privileging vision too much. In fact, she is a philosopher who is
1:16.2	decided to specialize in the sense of smell. And therefore, almost inevitably, her first book,
1:22.3	which is just about to come out, in which I can highly recommend to you, is called Smellosophy.
1:27.2	But it's not just about, you know, we should think in this in that way about what we smell.
1:31.5	It's about the fact that by thinking of other senses other than vision, we get a new window
1:36.7	onto how the brain works, how consciousness works, how we perceive the world and think about it.
1:42.1	And I really admire what Anne has done, because not only is she a philosopher who is blazing new ground
1:47.2	in this way of thinking about the world, but along the way to learning how to do this, she, of course,
1:52.2	had to learn some neuroscience. She hung out with neuroscientists. And at some point, someone said,
	...

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