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I am an interdisciplinary researcher. My work spans across the elds of Urban Design, Architecture and Cognitive Science. I hold a
degree in Woodworking, a B.A. in Environmental Design with a minor in Architecture, and a M.Sc.A. in Planning / Urban Design. In order
to identify avenues of approach for architects and environmental designers interested in working with the olfactory dimension, I am
currently pursuing a research within a Philosophy - Cognitive Science doctorate at the Université du Québec à Montréal (QC Canada).
For more details about my work, you can either go to www.researchgate.net/prole/Natalie_Bouchard2 or www.natalieb.ca, email me at
natalie.bouchard@gmail.com, or catch me on twitter.com/160B
i would like to discuss this model with you
The Theatre of the Olfactory Memory
The structure of our reality is built from an intrinsic brain activity that call on prior knowledge that
experience has laid down in our synaptic connections; it is also tinged by the fictional
narratives (Vaihinger, 1911, Ricœur, 1983, 1985) that take shape through our affordances and
our conceptual inferences. Our brain constantly compiles various predictions in order to
prepare our body for different spatial and temporal eventualities in accordance with the
familiarity of where we found ourselves and our level of attention (Clark, 2016;
Hohwy, 2013). As a consequence, our brain processes most of the time
more inputs from itself than from the outside world (Feldman Barrett,
2017; Seth, 2015). Apprehending the world thus implies constantly
scaffolding different scenarios; these may be incoherent, unreal or
faithful to reality, it remains that the reality is basically a ctional
relationship between us and the environment.
The signals we grasp from the environment simultaneously
stimulate multiple sensory modalities, which creates
interconnections among various sensory areas of our brain
(Hardcastle & Giocomo, 2019; Zhang et al., 2016). Because of
this active networking, our reality is continuously shaped by a
memory system which follows a variety of temporal rhythms.
Looking at the path that a chemical signal can takes in the brain,
we see that 5 to 10% of the air we breathe is directed by the
nasal conchae toward a patch of cells on the roof and adjacent
sides of the nasal cavity (Zhao et al., 2004; Keyhani et al., 1995).
This area, which contains more than 100 million receptor cells (Keller &
Vosshall, 2016), is where the stimulus conversion—transduction—kicks off.
The input is transposed into a neuronal pattern in the glomeruli of the olfactory bulb
(Frasnelli et al., 2008; Firestein, 2001; Buck & Axel, 1991) and then passed to the
olfactory cortex where memorization work is carried out, a process that is biased by our
beliefs and feelings of the moment. An interesting fact: olfactory transduction is much
slower than visual or auditory transduction due to the timing of the sniff cycle. The impact of
this delay is major because it allows the system to unite current temporal and spatial
information with the conversion process (Trimmer & Mainland, 2017). We can thus deduce that
each chemical complexity stored in our memory reects a world in itself.
Forming an intangible topography in motion, the odorous harmonies that occupy the environment can thus allow us to evolve, by conscious or
distracted mental projection, between the virtual planes of innumerable places encoded in our memory (Eichenbaum, 2017). I call these odorous
harmonies olfactory ambiances. Olfactory ambiances affect our olfactory memory, which in turn affects three important aspects our mental live:
spatiotemporal patterns, the emotional valence associated with these patterns, and our olfactory experience of the world, which I call its “smellscape.”