The Shadow Sense - Forgotten Yet Powerful

The most ancient sense and the implications from a brand new study

One of our senses invisibly rules our lives, but it's not what you think. Yes, of course we are visual creatures and, especially now that more and more of our life takes place online, visual communication is shaping how we see the world and making us blind to our other senses. We are also auditory creatures and one example of the importance of sound perception on our sense of self is the growing awareness that sound pollution is real and causes real stress. Taste has been circumscribed. We just don't go around licking everything we encounter, past a certain very young age. Touch and proprioception (our awareness of our body's position) are also very circumscribed, and we are taught in modern society, to limit this sensory input drastically. But scent...scent has been overlooked. It and its profound power over us have been forgotten.

Scent is the oldest sense. Even the earliest single celled organisms that first emerged in the primordial oceans had chemoreceptors that allowed them to move or grow towards sources of food and away from toxins, which is the origin of scent, the detection of certain molecules. This is echoed in sperm (a single cell), that find their way to the egg (another single cell) by smelling their way--They have chemoreceptors in their heads.

Freud, in his book "Civilization and Its Discontents" postulates, in a frustratingly brief footnote, that when the precursors to modern humans went from being on four legs to standing up on two legs, their primary sense went from olfaction to vision. He doesn't go anywhere with that thought. The idea is that when our ancestors were walking on two legs they could see further and interact with a larger world, at a distance. This leads to writing and the constructions of a certain form of history and human interaction, including commerce and property. It leads to distancing. Our eyes are in front so we can see in 3 dimensions, which is great for being a hunter, and a very different way of constructing a world view (notice 'view'!) from those animals that have their eyes on the sides of their heads, see all around them, but can't see in 3 dimensions, e.g., horses. Of course, many predators that use vision run on four legs, such as wolves and coyotes and dogs, but their sense of smell still plays an important role in how they perceive the world. I'm not sure how Freud conceptualized the non-upright walking creatures that interacted with the world through smell. I think Freud was actually wrong. While vision certainly became more consciously dominant, scent and its power never really disappeared. We just forgot about it.

Scent is an invisible, neglected sense, but I wouldn't say it's atrophied. It still has profound influences over us as a recent study shows. It's a study that was just published the influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 2/13/24) and it's entitled "Recall of Autobiographical Memories Following Odor vs. Verbal Cues Among Adults with Major Depressive Disorder.(MDD)" The authors are Emily K. Leikner and others. 

There are many intriguing findings about the power of scent in this study, for example, that while people with MDD have worse autobiographical memory recall with word cues compared to 'normal', their recall with olfactory cues is no worse. It has been thought that autobiographical memory, that is memories of their actual lives as opposed to the oppressive vague generalizations of major depression, e.g. "I'm a bad person", is impaired in people with depression and that this is at the center of the pathology and suffering. You could imagine that people with depression forget who they were. But this observation is based on verbal cues, which don't allow people with depression to recall their actual past. However, as this study shows, they are still able to recall their actual past when presented with odor cues, aka scents.

In terms of reawakening ourselves to all ourselves, including our past, and not just the frequently limiting and negative generalizations that all of us, not just those labeled to have MDD, are prone to, scent bypasses the intellect and thus offers a unique powerful way. The intellect, part of the ego, part of the default program, and which inevitably filters word cues, keeps us trapped and cut off. That's why people don't remember who they were from verbal cues. The intellect prevents that.

Scent, on the other hand, elicits significant emotional response and, even more I would argue, makes us feel more reconnected, to ourselves, to others, to the environment. The word eco-delic has recently been introduced to described this increased sense of connectedness to everything around us.

I mentioned default mode. Scientists have identified a network in the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN), that becomes more active when we are at rest or are engaged in a task we have done many times before, such as driving to work. Since its discovery, the DMN has been shown to play an important role in many conditions, including depression, anxiety, PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, addiction and more. It seems the role of the DMN in more and more conditions is being discovered continually.  

The most comprehensive view of the main function of the DMN is that it constructs the story we tell ourselves of ourselves, which can be called the ego, our sense 'this is who I am.' This story is always a work in progress, always updated, the past always edited. The ego is just another program running in the DMN. With traumas and other factors, very dysfunctional programs start running in the DMN. The tenacity of programs running in the DMN, as seen in the case of the ego, is one reason psychiatric conditions such as the ones I mentioned above, are so hard to treat. Incidentally, 'disrupting' or decreasing the internal connectedness, think rigidity, of the DMN appears to be one of the mechanisms by which psychedelic assisted therapy appear to help a variety of conditions such as the ones mentioned above. This has been paraphrased in media reports as 'psychedelics increase connections of brain parts that are not usually connected.'

In terms of a Shadow sense, or more precisely a Shadow way of being, an unconscious, automatic way of dealing with the world, I would say the programs running in the DMN, including the ego, actually put us in invisible ruts. When we are depressed, or in the grasp of other programs running in the DMN, we are actually unaware that there are other ways of operating, thinking or looking at the world. When we are in default mode, we are unconscious, on auto-pilot and we usually can't imagine how things could be any different. This inability to imagine things could be different is a common cognitive trait among many of the conditions mentioned above and contribute to their tenacity and the suffering they cause. It is also one of the limitations of the ego and ego transcendence is the promise of various spiritual traditions and psychedelics.

But psychedelics are not the only way to disrupt the DMN. There's a study from 2017 by P. R. Karunanayaka and others (https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.23440) that shows that olfactory cues also 'disrupt' the Default Mode Network (DMN).

In the recent study I mention above, Leikner states: "Memories triggered by odors typically differ from memories triggered by words in several recall characteristics. Odor cues are consistently found to evoke memories that are more emotionally arousing and associated with stronger feelings of reliving than memories evoked by words."

The way I think of odors and aromas, there are at least three levels at which aromas work on us.

There's the biographical, which has been called 'the Proust effect.' I highly recommend Proust's description of the effects of scent on memory in the first few pages of "Remembrance of Things Past", a 3000 page thinly veiled autobiographical novel, which starts when the protagonist, like the author is reminded by the taste, which is really the scent of a cookie of a particular event in his childhood, when his aunt gave him a similar cookie and then the author is flooded by many memories, which he spent most of his life pouring into this book. Proust's description of the memory evoking effects of scent culminates in "But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

There are also the cultural associations of scent. Think of thanksgiving (pumpkin pie, etc.) and Christmas. There are very specific odor associations shared by cultures, although they obviously differ in different cultures.

Then there's the archetypal realm, which Cathy and I have seen in teaching around the world with aromas, where people have similar sets of reactions to the same scents. I think this is the level at which ancient Eyptian scent technology operated or the ketoret incense for which a precise recipe is given in the Torah.

In my work, I have seen scents operate on this archetypal level, with ketamine, with other psychedelics and by themselves. This is where essential oils come in. We have worked deeply with essential oils from plants that have a long history of spiritual use, e.g., labdanum was used in ancient Egypt, galbanum is an ingredient in ketoret. I feel that is the level at which aromas work on all of us. The biographical and even the cultural can be too varied and unpredictable.

Someone might love lavender, but then someone else might say 'my grandmother who used to beat me used to smell of lavender.'  So the unusualness of certain powerful essential oils can be helpful, because the likelihood of 'interference' from the biographical level can be lessened.

Also, essential oils for this work, need to be alive, or have 'viriditas.' I can tell when an essential oil has this aliveness because it's a prerequisite for soul-to-soul connection between me and the plant and alive essential oils have made me cry and elicited other strong emotions, in myself and others I've worked with.