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Jacobson's Organ: The Remarkable Nature of Smell by Lyall Watson W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., April 1, 2000
The sense of smell in humans is often not highly regarded. We tend to consider ourselves and our primate cousins as visual creatures above all, with olfaction underdeveloped relegated to a secondary role in bringing us information about the outside world. Even though this is far from being true in other mammalian species, where smell can even be considered as the primary sense and main regulator of their physiology and behavior, the accepted view is that in the primate branch of the evolutionary tree it has gradually been left on the side and its functions have been taken over by vision or audition. Watson wrote his book with the explicit aim of providing an alternative view of our relationship with smell, one that is much more complex and profound than what has hitherto been acknowledged by mainstream science.
The title of the book comes from the original name given to the vomeronasal organ, a pair of pits located in the inner surface of the nose and first described by the Danish surgeon Ludvig Jacobson in the XIX century. Jacobson’s organ plays an important role in the biology of certain animal species such as snakes, that use it to detect non-volatile molecules dispersed in the environment and provide them with what has been called a “sixth sense”, whereas in rodents the organ is essential for the processing of certain pheromonal cues derived from other individuals of the same species. The evidence for a functional Jacobson’s organ in humans, however, is really scant, with several studies having even failed to find the structure in every patient examined. Watson strongly rejects this notion of a vestigial Jacobson’s organ in our species, using some isolated pieces of evidence pointing in the opposite direction to argue that the organ is also fully functional in us humans. Moreover, he maintains that it provides direct sensorial input to the limbic system, bypassing the cerebral cortex and therefore conscious recognition of the signals that it detects. His idea is that we are constantly receiving olfactory information from other living beings that affect us unconsciously, and this provides a rational explanation for phenomena normally considered outside the bounds of scientific enquiry, such as intuition, “hunches”, divination and even paranormal episodes.
The author does a reasonably good job at introducing the sense of smell from evolutionary, physiological, taxonomical and historical points of views, and the book can be said to gain its strength by this characterization, even though his fondness for jumping from one subject to the next in the same paragraph does not help in bringing clarity to the text. However, and specially in the last section, the narrative becomes more and more associated with a hypothesis that is regarded with general skepticism by the scientific community, and the radically reinvented worldview that Watson advances based on this, that of a dense network of olfactory signals regulating our habits and interpersonal relations at an unconscious level, comes to resemble not much more than a flight of fancy, perhaps more appropriate for speculative fiction than for a science book.
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