Analysis Of 'The Winter Palace Of Monarchs'

On the first day of “Scent, Sociality, and Sex,” we were asked which of our five senses we would sacrifice if forced to decide. Many students deemed their sense of smell their least essential sense. After reading experiments and pop science articles in class, I now better understand how imperative the sense of smell is to the daily lives of humans. I have developed new insight into the science behind olfaction, learning how the brain interprets scent signals and how the brain perceives scent stimuli. While I don’t believe what I’ve learned has altered the scents I smell, my understanding of how I smell certain scents and why I pair them with specific memories has grown. To the once naive group of students in our class, the ability

The Winter Palace of Monarchs, by Diane Ackerman, explains the author’s experience working to save butterflies from the destruction of their habitats. One winter, Ackerman traveled to California to work for Los Angeles Museum 's Monarch Project. She would be tagging butterflies in their preferred environment, the intensely fragrant eucalyptus groves. The menthol-like scent of the flora transported Ackerman back to the bedroom of her childhood home in 1950s Illinois, her mother rubbing Vicks Vaporub on her sick chest (...). From the eucalyptus scent, Ackerman’s brain triggered an odor-evoked memory from the first two decades of her life, likely even the first decade, just as the autobiographical memory research would have predicted (...). With little knowledge of the neurological and psychological functions of olfaction, in our first writing assignment, I wrote about how some of the smells of the dorms’ bathrooms strongly remind of my sleepaway camp. I would learn later that my writing inadvertently substantiated the findings of the study. Common smells like hairspray and certain perfumes trigger vivid, odor-evoked memories of a place I spent seven weeks at from age nine to eighteen. This is just one example of how I have a clearer understanding of my olfactory processes from information shared in this