Juliet was wrong
Standing at a window overlooking her family orchard in Verona about 700
years ago, Juliet Capulet is reputed to have developed a famous
hypothesis which Shakespeare later recorded. Details may have
been lost in translation, transmogrified through the passage of several
hundred years before her words were set down, or magnified from nought
by the pen of a man whose poetic license has never been paralleled.
This is what she hypothesized:
What's
in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as
sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo
call'd,
The guy smelt pretty damn sweet for Juliet to scent him from a window
high above an orchard, but remember, these were the middle ages. And,
anyhow, it turns out she was wrong.
Maybe it's no surprise that she was wrong, since
she's well known for her tragic mistakes. Yet despite her famously bad
judgment, the Rose Hypothesis is oft cited and widely believed. No
longer, perhaps! According to
this
article in today's Guardian, a group of psychologists at Oxford
University has determined that words you see affect what you smell. Via
the website of the journal
Neuron, I located the
full reference to the original article:
Cognitive
Modulation of Olfactory Processing, Ivan E. de Araujo, Edmund T.
Rolls, Maria Inés Velazco, Christian Margot, and Isabelle Cayeux, Neuron, Vol 46, 671-679, 19 May 2005
The full text is
here,
but I am not sure whether access is free to all, or whether it will
remain so. Here is the summary of the article:
We showed how
cognitive, semantic information modulates olfactory representations in
the brain by providing a visual word descriptor, "cheddar cheese" or
"body odor," during the delivery of a test odor (isovaleric acid with
cheddar cheese flavor) and also during the delivery of clean air. Clean
air labeled "air" was used as a control. Subjects rated the affective
value of the test odor as significantly more unpleasant when labeled
"body odor" than when labeled "cheddar cheese." In an event-related
fMRI design, we showed that the rostral anterior cingulate cortex
(ACC)/medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was significantly more
activated by the test stimulus and by clean air when labeled "cheddar
cheese" than when labeled "body odor," and the activations were
correlated with the pleasantness ratings. This cognitive modulation was
also found for the test odor (but not for the clean air) in the
amygdala bilaterally.
So, by a quite unscientific though not implausible extrapolation, that
which we call a rose by the name of a dog turd might not smell half as
sweet.
And while we're on the subject, why are there so many different names
for roses, but so few for dog turds? Is the intrinsic variation of dog
turds so much less?
And while we're not on the subject, Juliet was not trying to rid Romeo
of his given name, but of his family's name: she wanted him a Capulet.
As a semanticist, I should love to have been born with the name
Montague.
However, he left no children. Like Romeo, but for different reasons. I
won't go into them here, except to say: it ended badly.
Posted by David Beaver at May 19, 2005 02:12 PM