On why we can't imagine strong pain or suffering, time heals all, dulls all

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When reading To the Lighthouse you come across this sentence:

“…While it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds…”

Can you smell this odor? When I read this passaged I imagined I did. Of course what I was “smelling” was the idea of a smell. Not something visceral like a real smell. Can we imagine smells? I posed this question to a neuroscientist, an expert in how the brain constructs “smell”:

I have not met the person who can convincingly tell you that they can recreate peppermint, or lilac at will and with … immediacy.  I myself cannot, but can force a small fragment of the experience in an almost intellectual way—not the visceral experience…Why is this? I think that smell…has a more primitive, somatic nature: you cannot create the qualities of intense pain or itch in your mind and feel them with any intensity either. Perhaps this is because smell is a primitive stimulus …  in some ways, the more primitive sensations are more important to survival.  The body does not want you to create the experience of smelling danger or food or a mate ex nihilo unless they are actually present- it costs to act and false alarms can lead to problems.

When we imagine, our experiences of sensations are dulled, so as to distinguish these imagined senses from real cues. We “force” an experience in “an almost intellectual way.”

What interests me here is that most people believe that they can imagine smells perfectly; viscerally. Or, while they are reading, they tell themselves that they have smelled something. (Like my idealized piano playing, there are no wrong notes. We have read a book—that is to say: imagined it—perfectly).

The smell of “salt and weeds:”

I am not smelling them: I am performing a synesthetic transformation. From the words “smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of that Cape Cod house I rent. The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which leaves a slight after-image. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora. A nebula of illusory material.

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