The Fifth Toe Syndrome
Happy Sense of Smell Day!
The other day I was looking at my toes and I came to an odd realization: my pinky toe is really small. Have a look at yours because you might find the same. Why is that, I thought?
Off I went down the proverbial rabbit hole, googling why our fifth toe is so much smaller than the rest. It turns out that it’s largely due to a complex interplay of genetic, environmental, and cultural factors over the course of human evolution.
Stay with me here because there’s a smelly point to all of this, I promise!
It turns out that as we humans became bipedal and started walking on two feet instead of four, our toes didn't need to grip things as much for balance. And, as the fifth toe became smaller, our feet became narrower, making it easier to walk and requiring less energy to propel forward.
But environment and culture also played a role. As humans migrated to colder climates and began hunting and gathering food, there was a greater need for protective footwear. Of course, it didn’t help that modern humans introduced shoe fashion, which added pressure and constraint on the feet and led to the gradual atrophy of the pinky toe over generations.
But today our pinky toe still plays a crucial role for balance and propulsion so we can skip, walk and run.
Hmmm 🤔, something felt oddly familiar here…
Is this a similar pattern for our sense of smell? Off I went down another rabbit hole. Sure enough, it appears that our sense of smell has, in fact, had a similar fate to our little toe.
Science is now showing that our early ancestors likely had a much keener sense of smell than we do today, probably due to the need for survival, helping them detect food sources, predators, and potential mates. Of course, as we evolved to walk upright, our noses moved farther away from the ground, likely (not truly confirmed) reducing our reliance on smell for navigation and foraging compared to quadrupedal animals, whose noses are closer to the ground.
Then, as humans developed tools, language, and complex social structures, we became more reliant on vision for communication and understanding our environment, all to the detriment of the sense of smell.
Culturally, this 2022 study aptly titled “Your Money or Your Sense of Smell?” said it all. The study, led by psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Herz, revealed that the sense of smell was perceived as vastly less important than vision and hearing, and much less valuable than various common commodities like social media, the phone, and even our left toe.
Yet the fact still remains, our sense of smell continues to play a crucial role in keeping us safe, giving our food flavor, social interactions, memory, and environmental awareness.
Could it be that our sense of smell has a sort of “Fifth Toe Syndrome?”
Both are diminishing in importance.
Both play a crucial role in how we navigate the world.
And yet both are seen as culturally irrelevant.
Looking at my little toe and making the connection to our sense of smell wasn’t so crazy after all.
I bring all this up because tomorrow, April 27th, is National Sense of Smell Day, a day dedicated to recognizing the importance of our sense of smell.
So, I’d like to ask you to do something for me. Could you pay attention to the odorous world around you? Use your nose and smell the flowers, food, people, and pets in your life? Ask yourself what the connection gives you, how it makes you feel, and what would happen if you lost it.
Then every day after that, whenever you look at your little pinky toes, maybe you’ll be reminded that your sense of smell is valuable and worth investing in too. Those little toes serve as a reminder to smell everything, always.
This week on my podcast An Aromatic Life:
This week’s whiff of wisdom comes from olfactory artist Lula Curioca who shares how to use smelling to connect at a deeper level.
Lula is as passionate about our sense of smell as I am, so let’s celebrate this underappreciated sense with her.
To listen to the original full episode go to episode #53.
Whiff of Wisdom is a biweekly format which spotlights an inspirational insight from a guest on the pod. The goal is to offer you a whiff of wisdom for your aromatic life, as well as give you some inspiration to try new things that use your sense of smell more.
You can listen to this episode, and all others, on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Go here.
I find it so hard to comprehend why so many people dismiss their sense of smell and treat it as something unimportant. Smelling things around me is how I have always been processing the world, it's of the same importance as vision or hearing, tasting or sense of touch. It's an important stroke to the portrait of any human, animal, plant, building, or object - it carries an essential information. From smell of human skin we can tell sometimes whether they are healthy, or if they have bad habits or poor hygiene; or maybe they love the same perfumes as I do, or we can tell where they have been.. I am not going to expand here on the smell of cats, as these creatures smell simply delicious, they groom themselves so well, and there's nothing more soothing as the smell of cat's freshly licked fur! Buildings carry aromas as well, their smells can tell stories! I have a habit of sniffing everything I encounter, it's the same as looking at something, most of the time it's fun, but sometimes it can be fatal: last Sunday I was doing some gardening and had to use rooting powder for the first time. I had to sniff it of course, you never know what you're missing, if you don't stick your nose everywhere, do you?! To cut the long story short, it took me a good couple of hours to recover from the olfactory trauma that rooting powder "made of natural ingredients" caused me.