Scientists Use Smell to Recreate Famous Deaths

Dutch scientists are able to re-create the deaths of some of the world’s most famous icons and figures by using scents and sounds in reconstructing their last moment.

Breda university scientists said they offers their visitors a unique, if somewhat macabre, historical snapshot ranging from the sweet smell of Jacqueline Kennedy’s perfume mingled with the scent of John F. Kennedy’s blood to Whitney Houston’s last drug-fuelled moments in a Beverly Hills bathtub.

Frederik Duerinck, communication and multimedia design faculty of Breda’s Avans university of applied sciences asks: “We all have seen the images of JFK’s assassination, but what did it smell like?”

To find this out, visitors with a sense of the morbid are invited to lie in a series of four silver metal boxes similar to those found in a morgue, report said. It added that the boxes, which are pitch-dark inside, are rigged with pipes leading to bottles containing pressurized smells.

Report added that a soundtrack is played and on queue different scents are released into the box to recreate a specific “final moment.”

Through this, visitors can revisit the smells and sounds believed to have been around at four people whose deaths are etched into the world’s collective memory: Kennedy (1963); Princess Diana (1997); Moamer Kadhafi (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012).

Chemical odor

For example, those wanting to experience Houston’s final moments are transported to a bathtub at the upmarket Beverly Hills hotel where the diva died in February 2012 at age 48.

A coroner has concluded that the singing legend died of accidental drowning, with cocaine and heart disease listed as contributing suspects.

Report said that the sounds of splashing water and Houston’s voice, a visitor first gets a whiff of generic cleaner, used in hotels around the world, followed by the olive oil the singer used in her tub.

After this, a strong chemical odor, similar to that of cocaine fills the box, grabbing its occupant by the throat, followed by the sound of rushing water and then silence.

Duerinck said “Smell is rarely used in communication and we wanted to explore its uses.”

“It’s a very powerful means of communication,” he added.

Scientists have proved that smells are linked to the part of the brain that regulates emotion and memory, report said. “Who doesn’t want to buy a loaf after catching a whiff of fresh bread?” asked Duerinck.

Duerinck, who together with other lecturers and students, has put together an inventory of odours and is devising new ways of using smell: for instance in story-telling.

Source: GMA News Online