The human sense of smell is far more acute than we might realize, and  linguistic research emerging from a cluster of groups in southeast Asia and other locations suggests that, for many of us, our inability to smell might be a cultural problem, not an invariant fact of human nature. Our language may hamper our ability to perceive aroma.

From 2014, this discussion of languages with rich sensory vocabularies for aroma discusses the effects of social processes of focusing the attention on sensation, including how we might cultivate our senses in diverse ways in different language communities.