He rarely appears, but his presence is hard to miss. The small hills usually give him away, although he always hides so nicely under the ground. In the summer o just a human foot length below the meadow, when it gets colder up to a meter deep. lives therehe’s in a gang system, pretty much alone most of the year, he’s a loner. Besides, he has other things to do: he has to dig. When he is a male, his territory is about 6000 square meters. A female is content with a third of that. Both are hungry, almost always. There are hunting corridors, hallways, living rooms, storage rooms – all pitch black. The mole can’t do anything with his tiny eyes, and his ears aren’t much help either. But he is a world champion in feeling: his little fur hairs and whiskers tell him what the environment is like. But where he has to go, his nose shows him. Pointed and rosy, it protrudes ahead and shows him the straight way to his meal. Sometimes earthworms, sometimes snails, then woodlice again. They can lurk wherever they want
She directs him to the right and left. unerring. Unless someone blocks one of the two nostrils, like the US biologist Kenneth Catania, who only discovered the secret of the mole’s sense of direction. Disabled in this way, the nose sends him on detours. Nothing works without the body’s own guide.
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Trust your nose
For the toddler, being unable to smell is just as devastating as being unable to see almost anything for us. Although we certainly have other options to partially compensate for the failure of the sensory organ that is so important to us, we are initially lost in the sudden darkness. Maybe because we’ve given up feeling and got used to functioning. Because we don’t trust ourselves anymore. Our sense of touch rivals that of the mole rat – a species of mole with a radiating nose that has over 100,000 nerve endings on a square centimeter of skingathered – certainly not keep up. Our basic biological equipment is first class. But once we close our eyes, we realize how sensitively we can feel. And our nose also becomes more sensitive when we concentrate on it. It is our best companion anyway: it not only knows what coffee must smell like, it can even sniff out gene combinations that suit us well.
Smells develop a power that most people hardly suspect – because it is the scents that decide about sympathy and erotic attraction . While we can close our eyes and block out sounds to some extent, the nose keeps working. After all, we need to breathe. Nevertheless: “In Western culture, the nose is criminally neglected,” says the Norwegian artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas. It starts with the fact that children are drummed into questionable odor standards by their parents and advertising , she says: “And that’s a distinction between you and the stench.” It would be easy to take everything as it comes, not hasty To make judgments and thus give more space to the sense of smell.
Smells bring back memories
We only realize how important the work of our nose is when we have a cold. Then everything tastes very pale, and even a noble Château Petrus can hardly be distinguished from a dingy Tetrapak red. Because smells from the sinking of the emotion centers amygdala and hippocampus in the brain to be transported upwards at the push of a buttonit does not work. The other way around, the system is sophisticated: smells produce images. Every emotional event is stored in the head together with the scent, right from birth. They are stored there like in a huge database that we have no access to as long as the appropriate key is missing. But as soon as we smell something, the door opens automatically. We accept Werung based on our experiences and experiences that have been repressed for a long time. Sometimes we have to ponder what our nose is reminding us of. Then there are events that may have been decades ago, specifically they can be traced back to the age of two.
What is the smell trying to tell us?
It’s worth pausing. We are on the trail of our past. Also a kind of prey. Through them we can better understand ourselves.Maybe we should all be a little bit more of a mole – figuratively, of course. By using our guidance system, digging through our database, digging up experiences and sometimes preferring to let our noses decide than sober reason. Because he can be deceived. If necessary, even switch it off completely. We often seek advice from complete strangers rather than from ourselves, always looking for the expert for our own lives. Because we believe that the outsider’s perspective is more objective. We always have our advisors with us, and the very best is right in the middle of our face. By the way, April is now the mating season underground. In purely arithmetical terms, the small natural excavators live to be three years old on average, so they deliberately meet conspecifics about three times in their lives.
So let’s leave them and their earthy legacy alone, especially now. Sometimes the nests with the young are hidden very close under the hill. And it would be a pity for these soft-furred fellows with the huge shovel hands and the cute, pointed noses. Let’s take the traces as a reminder. Firstly, that these animals only live where the soil is fertile and healthy. And second, for the fact that the nose is a built-in, always-reliable compass. Not just for moles.
