The Dog’s Nose: A Metaphor for Better Thinking

I am a die-hard doggie person, and in addition to being happily overwhelmed with my own small pack, I love finding out interesting facts about them. Their history, their behaviour, their intelligence…all of it fascinates me. It fascinates me enough that I happily get drooled on in the morning, and I pick up their poop. I can’t get over how incredibly cool they are, maybe too cool for us.

One interesting nugget that stands out is how a dog’s olfactory system works. While humans lump scents together (if we register them at all), a dog’s nose and brain manage to separate smells into intricate details. We smell pizza, and they smell a veritable grocery list of individual ingredients. We walk into a room of people, and unless we sniff individuals (which isn’t at all creepy), we can’t discern one body from another.  Dogs, however, can narrow down a particular stink well enough to find a lost human, anticipate a storm, or recognize when their human is not well. They can hold and/or juggle all this detail at once. Dogs smell in 3D, maybe even 4D, in glorious technicolour, with all the special effects.

It occurred to me recently, while I watched my puppy scour a huge pile of stinky shoes to find a singular piece of lost kibble, that humans could be taking cues from the canine sense of smell. Our noses may never get there, but what if we approached thinking the way a dog approaches the world of smell?

Let me be clear, it’s not that we can’t think in this kind of detail, with this degree of attention and focus to minutia. We’ve got the both the hardware and the software needed to do so, but a lot of the time (especially these days), we don’t. Maybe it’s because of fatigue, distraction, laziness, or maybe it’s we’ve got an agenda to push, and the subtleties of a situation don’t suit us. We choose not to take it all in, to sniff beyond the surface. We go with knee-jerk reactions, wishful thinking, and whatever explanation happens to be on the top of the pile. Culturally speaking, we don’t prize nuance, and detail. We don’t delight in the hidden treasures that pop up when we choose to pay attention.

If we used our minds the way dogs use their noses, could we discern opinion from fact, generalization from deep understanding, and authority from mere bluster?  Could we take a moment to pick apart fact from opinion, premises from conclusions, fallacy from valid argument?  Would we be capable of sniffing out ideas that actually make sense? Is it possible we could put emotions over here, and reason over there, respecting both, but not confusing one with the other? Would we learn to revel in the many flavours of truth?

Would expanding our repertoire this way help us to enjoy thinking? Would we be delighted by new and different ideas, instead of being afraid of them? Would we be aware of foul intentions and motivations before we become prey to them? Would solutions present themselves faster when we were in trouble?  Would we get much better at engaging our curiosity, connecting with the world around us, and living more multifaceted lives? Could we talk ourselves into thinking in more than one dimension again?  

If dogs used their noses the way we sometimes choose to use our minds, they’d never be able to find missing kids, track prey, or make their way home when lost. I can only speculate about the richness of the experiences dogs have via their snoots. I watch mine stick their faces out of the car window, and I imagine them thinking “I can smell everything all at once!” Our dogs know whose socks are whose, which side of the bed to snooze on, and which open windows provide the most variety. When we go for a walk somewhere new, and they toddle along with their noses engaged, consumed by what’s floating in the air or settled on the grass, I can’t help but wonder how much cooler things are for them. They’re taking advantage of their noses, letting it all in, savouring and learning. Smelling in technicolour, in the finest detail, has allowed them to not only survive as a species, but to get more out of their existence.

Yes, this is just a metaphor. I don’t know if dogs can turn off their sense of smell the way humans can turn a blind eye to reason and logic (doggie free will is for another conversation). I do, however, know that just as dogs have been granted the gift of extreme smell, we’ve been allotted the ability to think deeply, and we choose to skim along the surface, and drive each other crazy, while depriving ourselves of many, many moments of clarity and creativity.

If we allowed ourselves to think the way a dog uses their nose, with complexity, depth and discernment, think of the ripple effect it might have. What if we chose to see our world in detail, to marvel at it at a granular level, to take the time to sort, analyze and digest it, small bite by small bite. What if we allowed ourselves to notice all the things that we ordinarily choose to miss, the diverse, the interesting, the useful, and the beautiful?

Kibble for thought.