“Arithmetic By Smell”, 1894 (; similar):
It seems worth while to put a few simple experiments on record, which I made for my own satisfaction a few months ago, in order to assure myself that arithmetic may be performed by the sole medium of imaginary smells, just as by imaginary figures or sounds…Whenever the tubing is grasped by the hand, a whiff of scented air is forced through the nozzle; when the grasp is relaxed, fresh air enters through the nozzle and passing through the wool becomes quickly impregnated with scent. The apparatus is then ready to be used again. Whiffs of scented air may thus be sent out 4 or 3 times in moderately quick succession and be almost equally odorous throughout.
…Subtraction succeeded as well as addition. I did not go so far as to associate separate scents with the attitudes of mind severally appropriate to subtraction and addition, but determined by my ordinary mental processes which attitude to assume, before isolating myself in the world of scents…There was not the slightest difficulty in banishing all visual and auditory images from the mind, leaving nothing in the consciousness besides real or imaginary scents.
…A few experiments were made with taste. Salt, sugar, citric acid, and quinine seemed suitable for the purpose, and there appeared to be little difficulty in carrying on the experiments to a sufficient extent to show that arithmetic by taste was as feasible as arithmetic by smell.
[cf.: “Multiplying 10-digit numbers using Flickr: The power of recognition memory”, 2010, “Harnessing vision for computation”, 2008.]
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