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While many might consider smell to be one of our less vital senses, it is nonetheless an integral part of most people’s conscious experience, entwining with our memories, giving us warnings of nearby dangers and subtly shaping our subjective world at any given moment. Anosmia – named for the condition it explores – bounces between interviews with a wide range of people who either lost or were born without the ability to smell. Using vivid, odour-evoking visuals, the US filmmaker Jacob LaMendola cleverly delivers a nuanced look at the experience of smell by probing the minds of those without it.
Director: Jacob LaMendola
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
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Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes