Smell is the only sense that reaches emotion and memory before it reaches language, and it never switches off — every one of the roughly twenty thousand breaths we take each day carries chemical information.

But most of the volatiles that shaped that system were never addressed to us: they are a plant's defensive and signaling chemistry, evolved to warn, repel, and recruit, and we inherited the receivers without the vocabulary. We are also emitters, our own chemistry read by every room we enter, which makes belonging less a metaphor than a description of what moves through the air between people.

“The Air Is Not Neutral” examines what happens to emotion, memory, and the sense of self when we live inside an engineered air that is chemically loud and informationally silent, and what shifts when we start reading the air instead of decorating it--asking not what to add to a space, but what is already being communicated in it, and by whom.

This presentation is free, by advance registration here

After this session, you'll stop thinking of scent as something added to a space and start seeing the air as something already communicating — with a sender, a receiver, and a message you're part of whether or not you notice.

This session is presented by Tammy Davis, MCN. Tammy has spent nearly four decades working at the intersection of pharmacology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and essential oil chemistry. She serves as a peer reviewer for Taylor & Francis pharmacology journals and teaches continuing education courses at the University of New Mexico and Santa Fe Community College. She is the founder of Aromagenomics, where her work centers on constituent-level chemistry and biochemical individuality — the principle that the same molecule produces materially different effects in different people. She is the author of The Scent of Enough and of the forthcoming seven-volume A Constituent-Based Guide to Essential Oils: Species, Chemotypes, and Biochemical Individuality, a reference work cataloguing essential oils by their chemical constituents rather than by plant name. She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.