REMEMBERING SMELL
A Memoir of Losing—and Discovering—the Primal Sense
In the fall of 2005, my nose stopped working. I'd inhaled a zinc-based gel called Zicam to prevent a cold. The cold was unfazed and I spent a week stuffed up and miserable. A week later I noticed a funny smell. Soon I was overwhelmed by unaccountable odors, unfortunately all of them vile.
Was I going mad? An ear, nose, throat specialist knew immediately that the odors were olfactory hallucinations. I wasn’t making them up—my brain was. He prescribed an old-fashioned antidepressant that would "trick" my brain into letting up on the odiferous onslaught of burning flesh, rotting fish, feces, and the like.
Sure enough it worked. One morning I awoke with a clear head. I couldn't smell a thing.
Now I was faced with an entirely new problem: anosmia. Imagine a world devoid of scent. No lilacs perfuming the air in spring. No telltale smoky smell when the house is on fire. No hint that dinner’s ready. No taste of dinner either. Taste is ninety percent smell. When you’re anosmic, food is fuel. Would my nose get well? Only time would tell.
My doctor suggested I not get my hopes up. Zicam had severely damaged the olfactory receptors. While olfactory cells do regenerate sometimes, it takes months or even years. Lacking any knowledge of science, or much discernible talent in that direction, I plunged headlong into the study of biology and genetics.
How wonderful it would be to understand the brain. Not just the human brain but brains of other species to whom smell is critical not just to happiness but survival, from dogs to mice to giant lizards whose superbly sensitive noses mark territory and stalk prey.
Focusing on what scientists call “the underlying logic” of smell allowed me to put my emotions on the shelf, if only for an hour or two, and think about something other than my mounting dread. I felt like a space-walking astronaut whose lifeline is severed. I knew that most blind and deaf people come to terms with their disabilities. But who loses their sense of smell? No one I knew. Can a person live peacefully in this world without smelling it?
Smell dysfunction is indeed rare, striking less than five percent of the population. It’s usually caused by a nasal infection or a head injury. Even those who take their noses for granted report suffering from profound sadness when suddenly deprived of smell. Smell is unique among our senses in that odors are processed in the ancient limbic system—even the Komodo has a limbic system—home of fear and long-term memory. Only an odor can trigger childhood memories, restoring them in riveting detail. Images and sounds can’t.
The famed geneticist and Nobel laureate Richard Axel, who found the genes for smell in 1991, calls smell the primal sense. Smell is the oldest sensory system and thus the most deeply embedded in our psyches. This will surprise people who assume that vision comes first, then hearing. But a new paradigm has taken hold in biology owing to the relatively recent discovery that all species share the same genetic machinery. I’m talking about salamanders, worms, and fruit flies. Solving the mysteries of identity and consciousness may come through experiments on simple species with powerful smell brains.
Remembering Smell segues from basic genetics to the biology that drives food and appetite, sex and love. It offers a cultural history of smell, chapters on language and literature, and the latest research on illnesses caused by inhaled substances, not just cold remedies but bacteria, air pollutants, cleaning products, and anything else that enters the brain through the nasal passages. Such substances are now believed to play a role in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological disorders, as well as cancers and some infectious diseases.
Does the book have a happy ending? Am I going to tell?
Remembering Smell will be published in June 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
