I still don't have my sense of smell back after my traumatic brain injury and I probably never will. So, I'm learning what it is to live without it. First of all, let's discuss smell in relation to food. As we all have experienced when we had a head cold, not being able to smell deadens us to the flavors in food. All we can taste is what our tongue's taste buds tell us is in it: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory. We can't taste nuances in flavors, or detect spices, either. The flavor of the dish, which is the mixing up of all these different ingredients to get the distinctive taste of it, is absent. Food now tastes bland and I'm forced to enjoy it by its mouthfeel, temperature both thermally and chemically (i.e. hot peppers), whether it rests well with
me and the overall satisfaction it gives me.
But there is more to eating than flavor. Normally, smelling a food when it's cooking prepares us for eating by secreting digestive juices based upon what we've smelled. Without smelling the food beforehand, my body doesn't know what I'm going to eat and therefore my digestive juices lag behind. Eventually, the correct juices start flowing, but then I don't know when I'm full. If I don't stop eating before I'm full, I end up eating too much. Therefore, satiation lags behind, too.
Losing my sense of smell affects me in other ways I didn't fully appreciate until after I lost it. First of all, I've learned that the sense of smell helped me navigate by scent-tracking, like bloodhounds do. I'd sniff the air, recognize a smell, and could tell which direction it was coming from, which oriented me. Also, a smell would draw my attention to things I wouldn't ordinarily notice without it, like a newly cut lawn or the scent of meat cooking on a grill. Now, when I'm walking around an unfamiliar area, I have no scent trail to follow. I have to rely solely on visual and auditory cues to remind me of where I am in orientation to where I've been. Therefore, this grounding sense of smell underlying where I've been is missing and it's a lot harder to find my way back.
I've learned that the sense of smell also plays a role in perception. When we can't smell, we don't get into the depth of our surroundings. Universal smells based upon human activities such as the diesel exhaust or fireplace smoke, plants such as the sweet scent of jasmine or the cat-pee scent of junipers, animals such as wet dog, a rookery or decomposition, and other common smells overlay one another to form an invisible, particular smell landscape called a smellscape. Each environment has it's own smellscape, making an ocean shore smell different from a forest and a rural area smell different from a city. We subconsciously remember these invisible but powerful smellscapes, which evoke an emotional response. For example, if we stand next to the ocean, we can see the waves, hear them crashing, touch its water and feel the cool, humid breeze against our faces. But if we can't detect its smellscape, how can we be fully engulfed within the experience? Without my sense of smell, I feel almost like I'm not completely there.
Finally, I've learned that the sense of smell is strongly tied to memory. Before my fall, if I smelled the perfume my mother wore, a vegetable soup like my Grandma made, the smell of a baby's head, fresh paint or cigarette smoke, it would bring to mind the memories attached to those smells. But use it or lose it applies to the brain as well as the body. In time, I know I will forget some of those memories because I am not being reminded of them. I will also have more difficulty forming new ones because I can't detect the smells associated with them.
Because I can't smell anything, I don't feel like I'm living life as deeply as I would like. Instead, I'm living in a virtual reality!
