Similarly, anosmia, the inability to smell, can have extremely negative impacts. Parosmia can also impair daily life, causing people to avoid eating and anything that triggers unpleasant smells. Parosmia can lead to a loss of identity, as people no longer feel like they are living their own life.
Parosmia is when smells are distorted, like coffee smelling like rotting garbage. Since we often aren’t consciously aware of what we’re smelling, people mistakenly conflate that with smell being unimportant.īut, for people whose sense of smell is altered, the value of smell can’t be overstated. Certain smells that we’ve experienced hundreds of times before - like our bedroom or car - our brain has deemed as safe and we no longer consciously process these smells in a phenomenon known as “nose-blindness.” Other times, we become so bombarded by different smells that we can no longer distinguish any of the smells. Part of the reason for this lack of appreciation for smell is that although we process smell almost instantly, smell often doesn’t pass through the conscious part of our brain. These results weren’t limited to just adults - in a 2011 survey, 53% of young people (ages 16-22) would rather lose their sense of smell than their technological devices. In a 2019 survey of adults, smell was the sense that people would be most willing to lose. However, most people are unaware of this link between smell and memory because most people tend to undervalue smell as a whole. Often, these memories go back many years, sometimes all the way back to early childhood in this aspect, smell related memories diverge from typical memory patterns, as most people tend to suffer from a period of pre-adolescent amnesia where most memories before adolescence tend to be inaccessible. As a result of this, smell and memory often become intertwined, with each person having their own unique smell print - the specific memory that they have attached to a smell. The regions of the brain that are involved with olfaction are connected to the memory and emotion portions of the brain.
Smelling is an incredibly quick process: in just two synapses, smell travels to the highest region of the brain.
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