Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett presents the reader with a bouquet of theories, facts, and emotional resonances about the most ignored sense, the sense of smell. After loosing her smell following a cold treated with an unregulated over-the-counter medication, garden writer Bonnie Blodgett embarked on a journey to learn all she could about this often forgotten, and in her case, entirely lost, sense.
The Primacy of Smell
Diving headfirst into the history of smell, Blodgett reports that smell is considered a primal sense, predating amphibians. Smell is linked directly to the limbic system, unlike sight and hearing, which are interpreted by the brain's logic centers. Smell is primal, both because it is a very old sense evolutionarily, and because it directly affects the emotions.
Blodgett, who experienced phantosmia, phantom smells, before experiencing amnosia, the inability to smell, found that her mind conjured up foul odors, despite having severely injured olfactory receptors. The importance of smell as a warning--the fish is rotten, the house is burning--manifested itself in the form of nauseating odors, all the more disturbing because of their lack of a physical cause.
Smell and Mental and Physical Diseases
As Blodgett discovered, the sense of smell is integral to enjoyment. Smell uniquely brings back memories, feelings, and context. To live without these associations made the author feel cut off and ungrounded, and resulted in depression.
Her own experience, and research, confirms that amnosia is related to both depression. The author reports it is also related to schizophrenia. Ironically, the author's phantosmia was treated with antidepressants which were effective in stopping the phantom odors, leaving Blodgett with no sense of smell at all. She continued using anti-depressants to treat her despair over her loss.
This well-researched work points out that disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's dementia, and Parkinson's disease often cause the loss of smell.
Pheromones
Diving into the fray, the author presents the fragmented and controversial arguments for and against pheromones in humans. While scent is known to mark humans, for example, using only their noses women can pick out t-shirts worn by their husbands, human chemicals designed by nature to subliminally lure the opposite sex are not proven to exist.
Yet, in the insect world, pheromones are a powerful tool in the arsenal of the survival of the fittest. Our own noses, with olfactory receptors that feed directly into the brain may well be responding to more than the nice smile and pretty eyes of our partners.
Cultivating Smell
Much of Blodgett's work is a treatise on the importance of smell and a mourning of it's loss, not only personally, but in the culture at large. She bemoans the rise of fragrance-free workplaces, and of works of literature that weave olfactory threads throughout the tapestry of the story. Literature, it seems, has been shedding references to smell over the last couple of centuries.
As a gardener, Blodgett had revealed in the odors of flowers, herbs, and fresh-cut grasses. As she mourns her loss, and learns about anosmia, the reader becomes more sensitive to odors--both pleasant and otherwise. This well-researched book is a gift; as is the forgotten sense of smell.
Source:
Blodgett, B. Remembering Smell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2010.
Gina Barrett Putt - Gina Barrett Putt works in housing, with experience in case management for elders and the mentally ill, and college and K-12 education.
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