People often ask me what it’s like not being able to smell.
The honest answer is:
I haven’t the faintest idea.
If that sounds odd, then consider this: I’ve never experienced life with a sense of smell, so how can I possibly say what life is like without it?
To me, smell occupies roughly the same category as telepathy, X-ray vision, and flying.
I understand the theory.
I simply have no frame of reference for the experience.
What Exactly Is Congenital Anosmia?
Put simply, anosmia is the lack of a sense of smell.
Anosmia is to smell what blindness is to sight, or deafness is to hearing.
Congenital means I was born this way.
I didn’t lose my sense of smell later in life.
I never had it in the first place.
Technically, anosmia is the complete absence of smell. There is actually a spectrum of smell-related conditions, of which anosmia is just one.
Anosmia
The complete absence of any sense of smell.
Hyposmia
A reduced sense of smell. Think of it as turning the detection volume down.
Phantosmia
Smelling things that aren’t there.
I hear this one can be pretty awful for sufferers.
My brain obviously never generates imaginary smells. It has enough trouble detecting real ones.
Parosmia
Distorted smells.
Coffee may smell like burning rubber. Perfume may smell acrid or unpleasant.
Unfortunately, following COVID, cases of parosmia, hyposmia, and anosmia all became significantly more common.
So now you know what the various smell disorders are.
How is congenital anosmia different?
You Can’t Miss What You Never Had
Well, I’ve never had a sense of smell.
Never experienced what smell is.
To me, the sense of smell is effectively a fictional experience.
Someone who acquires anosmia later in life, through illness, infection, head trauma, tumours, or simply old age, experiences a genuine sense of loss.
They remember smell.
They miss smell.
They know what coffee smelled like.
Freshly baked bread.
Cut grass.
Rain.
Those memories remain even after the sense itself has gone.
In some ways, being born without a sense of smell is easier.
That may sound strange, but it really doesn’t bother me.
That’s not to say it isn’t serious.
Depression among people who lose their sense of smell later in life is sadly quite common.
I do not envy them their memories.
People often ask whether I feel I’ve missed out.
It’s a bit like asking how I cope with losing £100 billion on the stock market.
I haven’t lost £100 billion on the stock market.
I never had £100 billion on the stock market.
I’m aware that both smell and £100 billion exist.
My emotional relationship with either is somewhat limited by their complete absence from my life.
Smell as a Superpower
I’ll tell someone I’m anosmic and can’t smell, and invariably I get variations of the same conversation.
“What? You can’t smell coffee?”
“No.”
“What about burnt toast?”
“No.”
“What about aftershave?”
“No.”
At this point the conversation starts descending into that famous scene from BBC’s Red Dwarf.
“Everybody’s dead, Dave.”
“What, Captain Hollister?”
“Everybody’s dead, Dave.”
“What, Peterson?”
“Everybody’s dead, Dave.”
No.
I can’t smell coffee.
I can’t smell toast.
I can’t smell aftershave.
I can’t smell anything.
Funny as it is, it becomes a little tiring after the hundredth repetition.
These days, when someone asks:
“So you can’t smell roses?”
I sometimes reply:
“Can you see through walls?”
Both questions are equally unhelpful to understanding.
I then explain that I know smell exists and I know Superman can see through walls.
I understand the theory.
I simply don’t, and never will, understand the experience itself.
I understand smell intellectually in much the same way I understand quantum mechanics.
I accept that it exists.
I can even comprehend some of the details of the process.
Beyond that, things become rather fuzzy.
Things People Forget Smell Does
Once people understand that I can’t smell, I occasionally get this sort of response:
“Ooh, lucky you. You’ll never have to experience a hot, sweaty Tube train.”
I usually have rather less patience with this one.
My response is generally something along the lines of:
“And blind people never have to experience what passes for modern art these days.”
Smell is an important sense.
Not only is it heavily linked to flavour, but it also contributes significantly to memory and environmental awareness.
Taste itself is largely handled by the tongue and remains unaffected. We can detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami flavours, as well as sensations like the cooling effect of menthol and the burning sensation of capsaicin.
Smell, however, contributes enormously to the richness and complexity of flavour.
It’s also closely connected to memory.
The olfactory bulb has direct connections to parts of the brain involved in emotion and memory, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus.
There’s a reason certain smells can instantly transport people back to childhood and why senses are important in laying down new memories.
My memories simply use different triggers.
Smell also provides environmental awareness.
It helps detect danger.
It warns of fires, gas leaks, spoiled food and other hazards.
I’ve had so many cases of food poisoning over my lifetime that I’ve genuinely lost count.
So yes, there are disadvantages.
Detecting spoiled food.
Detecting smoke.
Detecting gas leaks.
These are all things I have to think about differently.
That said, there are advantages too.
I grew up on a dairy farm.
Without going into too much detail, I’m sure you can imagine at least some of them.
Summing Up
Do I wish I could smell?
Of course.
Curiosity alone would make it worthwhile.
I’d love to know what coffee smells like.
Or petrichor after rain.
Or my wife’s perfume.
Or whether everybody has been telling the truth about bacon all these years.
But congenital anosmia isn’t really a story about loss.
You can’t lose something you never had.
It’s simply a different way of experiencing the world.
Besides, the only thing I know for certain that stinks is my sense of humour.
