6/18/09 – "Sense of Smell?...I never gave it a thought. Until I lost it"

New York N.Y. June 17th 2009.  “Sense of smell? ... I never gave it a thought. You don't normally give it a thought. But when I lost it - it was like being struck blind. Life lost a lot of its savour - one doesn't realize how much "savour" is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring - maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer..." (from: Sacks O., 1985, The dog beneath the skin. In: The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Summit Books / Schuster & Schuster Inc., New York)

A rose by any other name may not smell as sweet if you simply can’t smell it.  We never think our sense of smell is particularly important to our quality of life, until something happens and we loose it.  The sense of smell is in the news right now citing people who have lost theirs and realize just how diminished their quality of life is without it.  

Without consciously being aware of it, we smell every time we take a breath:
other people, newspapers, books, the city, the spring air, food and of course fragrances in all forms. The Sense of Smell Institute, the research and education division of The Fragrance Foundation, is a leading resource for understanding this least understood of our five senses.  The sense of smell affects every facet of our lives. Even our sex lives!  In her book, The Scent of Desire, Rachel Herz, an expert on the psychology of smell, looks at the role of scent in sexual attraction, based on years of research.  “Body chemistry plays a large role in terms of whom we are sexually attracted to and our noses speak loudly to our souls”, she says.
Drs. Thomas Hummel and Steven Nordin of the Smell and Taste Clinic at the University of Dresden Medical School recently completed a white paper for the Sense of Smell Institute entitled “Quality of life in olfactory dysfunction,” that provides a comprehensive review of the recent research on the causes of the loss of the sense of smell and its effect of quality on life.
In it they note that, “loss of olfactory function is frequent. While it frequently goes undetected in most of these patients, and almost all of them continue their social and professional activities, it may severely alter the quality of life of these people.” Problems typically reported are primarily in the areas of safety and eating, but olfactory loss can also produce a feeling of insecurity (for example, as one’s own body odors are no longer perceived).
So while most of us may think the sense of smell is the least important of our five senses, research proves just the opposite:

The sense of smell plays a vital role in our sense of well-being and quality of life. The sense of smell brings us into harmony with nature, warns us of dangers and sharpens our awareness of other people, places and things. It helps us to respond to those we meet, can influence our mood, how long we stay in a room, who we talk to and who we want to see again.

The average human being is able to recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. Our sense of smell is so powerful that when you smell skunk, you are smelling 0.000,000,000,000,071 of an ounce of scent. Dogs have about 200 million olfactory receptors. That is about 20 times the number of receptors that humans have.

It is important to understand that throughout every day and night of our lives we smell a wide variety of odors without being aware of them at all.
We go about our activities, breathing in and out, as an infinite number of chemical molecules interact subliminally with our odor receptors. Only when an odor irritates or pleases us or acts as a sudden reminder of the past do we pause to take notice.

You can find a wealth of information about the sense of smell and the vital role it plays in our quality of life by visiting www.senseofsmell.org

return to Press Room >