Remembering Smell (8 page)

A self-described hedonist, he'd been a fun-loving person with scores of friends before the accident. He was a hard-core womanizer and a passionate gourmand. Herz believes his death was the result of the disappearance of all that after he lost his sense of smell. Hutchence described his descent into melancholy as a kind of psychosis, a profound isolation, distance, unfamiliarity with a world he'd so greedily enjoyed when he could smell it. Even blindness would not have had such a pernicious effect on him. That his despair was not rational—it made no sense even to him—of course exacerbated the depression. None of it made sense. Had he lost his vision or hearing, the impairment would have changed him forever, he knew that. But that knowledge would have saved him from his otherworldly hell. Reason is a powerful therapeutic force. It gives a person tools, a plan, a project, which can lead to a sense of pride and accomplishment. Gone blind? Learn Braille. Practice walking with a white cane. Get a Seeing Eye dog. Harness the empathy of those around you and enhance your awareness of your other senses: touch, hearing, and smell.

To support her theory of Hutchence's death, Herz points to research showing that a species' ability to sense odor nuance is in inverse proportion to the species' odor acuity. Whether this implies an emotional component, an intellectual one, or both is unclear. But humans' unique gift of flavor perception, a highly sophisticated process, undoubtedly grew out of the same evolutionary forces as smell. Even without a connection to a high brain, an animal suffers when it can't smell. Herz tells of lab experiments in which rats whose olfactory bulbs had been surgically removed became listless and refused to eat. They seemed indifferent to toys and companions. They displayed "behavioral and physiological changes that are strikingly similar to those that occur in depressed people." As a witness for plaintiffs who seek damages for emotional distress due to smell dysfunction, Herz has met enough human anosmics to have become a passionate advocate for the smelling-impaired. She is their angel of mercy. Anosmia isn't the sort of disorder one would dream up to scam an insurance company. Much better to fake whiplash or slice off a toe.

Herz wrote that "the neurological interconnection between the sense of smell (olfaction) and emotion is uniquely intimate. The areas of the brain that process smell and emotion are as intertwined and codependent as any two regions in the brain could possibly be."

Rachel Herz's mentor at Brown University was the psychologist and smell expert Trygg Engen. He knew that just because smell operates subliminally did not mean that it lacked influence. A perceptive and compassionate scientist, Engen regarded any sort of smell trouble as potentially catastrophic to one's quality of life, because the sense of smell was like an idiot savant:

It is very sensitive, learns quickly, and forgets nothing, but it has no judgment about what ought to be remembered and what might as well be forgotten. This modus operandi will lead to many mistakes and false alarms. However, it ensures the identification of odors vital to the individual's physical and psychological well-being.

Among the beneficiaries of Trygg Engen's work and that of his successors, psychologists like Herz as well as cell biologists and other scientists newly interested in the primal sense, are people with brain disorders that alter their reality so profoundly they find themselves sinking into madness. Members of this group include schizophrenics, for whom smell dysfunction is a characteristic symptom.

Elizabeth Zierah had been anosmic for three years when, in 2008, she decided to talk about it online. A victim of a stroke in her early thirties, with a still-crippled left hand and a noticeable limp, she made an astonishing claim: "Without hesitation I can say that losing my sense of smell has been more traumatic than adapting to the disabling effects of the stroke." Zierah described more than just the pain of pleasures forever lost. Like Michael Hutchence, she felt detached from reality, as if she were adrift in time and space. And her depression seemed to be deepening.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wasn't writing about depression when he confided in his memoir
Speak, Memory,
"I do not believe in time." But depression does teach one how tenuous is the sensory convergence that keeps a person believing, intuitively and without question, in a concrete and well-integrated version of reality. When that faith is eroded by a sensory breakdown, the rebuilding process can take years.

As my days passed without smell, I lost faith in both clock and calendar. My life was a puzzle that had been shoved off a table and onto the floor. It lay in pieces. I could reassemble it—it would just take time, whatever that was. Each piece was small, unrecognizable, and insignificant, but like the individual odors that make up a smell, each was programmed to contribute something to the whole, something essential and precious that I'd misplaced but would recover, the way you can unexpectedly stumble on a lost necklace or misplaced keys. You believed the keys were gone for good when in fact they were right there, within your grasp. The keys always show up. The pleasure of routine would come back the way feeling comes back after you've sat on your haunches too long and your feet have fallen asleep.

And yet ... how do I measure the emotional cost when I realize I've tasted coffee for the last time? When I know I've taken my last stroll through the garden just to smell the fragrance of thyme that's released with every step and the roses that always entice first my nose and then my touch with their lurid perfume? When I realize I've smelled the last whiff of my grown-up daughter's drugstore-bought scent? (Never again will I suggest she tamp it down a bit because it makes my nose itch.)

What happens when I'm no l onger held captive by smells powerful enough to take me far away in time and space? To my kindergarten classroom (oilcloth and crayons). To the state fair (cotton candy and horse barns). To the North Woods, where I finally got to know my true self by getting in tune with nose-tickling lichens and liverworts, ferns and fungi, and the tall white pines and the long shoreline of Lake Superior, with its pebbled beaches, sculpted driftwood, and the seaweed that always reminded me of a mermaid's silk tresses, sending up its smell of unknowable realms below as it swished against the sun-dappled stones at the water's edge.

What happens when physical intimacy is oddly arid because I can't even smell my husband?

How is one supposed to feel about a disorder whose only symptom, once the fake smells give up, is no sensation at all?

O
NE MORNING
as the holidays loomed I awoke as usual in a vile stench and was (as usual) startled when the toothpaste set off a defensive dead-fish counterblast. My tongue tried to slither into the back of my mouth. Determined that Christmas would be business as usual, I made the annual holiday pilgrimage to the bakery across town that sells an anise-flavored Swedish rye bread and pastries to die for. The best part is lingering outside to admire the gingerbread village in the bakery window—all candy-c ane roofs and gumdrop doorknobs—while catching hints of the olfactory pleasures waiting inside every time a customer enters or departs in a cloud of warm, sweetened air.

A tinkling bell announced my arrival; this time I hadn't even glanced at the window before crossing the threshold. Inside the crowded store, my nose reacted with dismay. There was no mistaking that the better the actual smell, the worse its surrogate. Other notoriously stinky places flooded my consciousness—the old Waldorf paper plant that ground newspapers into pulp and was finally shut down because of its stench; the oil refinery that had burned to the ground, incinerated by its own disgusting smell; and the Landmark brewery, which smelled exactly like burning toast soaked in stale beer until its odor had the audacity to invade the "better" neighborhoods and caused such a stink that the brewery finally had to install filters.

As I instinctively raised my hand to cover my nose, the sweet strains of "The Little Drummer Boy" gently nudged my thoughts away from the salacious apricot Danish, flaky kolacky, and caramel pecan rolls to the petits fours. How pure they looked, their smooth icing topped with dainty pink flower buds. On impulse, I added two dozen of the chaste little cakes to my order. Simplicity is the essence of a petit four's taste as well as its appearance. Butter, sugar, eggs.

My tongue still worked. Maybe the pure, sweet taste of a petit four could slip by my nose. I left the store, lifted the lid of the box, and pulled one out, then licked the top. Smooth and, yes, sweet. No question about it. I let it melt in my mouth while I tried to conjure up the taste. Butter, sugar, eggs.

But something was throwing it off. Confused by phantom smells, my tongue couldn't think straight either. I quickly swallowed the rancid lump and left the rest of the petits fours alone, unmolested, their virginity intact. Christmas Eve would bring another onslaught of aromas twisted beyond deciphering. Candles, wine, the roast tenderloin I'd most likely leave on my plate (a treat for Mel). Even the evergreens heaped in the center of the table would reek.

Sweetened foods are the most tolerable when you can't smell, probably because sugar is the least ambiguous of tastes and utterly without flavor. It is also the likeliest to come in the form of smooth and soothing, reliably unambiguous textures. Yogurt, ice cream, applesauce, certain fruits ... petits fours.

To impress on her psychology students the relationship between taste and smell, Rachel Herz had them taste jellybeans with their eyes and their nostrils closed. Without being able to smell anything, the students found that the candies all tasted identical. No differentiating flavor. When the students unplugged their noses and popped the candies into their mouths—still no peeking—they were able to tell lemon from licorice, and bubble gum from grape.

Taste is said to be 90 percent smell—but only in humans. The secret to savoring, and why only humans do it, is flavor.
Taste,
then, is a misnomer. Some animals have lots of taste buds (and many different kinds), and some animals have none. Dogs can taste sugar but not salt. While humans can enjoy and even identify tens of thousands of
flavors,
we're able to detect only five
tastes.
Each taste has its own patch of tongue real estate—if the tongue were a residential lot, the bitter-taste taste buds would hang out in the backyard and the sour-taste ones in the shade on either side of the house. Salty and sweet tasters would be those more gregarious types clustered around the front gate, waving at complete strangers.

The taste buds depend on smell to make bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami worth much. (Umami is monosodium glutamate, or MSG, common in Asian food and often blamed for headaches by Americans. Some scientists now think that American brains are more likely reacting to its novelty rather than to anything innately allergenic or potentially harmful in the chemical itself.) Manufacturers of pet foods hype their flavorful doggy treats with the human consumer in mind. Obviously, no dog in its right mind is going to turn up its nose at a sweet or the remains of your dinner, although it's all the same to the dog if you had meat loaf or chicken tetrazzini. One olfactory expert put it this way: "When it comes to tracking the scent of a gazelle on the savannah, we can't compete with our hounds, but once we drag it back to the campfire we can sure season the hell out of it."

In humans those five basic tastes deliver the perfect gustatory package to complement the odorants rushing up the nose to the olfactory bulb. Psychologist Richard Stevenson called this associative learning. A couple of exposures to a sweet taste, and the nose quickly deems it sweet-smelling.

This also happens in reverse. When someone refers to the fishy taste of New England clam chowder, he's mostly reacting to its smell, a blend of cream and butter heavily seasoned with cooked onions and the smell of the sea. The tongue detects only the soup's sweet or salty sensations, as well as its warmth and the delightful feel in the mouth of slightly rubbery clams and soft, squishy potatoes. Neuroscientists now suspect that smell's tutorial role in tasting is facilitated by a synaptic interplay—a network of neurons speaking to one another. It's almost as if each of us has his or her own staff of expert chefs fiddling around in the brain, sipping, stirring, and spicing.

Chewing greatly enhances the flavor of food too, as some superintelligent caveman found out during the Pleistocene epoch. This would have been around fifteen thousand years ago. Mother Nature had done some plastic surgery to make the human mouth suitable for chewing tender (roasted) meats. Chewing made food more nutritious, easier to eat, and better-tasting even as it made human faces more refined—no more fanglike incisors and protruding jaws. Roast of rodent was just the beginning. Vegetables followed. These were roasted too, spiced with herbs, and blended into threshed, cleaned, and cooked rice, beans, and barleys, complex dishes inspired not by the taste buds but by the addition of the much more refined and discriminating sense of smell. The advent of farming added a huge array of new smells, from the enticing aroma of baking bread to boiled mush, butter, cheese, and alcohol.

It's not that other species lack the hardware—a dog's nose is enormous, and odors are just as accessible to canine brains as they are to humans'. It's a software problem that puts the pleasures of a fine Bordeaux out of Mel's reach. Imagine if you had to run your fancy new laptop on pre-Windows DOS. Or use a primitive word processor like TextEdit, which gives you a box to fill up with words and some rudimentary grammar tools, instead of the latest version of Microsoft Word, which corrects your spelling, keeps track of page numbers, red-flags your run-on sentences, and even lets you drop in footnotes.

Luckily for us, as neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd wrote in a 2006 article in
Nature,
"a notable share of this enlarged brain capacity is involved in flavor perception and behavioral responses to flavors." But like a complicated computer program, the human palate requires an investment in time and training to operate at its full capacity. In cooking too you have to learn the program. This process is both individual and cultural. With training, a person can learn to like just about any food, even raw fish.