Free Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett

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,