A typical nose, the sticky-out bit of the face part (photo by lightwavemedia)
I have, as many who know me can attest, a rudimentary, almost vestigial sense of smell. I’ve always been this way. I can detect really strong smells, like bleach, but for the most part I’m all but nose-blind.
So it came to pass last Friday that I headed home from Lenscrafters, where I’d just picked up a new pair of glasses to cope with the more ordinary sort of blindness. This being Portland, and March, Portland did what it does in March and started to rain.
This isn’t new. I’ve lived in Florida for decades, where it rains all the time, and now live in Portland, where it rains all the time but not as hard. However, on this particular day, something most peculiar happened.
Midway home, rain started falling. That’s not the unusual bit. The unusual bit was the smell. The heavens opened up and for a few brief, glorious hours, I could smell…everything.
Imagine you’re born blind. Imagine that you go to a nightclub one day, and whilst you’re there dancing to the beat of music, abruptly and without warning, you can see. But not just see, like, vague colors and shapes, but something like this…
Everything had a smell. The storm drain I stepped over had a smell. The cars driving by had a smell. People! People have a smell, my God! Who knew? A dude walked past me eating gummy bears and I could smell them! Half the thing I smelled I couldn’t identify, nor figure out where the smell was coming from.
Like our hypothetical blind person granted sight in the middle of a goth club dance floor, I was a bit overwhelmed. You have to understand, in my five-plus decades of life I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.
It lasted for five hours or so after I got home (it took half that much time to figure out the cloud of scent that seemed to follow me around everywhere was my laundry detergent, which I’d always assumed was unscented), then slowly faded. I woke on Saturday back in my normal state of nearly complete nose-blindness.
The whole thing was weird and freaky and I do not understand it, like, at all. (According to the Internet, a particularly acute sense of smell is called “hyperosmia,” and can be caused by a brain tumor, because we learn from reading Dr. Google that everything is caused by a tumor.)
For one brief, shining moment, an entire sense I’ve never had before opened up, then closed again. Which is a little sad. It’s one thing to live your life without having a particular sense; it’s quite another to have it and then lose it.
As a psychologist, my first thought was dissociation. Not brain tumour, like Dr. Google. Dissociation just means that your brain has dis-associated your sense of smell for some reason, usually because smell has been associated with something traumatic in your past. I’ve seen clients with C-PTSD who had a sense of smell which could switch off and on again, depending on what we were dealing with. Often quite dramatically.
I truly hope you smelled petrichor, probably the most beautiful smell in the world. Perhaps you will have this experience again soon.
Be thankful you didn’t have your hyperosmia when you were waiting in line for the portajohn at the RenFair!
If you aren’t already taking CoQ10, it’s something I recommend. Why? Because after a few weeks of taking it (for its fairly well established cardio benefits) I noticed my sense of smell had noticeably improved. Things like potatoes, that I thought had no aroma/taste of their own, and were just a vehicle for gravy, cheese or ketchup, suddenly had their own flavor.
I had a similar experience. I’m a musician and I’ve always been jealous of people with perfect pitch. I know that perfect pitch is acquired in the first 6 months of life and can’t be acquired later. In fact, people with perfect pitch often lose it in their forties.
But…. something freaky happened to me. Around age 45, for 1 week I had perfect pitch. I first noticed it when I heard a cat meowing and I could instantly tell that it was the exact same note as the opening note played on guitar in Marvin Gaye’s song “Let’s get it on.” It was bizzare. I checked a recording against the note that the cat had made and it was identical. I then started working out songs by ear and I could instantly tell what key they were in and what the notes were. I could also feel a strange “hot” feeling in my brain as though I’d opened an extra processing lane that had never been used before.
A week later this ability faded. I still have a good ear for meodies and chords and can work out songs quickly but I have to search for the starter note again just like I used to. It’s like I got a glimpse of having Mozart’s brain for a week and then went back to being a normal idiot. It’s reminiscent of that book “Flowers for Algernon.”
Someday I hope neurologists can figure out how to trigger these ephemeral neurological capbilities and make them stick!