Comment by andix
3 days ago
I have a friend who doesn't have a sense of smell since birth. It's more of a problem than one would think.
His diet is rather plain, and he doesn't enjoy a lot of food. It's mostly meat, fried things and sweets he enjoys. Most vegetables and low-fat dishes he just can't enjoy at all. Luckily he doesn't get a lot of pleasure from eating and that's what keeps him from getting obese.
It also gives him a lot of anxiety that he or his clothes smell bad. He often just can't assess it from other clues. He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes, but it's not by choice. It's driven by the fear of smelling bad and not realizing it.
It can also get dangerous in some situations, not being able to smell a gas leak, only noticing smoke once it got so thick it will hurt when breathing, and not being able to smell when food goes bad.
>He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes
Smell and taste seem to be the last two senses/modalities we can't really work with using technology. Vision (cameras) and sound (microphones) have existed for a long time but it's only within the last decade that they've become ubiquitous in the form of a smartphone, and only within the last 5 years that ML is good enough to work across them (ocr, stt).
But for some reason (maybe lack of easy commercial opportunities) we haven't even come close to making "artificial noses" to record raw input. Maybe as part of the push for "embodied humanoid AI" (e.g. Figure) we'll find a way to do that.
Two notes on this - one is that smell and taste are the earliest senses we have. The first thing organisms began to sense about their external environments were chemical gradients, and that’s in essence what smell and taste are doing.
The second is that what they’re doing is _fantastically_ complex from a physical standpoint compared to sight and vision - sight is the detection of photons of various wavelengths and energy levels; hearing is the detection of vibrations. Smell and taste are molecular docking problems: they are the detection and identification of the actual structures (or at least substructures) of molecules. The closest we have to that is mass spectrometry, which basically involves flinging molecules hard enough to break them and weighing the parts.
Both good points, thank you! I hadn't appreciated how complex it was, reframing it as something closer to spectometry makes the difficulty clearer.
Ironic, since they are the oldest senses. The very most primitive cells can do chemotaxis, which eventually evolved into the chemical senses. But it also means sensing chemicals instead of energy, and it's harder to replicate mechanically.
>He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day
tell him to use Dry Idea antiperspirant (I'd say unscented), the stuff blows anything else away. no need to thank me. (no I don't work there, long term user who ever now and then runs out and is reminded how good it is)
what's up with vegetables though? I love vegetables, but if I were asked what was the thing I least liked about them, I'd say "the smell"
> It can also get dangerous in some situations, not being able to smell a gas leak, only noticing smoke once it got so thick it will hurt when breathing
I can smell just fine but I still have carbon monoxide and smoke detectors in my house to alert me if I am asleep and there is a gas leak or fire.
I always wondered whether my poor sense of smell dictated my diet. I share your friend's food preferences.
I wonder how the anxiety developed, I would think they would not be self-aware given they cannot understand it, so maybe they were bullied as a kid by smelling bad once and it created traumatic memories for him as it's sort of an unexplainable thing to his nose.
I can't smell much at all. one time when i was 17 my friend told me i was kinda smelly (i had just exercised). I've been stressed about it since. the human brain can latch on to the oddest things
Even those of us with a good sense of smell often can't smell ourselves, so I don't think you're at too much of a disadvantage there
From embarrassing situations in the past.
I had loss of smell for 4 years after covid and developed similar fear. It is not because of bullying, but from constantly having "what if" you can't answer yourself.
What about drizzling the veg with some olive oil (or even lard), salt and a small pinch of sugar? This is what restaurants do to make veg more appealing (plus some acidity)
Better than subsisting on fried food and sweets - take the fatty and sweet element from that and apply to veg
My mother lost her sense of smell after surgery for nasal polyps in her teens. She was mortally afraid of fire breaking out in the night and not being able to smell it.
Maybe not reassuring at all: but we can't smell a lot while we are asleep. A bad smell won't wake us up. That's why fire alarms exist, noise (or bright light) does wake us up.
> A bad smell won't wake us up.
I've woken up at night to investigate weird smells. Maybe the smell didn't wake me up, or maybe it didn't wake me up quickly, but I smelled the smell as I was waking up and then did the find the vaguely burning smell game. Last one I remember was a neighbor's bonfire left going when they went to sleep inside.
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How does he react to electro magnetic stimulation of the nerve region?
My dad lost his sense of smell after having surgery for his meningioma. According to him he doesn’t even notice a reduction in the quality of his life. I asked if food tastes worse and he said he hadn’t really thought about it and no it doesn’t. It really is the least of the senses.
Having lost my sense of taste during a bout of covid I would say he’s absolutely the anomaly - or he only partially lost it. A complete loss of smell and taste is impossible to ignore. Imagine standing in the direct path of a bonfire and not noticing at all until your lungs start to hurt. You can’t not notice it.
I think people are different (also he only lost his sense of smell, not taste). It’s all about perspective. If you didn’t know that a lack of smell affects flavor you might not notice. It probably also helps that he is Asian and Asian food is significantly more flavorful.
When I had covid I noticed a difference in how food tasted but it was kinda irrelevant. Food still tasted very good. It might be genetic or something as well. For instance, I can have a double shot of expresso and go to sleep 30 minutes later.
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Brain surgery can leave you without the ability to detect something is missing.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia
Also Meningioma explained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meningioma
This was 15 years ago, but he seemed to have all his faculties in order. The major change we saw was for about 3 to 6 months after the surgery he would lose his temper at the slightest thing. He was basically impossible to live with and then all of that just went away and he went back to being very normal.