Common Scents.

A few months ago, I mentioned the fact that I suffer from anosmia — a neurological condition that has essentially taken away my sense of smell. It happened after I suffered a brain injury, having been hit by a tow truck in 2003, in which my olfactory nerves were damaged. Before the accident, I didn’t even know you could lose your sense of smell. Since then, I’ve only heard of three famous anosmiacs that I’d recognize by name: Stevie Wonder, Michael Hutchence of INXS, and the British poet William Wordsworth. Learning to cope was a largely isolated and often depressing process.

Molly Birnbaum, a once-aspiring chef and food writer, chronicled her experiences with anosmia for the New York Times this weekend with what I’m tempted to call a vaguely maudlin narrative. Like me, Birnbaum lost her sense of smell after being hit by a car. Also like me, she moved to New York when she “no longer walked with a limp.” Past that, I have a hard time vouching for her story:

Before the accident, I had been doing prep work in the kitchen of a small bistro in Boston, training to become a chef. My nights were filled with pristine boxes of wild mushrooms, stacks of chocolate bars from Venezuela and carefully constructed plates of quail. I arrived home in the early morning hours smelling of chicken stock and butter. I loved it.

But without the ability to smell, taste is a mere whisper. After the accident, my taste buds registered salty, sweet, bitter and sour. But there was nothing more. While my fractured pelvis and torn knee ligaments eventually healed, milk remained a viscous liquid, steak a slimy rubber, and ice cream was little more than freezing.

I found it interesting that the words she used echoed a Wikipedia article on Ageusia, the loss of taste:

It is sometimes confused for anosmia — a loss of the sense of smell. Because the tongue can only indicate texture and differentiate between sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami most of what is perceived as the sense of taste is actually derived from smell.

In the first year of my recovery, I regularly visited both a neurologist and neuropsychologist who both disputed this claim. They told me that smell and taste, although related, are essentially exclusive. If anything, my neuropsychologist told me, smell is more integrated with memory.

In my experience, I’ve found this to be true. I have not lost my love of food; in fact, I feel like my appreciation for flavor combinations have been heightened. Milk does not taste like a “viscous liquid” to me and ice cream is certainly more than just “freezing.” Similarly, a good wine is more than tasting the acids, a memorable dessert is more than simply sweet, and french fries do not taste like salty nothing-sticks.

I understand the frustration of an anosmiac because I am one. I miss the smell of clean laundry or fresh bread. It actually hurts to think I’ve been in a relationship with the same man for three years and have no idea what he smells like. I’m frightened by the idea that I might not be able to smell a fire in my apartment building. But when I read Birnbaum’s account of an anosmiac in New York, I became despondent for another reason entirely:

Without the aroma of car exhaust, hot dogs or coffee, the city was a blank slate. Nothing was unbearable and nothing was especially beguiling. Penn Station’s public restroom smelled the same as Jacques Torres’s chocolate shop on Hudson Street. I knew that New York possessed a further level of meaning, but I had no access to it, and I worked hard to ignore what I could not detect.

It made me sad to think that, along with her sense of smell, Birnbaum also lost her imagination.