Smelling (originally posted as a comment to another post)

[fuzzyjay]

I am practically "legally blind" when it comes to scent. Anosmic? I think that's the word.

Once when I was in Boston I went to the Science Museum with my brother. The museum had an exhibit on the sense of smell, with different places to sit where you could open compartments and sniff their contents. The substances within were carefully chosen to highlight genetic differences in the ability to smell.

I was unable to perceive the odor of most of those test substances. My brother could.

Maybe this is why I don't suffer when I smell the odor of a skunk? I think it unpleasant, but it also has some good associations for me. It signifies springtime, which in Connecticut was the time of the emergence of that endothermic plant the skunk cabbage.

Comments

[rootbeer1.livejournal.com]

I could barely smell at all until I had my septum straightened in 2001. Even now, my sense of smell is fairly poor ... for example, qbear could be upstairs and still easily tell what I was cooking in the oven, whereas I could have the oven door open and be inhaling deeply, and still be clueless.

[fuzzyjay.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There may be something there. I was perpetually stuffed-up as a kid, to the point where I didn't know it was abnormal to mouth-breathe. Perhaps all that lost smell experience has consequences in later life.