I have this problem myself and would love a cure, but there is no way I would accept an implant in my head to solve this problem. We're told this device would be analogous to the cochlear implants that give people with deafness a way to have something like hearing:
Hearing through a cochlear implant is different from normal hearing and takes time to learn or relearn. However, it allows many people to recognize warning signals, understand other sounds in the environment, and understand speech in person or over the telephone.
Why would you want something like that to replace smelling — want it enough to have something surgically implanted within your skull? The WaPo article talks about an anosmia patient who misses nostalgic smells like Christmas tree, but I doubt that kind of subtlety is coming.
If you want to help me sense dangers like fire and smellable toxins, just invent a wearable device — a wristband — that gives off an alert that I can hear/see/feel. I don't need some kind of fake smell-like sense intruding into my natural experience of the world.
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If it helps more voters smell bullshit I’m all for it.
AA, I wish you success in this area no matter your choice.
Not to criticize your rejection, but if I lost one of my senses, I think I would accept an implant to enable even a remote facsimile of my lost sense.
It is all just chemistry - ants "smell" their environment with more details than humans, using receptor sites for various chemicals. I'm not saying to get a trained ant to smell things for you. But that would be pretty cool.
Grant money, with a chance of drug patents, with the possibility of becoming an "expert".
"If you want to help me sense dangers like fire and smellable toxins, just invent a wearable device — a wristband — that gives off an alert that I can hear/see/feel."
I'll bet Apple is already working on this for a future Apple Watch.
Rush Limbaugh did his work with a cochlear implant for 20 years, which is incredible to think about.
Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.
A device like this would make more women and children vulnerable to Dutch Oven attacks.
Something to think about.
I have a friend with cochlear implants, but she was hearing impaired her whole life. She said it was remarkable to learn that her children made noise as they ran down the hall to her room. I found that beautiful, but it would be different to know what the original sound was and to recognize the facsimile all the time.
But coffee.....
I probably wouldn't go for implant were I to lose my sense of smell, but I don't really know what not having one is like, so I can't be sure I wouldn't go for it.
To regain sight or hearing, though, I would certainly give it a go.
Covid has brought attention to anosmia. Good. The first attempt at an aid may be clumsy, but they'll keep trying now. What if they invent a device for everyone that lets us turn *off smells sometimes? That would be so great.
Hmm. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
Think of it like cataract surgery.
Implants are scary. I've spent the last month coming to terms with a potential hip replacement. What's worked for me has been a process of seeking out people who have done the procedure and getting a realistic sense of costs and benefits.
For anosmia, let others be the guinea pigs, and learn from their experience.
It's hoped that technology will be able to replicate a dog's acute sense of smell with an "e-nose" or "robotic nose," and prototypes have already been developed. I'd think it would be easier to develop a smell detecting robot -- even one much better than our own noses -- than it would be to give the sense of smell back to those who have lost it.
But smell was always one of my favorite senses. It's the George or Ringo of our Fab Five. I always loved the smells exhibit at the science museum. Vanilla, mmmmmm ...
Tycho Brahe was anostic in an even more dramatic way, and may also have pined for the nosetalgic smell of Christmas trees.
I can only speak for myself, but the stench of the Biden Administration and their bureaucracy is making this voter clench.
If you want to help me sense dangers like fire and smellable toxins, just invent a wearable device — a wristband — that gives off an alert that I can hear/see/feel. I don't need some kind of fake smell-like sense intruding into my natural experience of the world.
Bound to happen. Some lab geek making $50,000.00 a year. Saving thousands of lives and making the world a better place.
Gets a certificate for job well done and remains anonymous, while athletes and entertainers rake in tens of millions a year.
"If you want to help me sense dangers like fire and smellable toxins, just invent a wearable device — a wristband — that gives off an alert that I can hear/see/feel. I don't need some kind of fake smell-like sense intruding into my natural experience of the world."
I have an unpleasant revelation for the author, here: Everything about your senses is fake. The only thing that makes you think that it's a "natural experience" is that you're accustomed to what they've been telling you.
End of the day, all any of us are would be a sloppy ghost dwelling on a substrate of soluble fats, ephemeral as all hell. That "reality" you crave so much? It's more accurately a shadow-puppet, thrown up on the cave wall of your life, just like Plato postulated. You can't really trust a damn thing your senses tell you, because it's all analog, all the time, and they're all relying on these really crappy half-ass tools that evolution has miraculously managed to equip us with. Most of which are utter shiite, unfit for purpose at their jobs... But, just good enough to get us through life, enabling our survival.
Sad, but true reality. The "artificial" bit is purely a delusion; you want to smell something? It really doesn't exist, that scent, except as an artifact of your past experiences with what that set of chemicals does to the substrate of receptor cells in your vomeronasal passages. As such, the "experience" would be no different if you were using something based on someone else tricking some sand into doing the work for you. In the end, it's all signals perceived and processed on some really dodgy squishy-ware that's got millions of years of accumulated kludges going for it, and jack-sh*t for real fidelity to what is actually going on in the chemical soup you're surrounded with.
In other words, it's all a bodge; your "natural senses" aren't all that, and if you did manage to replace them with something else, you'd soon anthropomorphize the something else into something "noble" and "humane".
At the present state of the art, I'm pretty sure I'd eschew the man-made replacement myself, but I've no illusions whatsoever that the crapfest we've put together through evolution is actually telling the spark within that is my sentient identity anything even remotely close to what is really going on out there. Seriously... When you get down to it, most of our sensorium is pretty much in the same class as a potato clock sat next to fine Swiss chronometer at the science fair. The really miraculous thing is how much signal we manage to tease out of the background noise of our environment... Most of which is actually taking place on the squidgy bits between our ears, and which represents rather more "processing" than "reality".
"I have an unpleasant revelation for the author, here: Everything about your senses is fake."
I'm struggling to picture what it would take for you to deem the experience as "real".
I second Wilber @ 6:42
As a recipient of a cochlear implant who went deaf at about age 12 I have to say that it is a miracle for me. No, it isn't a perfect replication of the hearing I had at age 12, but compared to what I had before the implant is night and day. I am hearing things that I haven't heard for 50 years.
As far as an implant to fix the loss of smell... I'd likely do the same as I did with my implants, wait until I can't function without the implant and then bite the bullet and get it done. Note that loss of smell doesn't prevent you from being able to communicate with others or function in a social context... well, maybe if you didn't wash often enough it could be a problem.
As for warning devices... they are still pretty clunky - I'm thinking of what the gas company uses to detect leaks. These aren't things that you can put on a pair of eyeglasses. Also, the sensitivity of these things aren't up to what some folks can manage. My wife swore we had a gas leak - but the handheld devices couldn't find it. They brought in a more sensitive one (suitcase sized) and finally agreed that there was a leak. Then these things don't have the ability to detect the heady aromas of sugar cookies, baking bread, pot roast cooking, fresh mint, etc.
So... as others said above, I doubt that the current state of the art will pass the smell test.
"I'm struggling to picture what it would take for you to deem the [any?] experience as 'real'."
Me too. The argument seems overdetermined and reductionist.
That hot coffee I spilled on my crotch in the drive-thru was a more convincing reality than a critique of what our senses aren't good at.
Ever since I first noticed the Prof's confession of anosmia, and heard her expound on how she tried 'not to give men ideas,' I've wondered if a problem like that doesn't solve itself?
One of my old friends married a stunningly beautiful woman who may have been anosmic--after I had backed off, for that and other reasons.
My wife has an acoustic neuroma and tinnitus. It stinks.
Obviously you know more about this than I do, but I would think the greatest danger from loss of smell would not be from toxins, but from the reduced ability to identify something wrong with your food.
"something wrong with your food"
"toxins" was intended to include a lot, including something wrong with the food
Original Mike said:
"I'm struggling to picture what it would take for you to deem the experience as "real"."
Just so you know... That 'whoosh' noise you were hearing as you read that? That was the point flying right over your head.
All of your senses are equally 'fake', in that what they're providing to your mind are imperfect approximations of the reality around you. You only perceive a very limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum because the rods and cones in your eyes that respond to them were evolved (or, alternatively, designed...) to pick up only that part of the spectrum which was relevant to the survival of your ancestors. There's rather more wave particle function out there than just the "visible light" spectrum you're used to using.
As such, it's a fallacy to think that any of it is at all "natural" or "unnatural", no matter what instrumentation you use to project that data onto the screen of your awareness.
The whole thing is an artifact of your mind's processing it, not the sense-organs. If you ever doubt that, pick up a pair of those glasses that reverse what your eyes see, wear them for a bit, and then note how your mind eventually processes that data to better reflect the nature of what you're seeing for your use in navigating the outside world.
No matter how you slice it, that which is "you" is basically a lump of flabby fats piloting a calcium skeleton sheathed in protoplasm. Ain't nothing "natural" or "unnatural" about any of it all, just the conceit that any of the phenomenon is at all special or unusual.
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