"... that are readily available in my spice rack, and I pay greater attention to the fumes emanating from the boiling pots and pans. I now consider smell training to be an essential part of my routine. I find it to be pleasantly meditative, leaving me mentally grounded in much the same way as my daily yoga. And while I cannot say that I’ve noticed a huge leap in brainpower, I am optimistic that I am protecting my brain from future decline. This morning I made my espresso as normal and sniffed the cup hopefully. For the first time since I began my smell training, the aroma hit me hard. I couldn’t help but smile when I realised that I had, quite literally, learnt to wake up and smell the coffee, and I shall never take my nose for granted again."
I'm reading
"Wake up and smell the coffee — the new way to train your brain/Loss of smell can signal a decline in mental health. David Robson discovered how to improve it" (London Times).
The author is only 39, so his ability to revive his sense of smell is very different from mine. He had luck with one of those smell kits where you sniff at various essential oils — eucalyptus, lemon, rose, clove. Keep trying. Practice smelling. I've already done that. Imagine telling blind people to look harder and deaf people to listen closely. What if that worked?
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17 comments:
Yeah, AA, you're just not trying hard enough.
Years ago, my family was at a golf driving range. I was, as usual, either topping the ball or digging a hole every time. It so happened that a friend of my husband's was also at the range that day, and he stopped to watch my "technique." Then, in all seriousness, he said to me, " What you've gotta do is brush the grass."
I didn't quite hit him with my iron. Geez, John, thanks so much! I never thought about just controlling at what level my club head would be when it made contact.
It's passed into the family lexicon for any time someone advises one of us to do something (a) obvious (b) that we're clearly trying or have tried to do, and (c) cannot do simply by deciding.
Also: my mom lost most of her sense of smell a fell years ago; until my sister and I started questioning her about the timing and the "bad cold" she'd had just before, and pointing out that loss of sense of smell was a COVID thing, she just figured it was the same thing that happened to her Uncle Bernie (or one of the unks, who had no sense of smell in his waning years).
She says she can sometimes - sometimes - pick up the scent of, say, a food in the instant before she takes her first bite, but then it's gone. Most of the time, she says, she's just remembering what food smells (and therefore tastes) like. She's too thin for my liking.
Mansplaining.
Mental progression? Sensory regression, perhaps. What was it like in the womb environment, isolated from external stimuli?
Last week I noticed that something in the kitchen smelled weird. My husband could smell nothing. Finally I pinpointed it to behind the refrigerator. He pulled it out and we found a mouse mess behind. After cleaning it up, the smell was gone.
As I've mentioned before, when you have an acute sense of smell, the whole world mostly stinks. Flowers can be especially overpowering.
What if a study showed that an inability to appreciate and enjoy the differences in a sequence of sunrise pictures showed incipient Alzheimers? The study would be false because there's evidence that quite young people cannot see and appreciate such differences and that quite old people in state of slow decline can.
This might explain Biden’s sniffing the hair of young girls. Or not.
It's taken a while but my cat has finally gotten used to my dog using his balloon knot for smell training, which the dog finds an essential part of his routine and pleasantly meditative.
My sense of smell returned once I cut out 95% of ultraprocessed food plus started consuming homemade yogurt of organic grass fed whole milk fermented with three top brands of random control trial successfully tested probiotics with inulin as the food source. Oh, I also no longer need my asthma medicine I had been on since the late 1980's.
Whatever troubles you, keep working the problem. Even if you don't fix it, you'll be better off for the attempt.
Sensory is 100% mental. Everybody knows this. Hearing loss and loss of smelling are contributory to dementia. Failure to fire off neurons is functionally equivalent to not lifting weights and sarcopenia.
My mother lost her taste buds after a surgery.
I lost my sense of smell for a couple months. It turns out it was sinus infection. Doctor gave me methyl prednisone and antibiotics, and it was gone in 24 hours. Months of no taste or smell, just because going to the doctor was inconvenient.
It's funny how even with zero taste, I could enjoy eating, just because of the textures. Having no smell is scary though. You don't know if food is bad, if something is on fire, or your farts are noticeable. Dangerous stuff.
The mock orange and the privet are both in bloom in the garden right now. It's pretty intense.
Someone doesn't understand arrows of causality. If you lose your leg in a car accident, you lose 30 lbs or something. Does that mean if you gain 30 lbs you get your leg back?
The Coffin Cure - Alan E. Nourse
I've forgotten what the term is, but we once had a neighbor from South America that was the first woman to be officially certified to grade wines. With the advent over the past few decades of creating very nice, high-grade wines from everywhere (thanks to technology), she was in high demand. 'Industrial wines' she termed them. Anyway, I saw her challenged once to identify 10 wines at a party, and she got every single one right, the label, the wine, the year. She gave us a basic wine tasting lesson once, and I was very surprised at the methodology. By priming your tongue with flavors in advance, followed with some coaching, you can learn to discern the notes in a wine pretty quickly. It's an exercise of controlling the associations. I would never have thought this was something you could learn in just a session.
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