• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 938 0

for example, perceives a smell when none is there. These olfactory hallucinations can be vague (“a chemical smell”) or quite specific (one patient said, “It reminds me of a flower I smelled in Samoa”). Phantosmia is a tricky diagnosis for a doctor to make: the hallucinated smell comes and goes and may not occur in the course of an office visit. The physician must first rule out all possible organic sources for the weird smell, especially sinus or gum disease. The physical causes of phantosmia are diverse and include seizure, migraine, and brain tumor. When a real odor gives rise to a distorted perception, the condition is called parosmia. The distortions in such cases are almost always unpleasant; patients say things smell foul, rotten, or burned. Such was the case of a sixty-year old woman who awoke one morning to find that every odor smelled like burnt toast. Eleven years later, despite treatment with antibiotics, antivirals, vitamins, beta-blockers, anticonvulsants, and zinc sulfate, her condition was unchanged. Most parosmics can tell you which smells are distorted; the most common are gasoline, tobacco, coffee, perfumes, fruits (mainly citrus and melon), and chocolate. Parosmia almost always occurs after an upper-respiratory-tract infection or head trauma, where smell function is reduced but not completely gone. This leads researchers to speculate that parosmia is an “incorrect rewiring” of the connections among regenerating nerve cells following damage to the olfactory system. Among smell pathologies, the most appalling is cacosmia, in which everything smells like shit.

In Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel The Simulacra (1964), there is a character named Richard Kongrosian, a psionic pianist who plays the instrument telekinetically. He also has a history of mental instability. An annoying advertisement triggers in Kongrosian the delusion that he has a bad body odor. He becomes obsessed with BO and washes compulsively, but in vain; the smell lingers. His ability to play the piano from a distance notwithstanding, Kongrosian is a poster child for a real-life psychiatric disorder known as olfactory reference syndrome, which is characterized by persistent hallucinations of body malodor.

IT PROBABLY COMES as no surprise that men and women differ in smell ability. This has been confirmed many times with a variety of test methods and in cultures around the world. Women rate themselves as having a better sense of smell, and the data back them up. Women detect odors at lower concentrations and are better able to identify them by name. A German psychologist found that men and women are equally good at remembering colors and musical tones, but women are better at remembering smells. Humorist Dave Barry’s wife would not be surprised:

At least five times per week, my wife and I have the same conversation. She says: “What’s that smell?” And I say, “What smell?” And she looks at me as though I am demented and says: “You can’t SMELL that?” The truth is, there could be a stack of truck tires burning in the living room, and I wouldn’t necessarily smell it. Whereas my wife can detect a lone spoiled grape two houses away.

Sex differences are based on group averages; there is much variability within each sex, and large overlap between them. But in general, women are better. Or, as Dave Barry put it, men suffer from Male Smelling Deficiency Syndrome.

What explains the female superiority? There is little evidence of sex differences in the nose. Dave Barry’s nose probably looks and operates much like his wife’s. The brain is a different story. Recent evidence suggests that brain structures related to odor perception differ in size and cellular architecture between men and women. Whether these anatomical variations explain Barry’s quip remains to be seen. We do know that some male-female differences in perception (the fact that women often rate smells more intense and unpleasant) are mirrored by differences in the underlying brain-wave response.

Female smell superiority is partly due to women having higher verbal fluency; verbal skills