People are born with synesthesia, and when you’re about a year old you lose it. Only five per cent of people walk around as adults with synesthesia. But the neurons you have now are the same ones you were born with. You can wake them up, and that’s what we’re going to try to do today.
— Perfumer Ron Winnegrad, talking to students at a workshop on synesthesia. Read more at Scents and Sensibility at The New Yorker.
OMG! I have (had, I guess, since I’m on leave) a student who claims he can’t smell ANYTHING. I kept telling him I didn’t believe him. . . Now maybe I can tell him he can work on it?! (Of course, I’m commenting before reading the article. Maybe it involves some awful probe up the nose for hours, in which case, I appologize for suggesting such a thing to a 12 year old boy. ?)
Well, I’ve gone ahead and read the article and no likely hope for my student. He’s not really “waking up neurons,” so much as teaching folks to make specific color associations with specific scents. . . like teaching a language, in my opinion. Oh well.
http://www.fifthsense.org.uk/anosmia-and-its-causes/
So maybe I should believe him? Seems unlikely that he has Alzheimer’s, but it’s possible he has had a traumatic brain injury.
There are all sorts of reasons…people have lost their sense of smell as a side effect of meds, etc. So I would believe him.
Now I feel like a meanie. ?
He’s a good kid, and he likes(d) my class anyway.
If he’s a good kid he’ll forgive you I’m sure.
My father had no sense of smell since he was 10 years old. He badly broke his nose from a horse kick. The resulting surgery, this was in the 1940s further damaged it. The biggest issue for him was with no smell food doesn’t have much taste. He was completely indifferent to eating and mostly ate for energy, not enjoyment.
If you look at the location of the olfactory bulb on the brain, it’s extremely exposed – it’s basically on the outside of the brain right at the bottom – which is why it’s not uncommon for it to be injured in TBI, but there are other causes for anosmia as well.
I watched something about how people perceive colour the other day and there is no exact way of knowing if one person’s ‘red’ is the same as another person’s red. So, I guess, if a perfume smells ‘red’ it could be lots of things, including green ( if the person is colour blind). I enjoyed the article , thanks!