It involves smelling four essential oils - rose, eucalyptus, lemon, and clove were originally recommended – twice a day for a few minutes. But adding different odors - as well as objects like rubber bands and crayons - to the aroma arsenal may help awaken the brain, Kelly said. The key is to focus on the smells; don't try to read emails at the same time.

Keep training, and track your progress.

— Workshops at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia try to "retrain" people who have lost their sense of smell. Read more at When the nose doesn't know: Recovering lost sense of smell at Philly.com.

To me, chocolate tastes like biting into raw sewage, chicken is muddy and rubbery, peanut butter and Marmite are like trying to eat diarrhoea. There are a couple of exceptions: raspberries, carrots and parsnips don’t taste vile. Nor does gin, which really helps.

— Louise Woollam of Get Lippie talks to The Guardian about her experiences with anosmia, phantosmia and parosmia. Read more at Experience: everything smells like sewage to me.

Yes, the new season of House of Cards was released this morning, but it's also Anosmia Awareness Day. Here's a short film on the subject from the Monell Center.

Recognizing that you are losing your sense of smell may be one warning sign that dementia could appear within the next 10 years, according to a new study by researchers at Stockholm University.

— Read more at Recognizing Your Own Fading Sense of Smell a Risk Factor for Future Dementia at PsychCentral.

"I kept coming in the kitchen to lift the cover off the bowl to smell it, just because I could," Hochman said. "It smelled the way I might imagine a middle-Eastern fruit market might smell."

— Anndee Hochman lost her sense of smell for 8 years after a series of bad colds. Read more at Life After Losing, Then Regaining, a Sense of Smell at NBC Philadelphia.

A Sense of Hope is a three-year $1,500,000 research mission to better understand the causes of anosmia and develop treatments. As the leading institute in the world for research on the senses of smell and taste, Monell is ideally positioned to take a central role in tackling this debilitating condition that afflicts millions. Click here to learn about our work with olfactory stem cells and other Monell research related to anosmia.

— The Monell Center announces a new anosmia research program. Read more at A Sense of Hope: The Monell Anosmia Project.