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For Janet Marple, 54, of Edina, Minn., coffee, peanut butter and feces all smell vaguely like burning rubber or give off a sickly sweetness. It’s like nothing she has ever smelled in her lifetime.
“I literally hold my breath when shampooing my hair, and laundry is a terrible experience. Even fresh-cut grass is terrible,” said Ms. Marple, a former corporate banker.
— Read more about post-Covid parosmia in Distorted, Bizarre Food Smells Haunt Covid Survivors at The New York Times.
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Oddly, this suggests that, among those who did not regularly drink caffeinated drinks, caffeine improved their sensitivity to smell but reduced their ability to identify odors. The authors say that caffeine’s stimulant effects may have had a more pronounced impact on performance during the odor sensitivity test given that it was a longer, more tedious task than the identification test.
— Read more in Caffeine enhances odor sensitivity among people who don’t typically consume caffeine, but not among regular consumers at PsyPost.
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The prevailing wisdom is (that post-Covid) parosmia is a good thing – a sign of the neurons regenerating but failing to make their connection, like leads in the wrong port. But, [Barry Smith of the Global Consortium of Chemosensory Research] tells me, it’s not a simple “miswiring”. There appear to be certain volatile molecules, such as those found in coffee and roasted meat – which in high concentration would be quite toxic – that set it off, perhaps triggering a kind of warning alarm.
“It’s a bit like tinnitus in the ears,” Smith suggests, in that the brain is struggling to modulate the signals it receives; my nose is whining, always at the same high pitch.
— Read more in Searching for sense: what we lose when smell deserts us at New Statesman.
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[Charles Wysocki of Monell Chemical Senses Center] found 20 volunteers who also could not initially detect androstenone, and after six weeks of sniffing the pheromone for three minutes, three times a day, half of them became sensitive to the molecule. This finding is in some ways intuitive; the olfactory senses of perfumers and sommeliers, after all, become more attuned to perfumes and wine with time.
— Read more about the development of post-Covid-19 smell training in You Recovered From COVID-19. Now Your Coffee Smells Like Sewage. at The Atlantic.
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Lemurs can use their sense of smell to locate fruit hidden more than 50 feet away in the forest—but only when the wind blows the fruit’s aroma toward them, according to a new study.
“This is the first time research has demonstrated that primates can track a distant smell carried by the wind,” says anthropologist and lead study author Elena Cunningham, a clinical associate professor of molecular pathobiology at New York University’s College of Dentistry.
— Read more in Lemurs Smell Fruit From 50 Feet Away via ‘Odor Plumes’ at Futurity.