Anita Rao
There's a smell that floods me with feelings and memories faster than any other. It's really hard to describe and it exists only in one place. 70 Parkside Crescent in Seaham, England. My grandparents' house ... or what was their house until last fall.
I'm one of 20 plus grandkids of Colin and Rose Thompson. Most of them grew up a hop, skip and jump away from 70 Parkside. But my siblings and I were always at least an ocean away. We'd travel over summer break and pull up to the house with a yellow door. But it was the precise moment I would smell the smell that I'd know that I'd arrived. It's a mix of cold air. Breath mints covering up cigarette smoke. Bags of English breakfast tea. A bar of Wright's Coal Tar fragrance soap. Old photographs on old walls touching old carpet. All of it hitting you the second you crack open the back door.
My nana passed last fall, just about two years after my granddad. The house has been sold. But that smell. It's mine to keep. This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
Smell is invisible, but it's a sense that shapes so much of how we experience the world and one another. And like so many things, we don't really notice its value until it's gone.
Bonnie Blodgett
When I finally was told that I lost my sense of smell, tt didn't take long to realize the enormity of what I had lost.
Anita Rao
Several years ago Bonnie Blodgett experienced anosmia, the medical term for losing your sense of smell. Until COVID-19 came along, anosmia wasn't as widely recognized. So back in 2005, it took Bonnie much longer to figure out what was happening. It all started with a bad cold and some over-the-counter nasal spray.
Bonnie Blodgett
I was driving to to visit my daughter at college and began noticing smells which I assumed were farm smells: manure, they were uniformly sort of foul. And then when I got to where she goes to school, Madison, Wisconsin, I, I noticed that the food was just off. Food didn't taste right. It just kept getting worse.
Anita Rao
For a while, Bonnie thought maybe the cold had just affected her sense of smell. She saw doctors who told her it was probably a nasal infection and to put her nose in a steamer. And all the while she was experiencing phase one of smell loss called phantosmia, which is where your brain makes up phantom smells to account for what's missing. Bonnie wrote about this experience in her book, "Remembering Smell: A Memoir of Losing — and Discovering — the Primal Sense." Here's Bonnie reading from her book.
Bonnie Blodgett
One morning, as the holidays loomed, I woke as usual in a vile stench, and was as usual startled when the toothpaste set off a defensive dead fish counterblast. My tongue slithered into the back of my mouth. Determined that Christmas would be business as usual, I made the annual holiday pilgrimage to the bakery across town that sells an anise-flavored Swedish rye bread and pastries to die for. The best part is lingering outside to admire the gingerbread village in the bakery window, all candy cane roofs and gum drop doorknobs, while catching hints of the olfactory pleasures waiting inside every time a customer enters or departs in a cloud of warm, sweetened air. A tinkling bell announced my arrival. This time I hadn't even glanced at the window before crossing the threshold. Inside the crowded store, my nose reacted with dismay. There was no mistaking that the better the actual smell, the worse its surrogate.
Other notoriously stinky places flooded my consciousness, the old Waldorf paper plant that ground newspapers into pulp and was finally shut down because of its stench. The oil refinery that had burned to the ground, incinerated by its own disgusting smell. And the landmark brewery which smelled exactly like burning toast soaked in stale beer until its odor had the audacity to invade the better neighborhoods and cause such a stink that the brewery finally had to install filters. Anyway, you get the picture.
Anita Rao
The picture was pretty bleak. And it wasn't until Bonnie saw an ear, nose and throat specialist that she finally got a diagnosis and an explanation. The over-the-counter nasal spray that she had taken — which by the way, is now off the market — had destroyed the olfactory receptors in her nose, and her sense of smell as she'd known it was gone.
Bonnie Blodgett
When you lose your sense of smell, the immediate sense is of, well, anxiety, of course. Fight or flight is regulated in the ancient brain. So that was the first thing when I realized that this was not just a cold. And trying to process that, just intellectually, using the modern part of the brain, and then having my other — the older brain just messing with my sense of reality, made me feel really almost psychotic, completely distant, as if I was in my own world. And I would be with people, I could talk to people, but it was as if they weren't really there. Things became so removed, hard to describe, and the anxiety didn't help. And then came the depression.
The combination of the actual loss of the reality that I had come to rely on, and then all of the pleasures, all of the comforts, all of the lovely things that we take for granted. I'm a gardener, I couldn't smell my garden anymore. I love to cook, I couldn't smell food. I couldn't enjoy food. I couldn't enjoy my relationship with my husband in the way that I had before. Because come to find out, smelling the loved one has a lot to do with how you react to affection and intimacy. He didn't seem like the same person. He was a stranger in a way. Even things like the smell of his aftershave, or the the thing that you you know, that triggers your affection, your fondness — it was gone. And so I always felt as if I wasn't in the world, I was watching it.
Anita Rao
Our olfactory sensory neurons regenerate every 28 days under normal circumstances. For Bonnie, after close to a year of life without smell, she started to gain hers back, which was an equally disorienting experience.
Bonnie Blodgett
You don't know as it's coming back what's going on. And you have to prepare yourself for the worst. But that makes the best all that much better, because you're prepared for the worst and any little sort of indication, something smelling, just smelling a little bit differently made you realize that you're those cells up are starting to do something. They're reacting. Something's going on. And then of course, when you realize that you can smell again, when you begin to actually smell again, and you you trust it. Like at first you don't trust it, and so you're always running around testing. And of course, it's also progressive, so it gets better and better and it changes. But when you finally realize the thing that that ENT told you about cells dividing and the potential for that to happen, if there's a little bit of tissue up there that hasn't been destroyed, then the sense of smell is the only part of the brain that does regenerate, that can regenerate. That's how important smell is.
So when you realize that, yikes, you know, I'm gonna get my life back, my world back. Everything of course smells so much better than it ever did before. And my first thing was, I think it was April when I realized I can smell again. I went right to the lilacs and just, I don't know, spent an hour just with my nose in the flowers.
Anita Rao
I'm not quite the gardening type, so I'd probably be more likely to stick my nose into a bag of coffee beans or a vat of chocolate fondue. Something to remind me of all the taste sensations I've been missing without my sense of smell. I've heard from so many folks how hard that part of smell loss is. Because taste is just salt, sour, sweet, bitter and umami. Everything else that makes flavor comes from smell.
Rachel Herz
Because we can't normally see smells unless we're looking at okay, that smell is coming from that rose over there. Otherwise, we're really not aware of how it is that it's manifesting. And so we tend to just ignore it and overlook it and think it has no meaning at all. But meanwhile it actually is involved in everything.
Anita Rao
That's Dr. Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist who studies the psychology of smell. She's written books about desire and disgust. And I've been geeking out about her research ever since we spoke.
Rachel Herz
For the sense of smell, we're perceiving chemicals that are floating through the air and chemicals that we can then inhale through our nostrils, and that then settle on this patch of mucous membrane, which is basically right at the very top of your nostrils. And in fact, it's exposed to the environment so that if you could stick your finger all the way up there, you could literally touch the olfactory sensory neurons that are detecting the chemicals that we're breathing in. So not every single chemical that exists can be smelled. In order to be able to detect it, it has to have a certain physical and chemical features. But apart from that, technically, we can smell anything out there in the universe.
And in fact, we can smell anything that a dog could smell, potentially, but we just can smell it at a much less degree of sensitivity. So they have more olfactory receptors, more of their brain dedicated to processing smells, so that they can detect things at much lower concentrations than we can. But anyway, what happens is, while we're awake, and we're breathing, we are inhaling various chemicals, that could be the smell of cooking, the smell of roses, the smell of diesel fuel, you know, anything that might be in our environment.
And one thing I should also mention connected to this is that you can think about the sense of smell like a change detector. So if you're sitting in a room that may have a certain scent to it that you notice when you first walked in, after a number of minutes, not more than 20 minutes though, you will stop being able to smell what the room smelled like. And then it just becomes the regular environment. And it's not until a new smell comes along, then we are able to detect it.
Anita Rao
You mentioned rose, and I think that's an interesting example that we can build off of, of how, you know, we each have these olfactory receptors lining the back of our nose, but what these express varies. So there could be the same rose that you and I smell, but we're not smelling the exact — or we're smelling the same thing, but it doesn't smell the same to each of us. So explain that difference.
Rachel Herz
Sure. So what's really, really exciting about the sense of smell is that actually every single person has a unique nose. What I mean is that the receptors that are expressed for different types of chemicals is actually ever so slightly different for every single person. So in terms of the gene family, for receptors for the sense of smell, there are probably about 1000 in humans in particular, and only about 400 or so of those receptors are actually activated. The rest of them don't ever become expressed. But of those different 400, there could be variation in terms of how many copies of a particular type of receptor you have, or even which receptors you have. And a great example of that is for the smell of cilantro, or the flavor of cilantro.
Anita Rao
Famous soapy Cilantro.
Rachel Herz
So you're probably someone who doesn't like it.
Anita Rao
I like it. No, I like it. But other people say it's soapy. And I don't get it.
Rachel Herz
Okay, perfect. Okay, the reason why they say it's soapy — I also love cilantro and I don't pick that up either — they're actually missing the receptor that detects this herbal, wonderful note that you and I and other people who love cilantro are getting. Rather they can't perceive that and all they're getting is this other quality, which is actually also there, and that's that more soapy component. So that's an example of variation in receptors which actually change the way that something smells.
Anita Rao
Unless you have an identical twin who eats and drinks exactly the way you do, there's nobody like you who smells the world the same way. That's due to the specific makeup of your nose, and your own personal history.
Sandra Davidson
What up Embodied? This is Sandra from Durham, North Carolina. I'm trying to tell y’all about my most vivid and visceral smell experience.
My husband and I were boiling a deer skull in a vat of water over a gas burner because this deer skull had a beautiful set of antlers on it and we were trying to clean off the rest of the tissue. And I decide that I'm going to be helpful by dumping this skull broth. And when I bend over and pour that water out, I have this gag reaction like I've never had it before. It was just like — I've never been that close to decay. But the way that my body on a cellular level recognized that was fascinating.
Amanda Magnus
My dad owned a motorcycle repair shop for the first 10 years of my life. And in addition to repairing motorcycles, my dad also sold parts, which included new tires. And now whenever I go get my oil changed, or have any kind of automotive work done, that new tire smell that hits you, when you, you know, go into one of these shops just brings me back to my dad's shop and all the time I spent there coloring and playing and whiling away the hours.
Ashley Philips
My name is Ashley Phillips. And I find myself not really remembering those smell-associated memories on their own. But since I've lost my sense of smell with COVID, I'm afraid that I'm losing some of those memories, and also that I'm not developing new ones. And that's especially sad to me as a new mom. You know, people like to joke that I won't have to smell dirty diapers. But that also means that I don't get to smell my baby. I'm only gonna appreciate it when it's too late.
Anita Rao
You just heard from Sandra, our editor Amanda and Ashley. Smell is so tied to emotions and relationships because of how our brains are designed. Let’s get back to Dr. Herz and her science.
Rachel Herz
This is also one of the amazing fascinating things about the sense of smell. So where the receptors are is basically just at the level of your eyebrow, and then all those receptors bundled together to form the olfactory nerve and they go into the brain, into what are called the olfactory bulbs. And they're these two basically pea-sized structures and they are basically at the very base of the brain. And that's where the first kind of level of neural computation takes place when it comes to the sense of smell. But we're not really processing what our conscious experience of smell is at that point.
Where we start consciously processing the experience of smell is when it then connects into the main part of the brain. And where it connects is this area called the amygdala hippocampal complex, which is in the limbic system. And the amygdala is involved directly in processing emotion and emotional memory. And the hippocampus is involved in processing associative learning, associations, spatial orientation and so forth. And so this linkage of those two structures is actually where our conscious perception of scent takes place. So the exact same part of the brain that is otherwise processing emotions, emotional memories, associations and so forth, is also the same part of the brain that's processing your experience of scent.
So when you smell something, and it's attached to something in your past, you instantly feel the emotional connection to it. And if you've never smelled that smell before, then that's where the learning instantly first takes place. So the sense of smell is all about learning, memory and emotion.
Anita Rao
Rachel is passionate about this often-overlooked sense to the point you could call her a smell evangelist. She told me some crazy stats about how undervalued our sense of smell is. Apparently the American Medical Association values the loss of our sense of smell as just between two to five percent of our net worth, as compared to vision, which is valued at 85%. Rachel's smell evangelism got real serious when she was called to be part of a court case.
Rachel Herz
This was the very first time that I've ever been asked to be an expert witness, so it was very exciting for me. And it was this particular case where a woman had lost her sense of smell in a car accident, which is not actually all that rare. If you get hit hard in the front of the head or the back of the head, what can happen is the olfactory neurons, while they're on their way into the brain get sheared off. And so that connection can then get broken and it can become permanent so that you can never regain your sense of smell after that. And that's what had happened to this person.
I met her about two years or so after the accident. And everything in her life had basically gone back to normal except for the loss of her sense of smell. And that loss had actually turned her life completely upside-down. So I shouldn't really say everything had gone back to normal. I mean, she was physically put all back together. But everything from the point of view of her daily existence had completely fallen apart, from the point of view of her doing her job — which involves a lot of analytical and spatial abilities, and actually, the sense of smell is involved in that — to her relationship with her husband. She had been married only for a couple of years, and was also planning on starting a family. But she decided that she could not now be a mother because of the fact that she was worried about things like not being able to smell if something was burning, not being able to smell a dirty diaper — but more importantly not being able to bond with her baby because of not being able to smell her. And also her intimate relationship with her husband had fallen apart. She had become really paranoid about socializing. She was worried about her body odor, so she'd become very reclusive. And overall, she'd actually become seriously, seriously depressed.
And what really struck me — I mean, I was completely taken aback and really overwhelmed by this woman's, you know, tragic experience — but it was also really striking and really sort of had a major impact on me how she kept on saying how she never paid attention to her sense of smell before this happened. And she had no idea that it really was woven into the fabric of just about everything in her life. And now that she had lost it, she realized it. And I felt like oh my god, I have to wake people up and tell them to smell the roses, because it's so important and not to overlook this amazing sense.
Anita Rao
One tip Rachel shared with us for how to better appreciate smell is to intentionally make scent memories — something she called "real aromatherapy."
Rachel Herz
Smells can actually have tremendous impact on our mental and physical wellbeing. But the mechanism is actually through these learned emotional associations, not through some kind of pharmacological connection that just inherently happens to us, like I give you a shot and you know, it relaxes you. Smells don't work like that. They work by instantly activating the part of the brain where emotions and memories and associations are stored. And that instantaneous connection creates a sense of calmness or relief or triggers a memory. And one thing that you can do is, first of all, be aware of that and potentially, like, seek out special fragrances that make you feel relaxed or calm or excited, however you want to feel during that moment. But you can also create smell associations for special occasions.
So something that I actually have done several times on special vacations is buy a perfume that I have never used before. And of course, I like the smell, so I have to be wearing it, so I obviously have to like it. And then for the special vacation, wear that scent every day of the special vacation, and then not again afterwards, except if I want to get that feeling and that recreation of that special vacation back. So my husband and I have taken a few special trips where I've done this, and then I'll put that fragrance on and it's like: Hawaii! So yeah, you can really relive it and you really relive it at this kind of visceral, emotional level because that's where smells get us. They're really deeply, viscerally, emotionally connected to us.
Anita Rao
I am so into this idea of intentional scent memories. So best of luck to my partner and friends for navigating all my future chosen scents on vacations. After all this aroma talk, we were curious about how folks who design sense do it. How do you make an ocean candle, an ocean candle?
Christina Degreaffenreidt
Pretty much any sort of smell idea that I have comes to me from either an experience, such as, you know, walking into a hotel, vacation, or just everyday life. So what I do is I capture these moments and try and turn it into a scent.
Anita Rao
That's Christina Degreaffenreidt, the founder and creator of Multifaceted, a candle-making company based in Greensboro. Christina has mastered the art of candle design. It starts with gathering as many oils as you can and practicing mixing them together in various combinations and strengths. Then comes rigorous testing.
Christina Degreaffenreidt
I do try and put as much scented oil into the candle that you can safely put into the candle. So we always start there to make sure we're really powering your senses through the candle. And then from there as we're testing it, if we think it's starting to be too overpowering, such as walking by you know, Yankee Candle, or even Bath and Bodyworks — we don't want it to be like that noticeable — then we'll taper down how much oil goes into the candle, so that is definitely part of our testing process.
Anita Rao
So humans all have slightly different sensory receptors, they can perceive things at different strengths, things smell slightly different. So how do you kind of create things that appeal to a variety of people, and I wonder if you've ever had someone, you know, smell a candle that you said, you know, was like day at the beach and they think it smells like something totally different?
Christina Degreaffenreidt
Of course I have. So yeah, we try and have a wide variety of scents. So everything from like just a classic — we have our Classic Collection which is geared more towards like an everyday scent that you would normally experience, such as like eucalyptus and lavender and mint and things like that. And then we get more into like the higher end scents that are a little bit more complicated with those. Those are usually the ones where I have people that are like: Oh gosh, I hate that scent. But we just try and have a wide variety for everyone. We don't carry a lot of food scents, due to the reason of people have a very strong reaction to food and beverage scents, so we try and steer away from those. But we do have ones, like for instance, we have hazelnut coffee. And that one, either you love it or you hate it, there's no in between. So we try and do a variety just to, you know, cater to multiple people.
Anita Rao
And you have some that are obviously, you know, specifically: Okay, I'm trying to get you to, you know, you're thinking about hazelnut coffee. But you also have a scent named after your nephew. So tell me about how you went about creating that scent? How do you evoke a person in a scent?
Christina Degreaffenreidt
Oh, gosh, I had the idea — so these random, these — I am a creative person. So to have an idea come to my head, and be able to formulate it into a scent is, I don't even know where this gift comes from, but I'll take it. So for my nephew, I really wanted to just capture him when he was born and make sure that I represent him in this brand. So, of course with babies, you try and use more natural things. And one of the more natural things that my sister and I always put on his skin is shea butter and coconut oil. So I used that as the base. And then when we blended the oils, I thought it was a great start. And then I felt like I need to have a little bit more sweet since he is a baby. And so we added just a splash of caramel to it, just to make it a little bit more sweet. But the base of it is shea butter and coconut oil.
Anita Rao
That scent named after her sweet nephew is called Kammie Kam. Christina says this work has definitely turned her into a scent snob, and she's quick to identify what odors are around her. If you invite her to a dinner party, it's going to be hard for her to not notice from many rooms away that your trash needs to be taken out. And just like everyone else, she has her own scent memories.
Christina Degreaffenreidt
My grandmother actually had a farm. So one of the most distinct smells that I — even to this day when I smell it just takes me back to her farm — is definitely manure. Of course, that is definitely part of the farm life. And one of the other really distinct smells — this is the most popular one that pops up in my head — would be the smell of my grandmother's perfume. But it wasn't a good thing. It's definitely not a good thing. It was one of those really cheap perfumes that was like flower-based and it was just horrible. So anytime I smell an oil that is anywhere close to that, I immediately throw it away.
Anita Rao
Too much floral is no good.
Christina Degreaffenreidt
It's too much floral. Yeah, it's just the perfume has come a long way. And I'm very grateful for that. Especially when I think about those days.
Anita Rao
You can find Christina Degreaffenreidt at the Greensboro farmers' market every Saturday. Your distinct scent if it were made into a candle would be your body odor. The science behind why we’re attracted to some folks body odors and not others is just as fascinating as everything else we’ve talked about. It boils down to the fact that your odor is an expression of your immune system and cisgender folks in heterosexual relationships in particular are drawn toward people whose immune systems are complementary to their own.
There’s so much more science to geek out about but we’re gonna leave you with some meditations on both the profound and personal meanings of smell as told to us by y’all!
Erika
Hi, my name is Erika and I'm calling from Oakland, California. What I like best about my sense of smell is that it actually helps me determine who or who not to date. Oftentimes when I'm on a first date with somebody or like a second or third date and we go to kiss for the first time, if I smell like a particular smell on that person, I am so repulsed by that smell that I know that this is a person that I can't date. It's not like it's their breath or like something they've eaten or it's not like BO necessarily. It's really like part of their essence. And for whatever reason, it just does not work for me. And after you know, like six months or so of dating somebody, like, let's say that I'm planning to break up with somebody or I know that the relationship is kind of rocky, they will get that smell. And I know that the relationship is over because they have started smelling a certain like repulsive way to me.
Jaime Gonzalez
When I was an undergrad, you know, I became an English major, so I became interested in learning how to interpret novels and poems and judging their sort of aesthetic merit. And so I started thinking: Well, how would I take this critical disposition and apply it to other things? So I started thinking about fragrances in this kind of like, critical way. So I remember, there's this one fragrance in particular that I looked up online that had horrible reviews. The idea was it was supposed to smell like black ink. So if you've ever spilled ink on your hands, you know it has that kind of metallic, sharp scent to it. It's not necessarily pleasant. And so I started wearing this fragrance that smelled terrible. But to me, it was like, that's not what mattered. What mattered was that I was, like, wearing this piece of art, and it can communicate ideas.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on-demand, consider a contribution at wunc-dot-org now. Incredible storytelling like you hear on Embodied is only possible because of listeners like you.
This episode was produced by Kaia Findlay with editorial support from Amanda Magnus. Audrey Smith also produces for our show. And Anthony Howard is our intern.Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. And Quilla wrote our theme music.
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Until next time…. I’m Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.