5 ms·
I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost alway
by krackers 11mo ago
I'd maybe make a hypothesis that a large portion of the space is "bad" smelling stuff: smoke or garbage. When people had covid-induced parosmia, it almost always seemed to be bad smelling stuff.
- robrain 11mo agoStill have it, intermittently. A sort of nameless-but-familiar "chemical" smell that comes and goes, along with any sense of taste. That is, I have bad days with no taste, just a chemical smell. Other days I have a pretty good sense of smell, generally with a good sense of taste. Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).
- m_kos 11mo agoThere has been promising work on olfactory training, which you can do very inexpensively at home. If you can, I would consider seeing any ENT first to rule out polyps, etc.
- shaky-carrousel 11mo agoThis is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.
- Terr_ 11mo agoI'm convinced that over the decades we'll continue to be a little surprised but just how much of our body-machinery is doing jobs of self-calibration, regulation, and safety-interlocks.
- robrain 11mo agoThat's the basic method of retraining. I've got a bunch of essential oils in tiny jars and I regularly take a 20 second sniff of each whilst thinking strongly about the smell in context. For example, when I smell the lavender oil I recall the garden at my grandma's house which obviously was full of lavender. It's definitely helping, but there are still a lot of gaps.
- teuobk 11mo agoThat was exactly my thought when reading the article and my personal experience with Covid. For a couple weeks, I perceived a persistent smell of something burning.
- 0_____0 11mo agoA smell of burning was how I suspected I had COVID the last time around. I was around some machines, I had to have someone else sniff around and let me know that nothing was actually burning.
- rclkrtrzckr 11mo agoSame here, and it's still there. I can't smell or taste a random set of stuff, like cinnamon, poop/farts. What annoys me most is that female genitalia just taste like nothing, literally... In addition to this, I sometimes smell scents that do not exist.
- jsrcout 11mo agoI know someone whose sense of taste was ruined by a small stroke. He said basically everything tastes like old gym socks now. That would suck so bad.
- exr0n 11mo agoSuper interesting! That would make sense, because a lot of the nose is presumably dedicated to smelling evolutionarily-relevant smells, most of which are "smells bad, avoid this". The method is very crude right now, but maybe with more fine-grained targetting we could better tune the smell profile.
- simsla 11mo agoGood / bad / unclassified. It makes sense for unclassified to smell worse than good, and it'd probably be the biggest category by a long stretch. (Pure speculation.)
- big-and-small 11mo agoAnd even good / bad is sometimes subjective and brain can adjust to it depend on whatever you like the taste for instance. Tell you this as a big fan of durian. Since there a lot of chemicals responsible for smell brain override reaction to fruit once you love the taste.
- bee_rider 11mo agoI wonder if we search for the worst smell, via optimization, is does this make it a big, not very steep optimum? Or maybe all unknown smells are a little bad, but the worst smell is some familiar badness.