I lived the first 20 or so years of my early life not knowing about smells. I think I already "knew" that I can't smell but I never really appreciated this about myself. I had always been "immune" to smelly things like animal poo, dead animals or whatever (which is abundant since I lived in a remote area). I think the receptors are there because I do feel weird or "sense" that something is wrong when there's smell (only once they told me about it so maybe its just psychological) but I do feel a "sensation" when something that gives out a strong smell is put close to my nose (like perfume and things like that).
However, my brain can't seem to connect which is what. I have no idea what "smelly things" smell like, or what makes a perfume smell "good".
So my family would often asked me to dispose of things that really smell or enter a really smelly room and things like that because they thought I am just "stoic" in this sense. I think they first realized that I don't smell is when I was shocked when they said that my coffee smelt nice. They went "Wait, you don't know coffee smell?". I had always faked my responses when people ask about smell and basically gave awkward smile or grief whenever is appropriate lol.
It didn't dawned on me until recently that I am missing out on a 1/5 a human experience. It also meant that I am very anxious if I am cleaning up properly (do I smell? did I miss a spot?)
Does anyone share the same experience? I wonder how you cope with this issue. I don't have any SO so I don't have a mirror that I can reflect on if the room or myself smell or whatever.
I had somewhat similar experience. It wasn’t until I was around 16 that my parents raised concerns. It came to light for me with my parents coming home and freaking out because I had apparently bumped the stove while they were out and accidentally turned on the gas burner and the entire house apparently smelled of something but I was relaxing in my room without a clue. My parents initially freaked out but later my step dad shared another incident where I had been working on something in the garage and there was gas can that had been tipped over and the whole garage smelled of gas and I had no idea. For the garage incident I could tell something was off around me like spider senses tingling but I couldn’t tell what it was exactly.
Do you feel like taste is a weak sense, or is your sense ~what you think others are experiencing. Since smell is an important factor of taste, do you find food exciting?
I had a friend who couldn't really smell until he got some kind of olfactory surgery. Before the surgery he felt like maybe he was missing out on some stuff like certain tastes or smell experiences (and he had a similar "immunity" to stinks). After the surgery he could smell to some degree and while it was a novelty he didn't feel like it really opened him up to a whole new set of experiences and was a bit underwhelmed. He was more thankful for the ability to breathe through his nose. I think smell is way less impactful than sight or sound, if that makes you feel any better.
My mother went her entire 59-year life without a sense of smell. She heavily leaned on my dad to check if the meat was off, if the house smelt before guests arrived, etc. But overall, I felt it was somewhat of a superpower. Who wouldn't love to say they have never experienced the smell of a poorly maintained public toilet or someone else's fart?
She spent about a decade of her life trying to find solutions before giving up and just living with it.
FWIW you mostly can’t smell yourself the same way other smell you. So even if you did stink, you wouldn’t normally notice.
When people smell their pits, they can tell when it stinks, but they have to really get their nose in there, whereas other people smell you from 10 feet away.
33 years old and I have had this issue for as far as I remember.
As for hygiene, I learned about that late (thanks to a boss who had the courage to speak to me about it), and now I just strictly follow the same daily routine. No more being complacent with showering, and I always wash my clothes every day regardless.
It worked well so far. But when it comes to changing the bed sheets or cleaning the toilet, I tend to let my wife handle it. Because smells does not mean anything, so for me as long as it is white and without stains, it is clean.
That said, I noticed lately that I sometimes actually smell things, but it is very random and episodic, like a few seconds every few weeks or so. So now I am wondering what is actually going on and if that may be curable in my case.
As I mentioned above, make sure you get your sinuses checked for nasal polyps and if you have any, ask your doctor if cortisone nasal spray can be used to shrink them.
I lost 90% of my smell due to a traumatic brain injury (including face/nose damage), so I've lost the ability to smell nuanced things and taste subtle flavors.
It was hard at first, but I've since coped by using things with strong smells that I can still recognize. Coffee, lemon, copious amounts of cumin and parmesan, cinnamon, vanilla, etc.
What's interesting is that I can still "remember" the original smell, but it doesn't smell the same anymore.
As far as personal hygiene/cleaning...I kind of just gave up on it. I don't really care if someone tells me I smell. That's a them problem now, and I have much worse things to worry about after my brain injury.
No need to be anxious. Just use soap and water and you're fine. I personally use fragrance-free soap.
And above all, please don't overcompensate and become one of those people who drenches themselves in perfume and air fresheners thinking people like it. They don't and there is a reason why you see signs at hospitals and schools saying to please not use that stuff.
Same experience here. I can once in a while smell things, but it doesn't last long, and I can't correlate the smell a perfume is supposed to represent to what it actually represents (so, a perfume that smells like roses smells like something, but I can't correlate it with the actual smell of roses, because I don't know how they smell). There are some smells that are quite strong and I can identify, like alcohol, fuel, acetone, but I wonder if what I call 'smell' in those cases is just a chemical reaction you get from the abrasive? properties of those things, rather than actual smell.
I cope with it in my own case by being thorough in my own cleanliness - I shower and use perfume (three sprays!) every time I have to leave my house. For other things I rely on my SO.
I'm a bit of a hypochondriac but I've lived like this for 30 years so I guess if I was having some kind of mental degradation it would have been noticeable already!
Three sprays of perfume means you're probably overcompensating in the opposite direction. Not to make you anxious, but being around overpefumed people gives me headaches - hate it.
Daily showers, deoderant, and shower after workout or heavy sweat should be more than sufficient.
Did you have your sinuses checked for nasal polyps? I frequently lost my sense of smell when I was younger, and if I had known erlier, I would have started using cortisone nasal spray, which can help reduce polyps significantly (of course consult your doctor, first).
I was similar to you (maybe not to that extreme) and I don't see zinc mentioned in this post.
I did have a minimal sense of smell, as in I could faintly smell perfumes if I sprayed it on my nose but often not animal feces or similar.
I started supplementing zinc because I suspected I was deficient in it and in about two weeks of taking 25-40mg per day (be careful, 40mg is the upper limit) I started smelling things properly.
It got to a point now after a few years that I can tell what happened in a room in the previous 30 mins when I step in.
There are upsides (smelling the sea) and downsides (dirty humans are truly something) but I love every minute of it.
Which is very subjective. I personally can't handle it, in the past I've even got headaches just from a couple perfume bottles standing around in the same room. I had to get rid of a perfumed shaving soap because it was a guaranteed headache and smelled like a chemical plant to me, while others just shrugged and said it's fine.
Perfumes, some deodorants (e.g Axe), and candles are the worst for me. I have to stop breathing and protect my eyes when entering department stores, for some reasons they often have a large area full of perfumes directly at the entrance.
Congenital absence of smell is a medical issue, and you may want to consider speaking to a physician.
For example: it can be caused by Kallmann syndrome, which is associated with other midline defects, especially of the hyothalamus (delayed puberty) or palate (resulting in a cleft). It can affect the eyes, ears (hearing loss), and kidneys.
I lost my sense of smell temporarily because of a Covid infection, and it was gone completely - I could stick my nose into a jar of ground coffee and not smell a thing. Funnily enough, they say that if you can't smell, your sense of taste is also impaired, but I could taste food just fine...
Had the same, but both taste and smell... anything eaten was just tasteless goo for maybe 6 weeks, no point in fine cuisine. I tested myself daily with sniffing a bottle of 52% home made slivovitz, it was like breathing mountain air, no reaction to even rather concentrated alcohol vapors.
Weird times... I'll never know if my smell came back 100%, or just some fraction of it. In fact, it took good additional 6 months to get my personal perfume to smell nice again, while normal smells kid of came back, this was a litmus paper for me that I am not 100% there yet.
Btw you can lose smell easily permanently, all it takes is 1 good hit in the nose. Nerves going through the skulls go through these tiny pores in the bone, and if the nose cartilage moves enough suddenly they all get severed/chopped. Doctors are quite familiar with this, no way to get this repaired.
My sense of smell is weak, my SO's is particularly strong.
Net effect is that we eat different things, because I like "garbagey" tastes like seaweed, anise, liquorice, anchovies etc. and she can sense if dairy or fruits/vegetables will give her food poisoning past expiration date.
As for hygiene I stick to a routine and rely on other senses - if I'm feeling sort of sticky then it's definitely time to bathe.
I wasn't born with it, but after catching Covid my sense of smell got for lack of a better term "muffled". Some things merged together. I could still "smell" shampoo and hand sanitizer, but they smelled identical to me and unlike either what they used to smell like or anything I could really place. There were quite a few times when I'd smell something and have no clue what it was because the scent was unlike anything I'd ever smelled before. During that time I was definitely self-conscious about how I might smell because I just couldn't tell.
Since then I think it's mostly recovered. Things smell how I think they should most of the time. But I always wonder if there's something out there that I'll smell completely "wrong" some day because the receptors for that particular smell just never recovered.
Yeah, same thing for me. I was probably 20 or so when I really understood that I had no sense of smell. It was much later when I realized that this was a gap in my version of human experience. As these things go it seems like not much of a disadvantage though.
> As these things go it seems like not much of a disadvantage though.
Well I think it’s more that you are used to. I’ve lived my whole life with only one eye (amblyopia) and it never ever bothered me until the boom of 3D movies which looked like standard movies for me. Plus, I’ve always been bad at catching balls but that’s just something I avoided as much as I can.
People without smell have a far higher chance of dying (statistically) in any given year than people with smell.
This article suggests that loss of smell might be an indicator of various brain diseases (which then might also kill you). However, other leading theories are that without the ability to smell, there is a much higher chance of eating bad food or toxins, contaminating things with faeces or chemicals, or otherwise harming yourself in ways smell would have prevented.
I got extremely sick in 2017 for about a week. Went through about 6 boxes of tissues in that short time period and was barely able to feed myself. Only months after when someone was vaping near me did I realize I wasn't able to smell.
Only after a few years after long and intense cardio I would sometimes regain some sense of smell for about 20 minutes. Now in the last month seems to be coming back more permanently.
I'm someone who spends a lot of money on expensive perfumes like Creed and regularly burn incense in my house.
I honestly didn't feel like I was missing out on much with no sense of smell, definitely did not feel like I was missing 1/5th of the human experience. It really didn't bother me and I never went to a doctor for it. That said, I'm glad the sense is slowly coming back again.
After covid I lost my sense of smell, and for almost 2 years my smell only recovered to about 5% of my original.
Honestly, I thought about it and I'm perfectly fine not being able to smell for the rest of my life. On the flip side, I'm actually happy I'm not impacted by unwanted smells in my environment.
Having smelt before, I don't miss it, but if I was born without it I would always wonder. Well let me tell you there's not much to miss.
Not being able to smell sucks. I was able to smell for the first 20+ years of my life and then lost it.
After years of going to doctors getting treated for polyps and allergies and all kinds of things I was diagnosed with Samter's Triad.
I know you have this since birth and it most likely is not what you have, but other people with similar symptoms may want to look into that, because not many doctors that I came across knew this.
I use fragrance free soap and cedarwood scented body wash and deodorant. As long as you're clean you should be fine. It's not something you have to worry about if you practice basic hygiene.
Smell and taste are very intertwined. I wonder if your taste is very subdued as well. When I had covid, I couldn't smell anything, and eating a world class meal may have just as well been some cardboard...
People say this a lot, but I’m very skeptical whether it matters much if you never had smell to begin with. I have had no real sense of smell for as long as I can remember but I’m a more than competent cook. This would be very contradictory if smell was truly essential to the experience. I can believe that it’s important if you had it and lost it, but I don’t think smell is essential to taste in general. (However, I do agree with GP that it feels like I’m missing a major piece of human experience.)
I have no smell, but I do appreciate all kinds of foods and tastes.
Mostly the only thing I noticed that I lack are spices. I have no idea what these are for, so I just blindly follow the recipes, hoping not to mess it too badly.
That said, I never had it to begin with, so I may be missing on something I don't know...
Since you don’t have a sense of smell, have you wondered if perhaps one of your other senses is enhanced in some way from using the spare brain matter? Do you have synesthesia?
One fascinating thing about Covid is that we discovered the loss of smell that it caused wasn't just due to Sars-CoV-2 wreaking havoc in the lungs, but that it got into the brain, and caused damage there.
Maybe it's related to the brain damage part: COVID didn't just kill my sense of taste and smell, but changed how I perceived touch too. Touch on my skin felt like I had a thin layer of something on my skin, even my teeth. It went away the same time I recovered my taste and smell. https://twitter.com/esesci/status/1608553863937921025?s=20
I didn't notice anything unusual about my hearing though.
For myself and several friends who started with poor senses of smell, covid boosted our sense of smell for a brief time after having it. My smell was easily 5x as sensitive for a month after having covid the first time. Now it's back to baseline.
I found that the lack of pollution at the beginning of lockdown increased air quality and my sense of smell became more noticeable and sensitive. Particularly in many walks around gardens and the countryside which was in spring. Or perhaps my perceptions of the smells increased rather than being able to smell more things.
Even three years later i've still a good smell sense. I love it.
It's possible that I had an early infection that triggered this response.
Interesting parallel with smoking ... I always had a pretty poor sense of smell, then smoked for a number of years, and for about two weeks after quitting I could smell everything. I didn't know office bathrooms were so bad...
This happens to me when I fast for a period or 3-5 days after becoming ill. For about a week after catching a stomach flu, the world smelled and tasted exactly as I remembered it being when I was a kid.
I sympathize, I lost my sense of smell and taste for two months, and almost two years later, coffee still tastes vastly different from what I remember.
I had phantosmia three times following COVID. Cigarette smoke each time. The first time lasted nearly a month and was very intense, with the subsequent instances lasting for shorter intervals and not being as intense. I was worried for a minute there that it was my new normal but I'm happy to report I haven't had any further instances in nearly 2 years. It was wretched.
Among the folks I know, the number who lost their sense of smell in their 30s-40s who later went on to develop some form of dementia is 100%, n=5.
Different countries, different cultures and backgrounds, but the common denominator is loss of smell predated their dementia diagnosis by ~20 years,+/-5.
My dad could not smell for a few years in his 50s - he has Parkinson's disease now, which started (noticeably) about 20 years later.
It seems to be subjectively quite awful (depression-like symptoms, difficulty walking - sports was a big part of his life) but at least I can still talk to him like an adult - it's not a proper dementia.
On a similar note, I recall this research[1] from some years ago about how loss of smell was a strong predictor of death within 5 years in older people.
Unexplained and persistent hyposmia or anosmia is definitely correlated with dementia. Doctors do look for it in practice as it's often an early sign. Precise statistics escape me at the moment.
I've lost my smell and a lot of my taste thanks to covid, even after a couple of years it hasn't returned.
The strange thing - it started to come back in early February, very slightly, I could smell things I'd not been able to for a while - like cinnamon, or rose.
Tested positive for covid a few days later. Once covid tested clear using a lateral flow test my smell went.
That is fascinating that your sense of smell came back "due to covid" and then went away again. I'm suffering from long covid as well and the loss of probably 50% of my ability to smell. Taste went away at the same time as smell, but it quickly came back within a week. Not so with my sense of smell.
The unique relationship between nasal cavity and cranial cavity tissues in anatomy and physiology makes intranasal delivery to the brain feasible. An intranasal delivery provides some drugs with short channels to bypass the blood-brain barrier (BBB), especially for those with fairly low brain concentrations after a routine delivery, thus greatly enhancing the therapeutic effect on brain diseases.
I have heard that the brain kind of sticks out into the sinuses, which may not be technically correct but the illustrations etc above show that there is a uniquely direct connection between the sinuses and brain via nerves that pass through very little tissue at a minimum.
The nerves pass through those holes in the bone which are called olfactory foramina. Foramen means hole and these foramina connect the cranial cavity to the nasal cavity.
The paranasal sinuses are nearby structures. The olfactory nerves do not go in there.
It's absolutely a fact that the nose is pretty much directly connected to the brain though. The best demonstration of this fact is naegleriasis:
This thing lives in water. If that water enters your nasal cavity, it will travel via olfactory nerve to your brain where it will proceed to literally eat it.
As someone who has suffered from microbiome issues for years, I'm confident they're looking in the wrong place. I'm sure there's changes happening in the brain, but my bet is it's actually starting in the intestines and caused by a bacteria or bacterial imbalance.
I've had a lot of things happen to me from lack of smell, heightened smell, tinnitus, sound sensitivity, memory issues, cognitive decline, changes in skin sensitivity, hair loss, etc. I'm confident all of this seems from my microbiome because the symptoms I'm experiencing shift every few months as I work on treating it and experience improvements and worsen.
Where you get extremely heightened sense of smell?
Because you know how covid made many people lose their sense of smell, many permanently?
It did the reverse to me, it made my sense of smell exponential. I've only read a couple stories of other people having this problem.
It's not a good thing. The world smells horrible. Way way before I can even hear the garbage truck I can smell it blocks away. Even if a street is empty early in the morning I can smell when someone has been there recently smoking cigarettes or other.
It's like some kind of fight or flight survival instinct or adaptation is triggered by the immune system.
That's fascinating. I remember reading a book where a woman said her grandmother (who was from a nomadic tribe in Africa) could smell rain from many kilometers away. Is this somewhat similar?
Are you living with this for how long? What does your doctor says?
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However, my brain can't seem to connect which is what. I have no idea what "smelly things" smell like, or what makes a perfume smell "good".
So my family would often asked me to dispose of things that really smell or enter a really smelly room and things like that because they thought I am just "stoic" in this sense. I think they first realized that I don't smell is when I was shocked when they said that my coffee smelt nice. They went "Wait, you don't know coffee smell?". I had always faked my responses when people ask about smell and basically gave awkward smile or grief whenever is appropriate lol.
It didn't dawned on me until recently that I am missing out on a 1/5 a human experience. It also meant that I am very anxious if I am cleaning up properly (do I smell? did I miss a spot?)
Does anyone share the same experience? I wonder how you cope with this issue. I don't have any SO so I don't have a mirror that I can reflect on if the room or myself smell or whatever.
Oh yea you just awoken multiple memories of almost causing housefires. I am pretty much banned from cooking, ever.
However since I can't smell it either, in our new house we got a gas detector. I'm a bit relieved thanks to it.
The positive side is that it also monitors the CO2 and air quality.
I hate to be a downer but smell is incredibly powerful. Vivid memories can rush back from a smell. Food is probably 90% smell and 10% taste.
She spent about a decade of her life trying to find solutions before giving up and just living with it.
When people smell their pits, they can tell when it stinks, but they have to really get their nose in there, whereas other people smell you from 10 feet away.
As for hygiene, I learned about that late (thanks to a boss who had the courage to speak to me about it), and now I just strictly follow the same daily routine. No more being complacent with showering, and I always wash my clothes every day regardless.
It worked well so far. But when it comes to changing the bed sheets or cleaning the toilet, I tend to let my wife handle it. Because smells does not mean anything, so for me as long as it is white and without stains, it is clean.
That said, I noticed lately that I sometimes actually smell things, but it is very random and episodic, like a few seconds every few weeks or so. So now I am wondering what is actually going on and if that may be curable in my case.
It was hard at first, but I've since coped by using things with strong smells that I can still recognize. Coffee, lemon, copious amounts of cumin and parmesan, cinnamon, vanilla, etc.
What's interesting is that I can still "remember" the original smell, but it doesn't smell the same anymore.
As far as personal hygiene/cleaning...I kind of just gave up on it. I don't really care if someone tells me I smell. That's a them problem now, and I have much worse things to worry about after my brain injury.
And above all, please don't overcompensate and become one of those people who drenches themselves in perfume and air fresheners thinking people like it. They don't and there is a reason why you see signs at hospitals and schools saying to please not use that stuff.
I cope with it in my own case by being thorough in my own cleanliness - I shower and use perfume (three sprays!) every time I have to leave my house. For other things I rely on my SO.
I'm a bit of a hypochondriac but I've lived like this for 30 years so I guess if I was having some kind of mental degradation it would have been noticeable already!
Daily showers, deoderant, and shower after workout or heavy sweat should be more than sufficient.
I did have a minimal sense of smell, as in I could faintly smell perfumes if I sprayed it on my nose but often not animal feces or similar.
I started supplementing zinc because I suspected I was deficient in it and in about two weeks of taking 25-40mg per day (be careful, 40mg is the upper limit) I started smelling things properly.
It got to a point now after a few years that I can tell what happened in a room in the previous 30 mins when I step in.
There are upsides (smelling the sea) and downsides (dirty humans are truly something) but I love every minute of it.
Which is very subjective. I personally can't handle it, in the past I've even got headaches just from a couple perfume bottles standing around in the same room. I had to get rid of a perfumed shaving soap because it was a guaranteed headache and smelled like a chemical plant to me, while others just shrugged and said it's fine.
For example: it can be caused by Kallmann syndrome, which is associated with other midline defects, especially of the hyothalamus (delayed puberty) or palate (resulting in a cleft). It can affect the eyes, ears (hearing loss), and kidneys.
Weird times... I'll never know if my smell came back 100%, or just some fraction of it. In fact, it took good additional 6 months to get my personal perfume to smell nice again, while normal smells kid of came back, this was a litmus paper for me that I am not 100% there yet.
Btw you can lose smell easily permanently, all it takes is 1 good hit in the nose. Nerves going through the skulls go through these tiny pores in the bone, and if the nose cartilage moves enough suddenly they all get severed/chopped. Doctors are quite familiar with this, no way to get this repaired.
Net effect is that we eat different things, because I like "garbagey" tastes like seaweed, anise, liquorice, anchovies etc. and she can sense if dairy or fruits/vegetables will give her food poisoning past expiration date.
As for hygiene I stick to a routine and rely on other senses - if I'm feeling sort of sticky then it's definitely time to bathe.
Since then I think it's mostly recovered. Things smell how I think they should most of the time. But I always wonder if there's something out there that I'll smell completely "wrong" some day because the receptors for that particular smell just never recovered.
Well I think it’s more that you are used to. I’ve lived my whole life with only one eye (amblyopia) and it never ever bothered me until the boom of 3D movies which looked like standard movies for me. Plus, I’ve always been bad at catching balls but that’s just something I avoided as much as I can.
This article suggests that loss of smell might be an indicator of various brain diseases (which then might also kill you). However, other leading theories are that without the ability to smell, there is a much higher chance of eating bad food or toxins, contaminating things with faeces or chemicals, or otherwise harming yourself in ways smell would have prevented.
Only after a few years after long and intense cardio I would sometimes regain some sense of smell for about 20 minutes. Now in the last month seems to be coming back more permanently.
I'm someone who spends a lot of money on expensive perfumes like Creed and regularly burn incense in my house.
I honestly didn't feel like I was missing out on much with no sense of smell, definitely did not feel like I was missing 1/5th of the human experience. It really didn't bother me and I never went to a doctor for it. That said, I'm glad the sense is slowly coming back again.
https://creakyjoints.org/living-with-arthritis/symptoms/sjog...
Much later in life I got migraines really bad. During which all my senses went into overdrive. Sense of smell was vastly better than those around me.
Honestly, I thought about it and I'm perfectly fine not being able to smell for the rest of my life. On the flip side, I'm actually happy I'm not impacted by unwanted smells in my environment.
Having smelt before, I don't miss it, but if I was born without it I would always wonder. Well let me tell you there's not much to miss.
After years of going to doctors getting treated for polyps and allergies and all kinds of things I was diagnosed with Samter's Triad.
I know you have this since birth and it most likely is not what you have, but other people with similar symptoms may want to look into that, because not many doctors that I came across knew this.
I use fragrance free soap and cedarwood scented body wash and deodorant. As long as you're clean you should be fine. It's not something you have to worry about if you practice basic hygiene.
Mostly the only thing I noticed that I lack are spices. I have no idea what these are for, so I just blindly follow the recipes, hoping not to mess it too badly.
That said, I never had it to begin with, so I may be missing on something I don't know...
I never had any smell, but lately I have very short episodes when I was surprised to smell something, until it disappears again.
I didn't notice any specific pattern about when it happens either, it's just a couple of seconds sometimes.
I didn't notice anything unusual about my hearing though.
Even three years later i've still a good smell sense. I love it.
It's possible that I had an early infection that triggered this response.
And then similarly it went back to baseline.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/02/14/los...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/does-covid-19-d...
Dead Comment
Different countries, different cultures and backgrounds, but the common denominator is loss of smell predated their dementia diagnosis by ~20 years,+/-5.
It seems to be subjectively quite awful (depression-like symptoms, difficulty walking - sports was a big part of his life) but at least I can still talk to him like an adult - it's not a proper dementia.
[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Dead Comment
The strange thing - it started to come back in early February, very slightly, I could smell things I'd not been able to for a while - like cinnamon, or rose.
Tested positive for covid a few days later. Once covid tested clear using a lateral flow test my smell went.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18817519/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_bulb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_nerve
I have heard that the brain kind of sticks out into the sinuses, which may not be technically correct but the illustrations etc above show that there is a uniquely direct connection between the sinuses and brain via nerves that pass through very little tissue at a minimum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_nerves
The nerve forms a bulb directly above the nasal cavity. That bulb emits many smaller projections through the skull and into the nasal cavity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cribriform_plate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_foramina
The nerves pass through those holes in the bone which are called olfactory foramina. Foramen means hole and these foramina connect the cranial cavity to the nasal cavity.
The paranasal sinuses are nearby structures. The olfactory nerves do not go in there.
It's absolutely a fact that the nose is pretty much directly connected to the brain though. The best demonstration of this fact is naegleriasis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleria_fowleri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleriasis
This thing lives in water. If that water enters your nasal cavity, it will travel via olfactory nerve to your brain where it will proceed to literally eat it.
The more you know. But that also means I (< 40) shouldn't be too paranoid yet.
I've had a lot of things happen to me from lack of smell, heightened smell, tinnitus, sound sensitivity, memory issues, cognitive decline, changes in skin sensitivity, hair loss, etc. I'm confident all of this seems from my microbiome because the symptoms I'm experiencing shift every few months as I work on treating it and experience improvements and worsen.
Where you get extremely heightened sense of smell?
Because you know how covid made many people lose their sense of smell, many permanently?
It did the reverse to me, it made my sense of smell exponential. I've only read a couple stories of other people having this problem.
It's not a good thing. The world smells horrible. Way way before I can even hear the garbage truck I can smell it blocks away. Even if a street is empty early in the morning I can smell when someone has been there recently smoking cigarettes or other.
It's like some kind of fight or flight survival instinct or adaptation is triggered by the immune system.
Are you living with this for how long? What does your doctor says?