Neuroscience
Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a short piece written by someone who lost her sense of smell and her effort to try to find it once again:
- Dementia And The Sniff Magnitude Test
From today's New York Times: Sniff Test May Signal Disorders’ Early Stages By ELIZABETH SVOBODA Published: August 14, 2007 [snip] The Sniff Magnitude Test, developed with the aid of a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, consists...
- Abstract Of The Day: Smell Identification And Anosmia Screening
Jackman AH & Doty RL. Utility of a three-item smell identification test in detecting olfactory dysfunction. Laryngoscope. 2005 Dec; 115(12): 2209-2212. From the Smell and Taste Center, Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Hospital...
- Upcoming Event: Philadelphia, November 2004
A symposium in the field of study for which two researchers (Drs. Richard Axel and Linda Buck) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine last week will be held on the 8th of November in Philadelphia. The symposium is sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania...
- The Nobel Nose
This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine has been announced: Press release and Nobel website page. Richard Axel and Linda Buck have been awarded the prize "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system." Here...
- Celebrating Olfaction
Sunday, April 30 is National Sense of Smell Day, and the Sense of Smell Institute is ready. Their web site includes bibliographies on topics like odor perception and the brain and human behavior, mood, and emotion (aka aroma-chology). Plus fun activities...
Neuroscience
Anosmia
Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a short piece written by someone who lost her sense of smell and her effort to try to find it once again:
Something's Off[ ... Read the full article ...] (free registration required).
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
17 October 2004
The New York Times
[Snip]
Smell is the stepchild of the senses, the one that many think they could do without. But when I couldn't smell things, I couldn't fully inhabit the world, and my movements in it were somehow, almost imperceptibly, more clumsy. This month, when the Nobel Prize was awarded to two researchers for investigating the science of smell, it brought back my mixed feelings about my own sense of smell's protracted disappearance.
It vanished in 2002, a result of a bad fall. As my neurosurgeon explained, when my head hit the ground, my brain sloshed around, which smashed delicate nerve endings in my olfactory system. Maybe they'll repair themselves, she said (in what struck me as much too casual a tone), and maybe they won't. If I had to lose something, it might as well have been smell; at least nothing about my personality or my memory had changed, as can happen with head trauma. So it seemed almost churlish to feel, as the months went on, so devastated by this particular loss.
But I was heartbroken. My sense of smell was always something I took pleasure in. I could tell, by smelling him, if Jeff was troubled, excited or sad. I could fall in love with him all over again -- or with a passing stranger -- with one good whiff. And one of my favorite parts of mothering has been smelling my daughters, those deep sweet smells in the crooks of their necks and at the shaggy tops of their heads. Without scent, I felt as if I were walking around the city without my contact lenses, dealing with people while wearing earplugs, moving through something sticky and thick. The sharpness of things, their specificity, diminished.
- Dementia And The Sniff Magnitude Test
From today's New York Times: Sniff Test May Signal Disorders’ Early Stages By ELIZABETH SVOBODA Published: August 14, 2007 [snip] The Sniff Magnitude Test, developed with the aid of a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, consists...
- Abstract Of The Day: Smell Identification And Anosmia Screening
Jackman AH & Doty RL. Utility of a three-item smell identification test in detecting olfactory dysfunction. Laryngoscope. 2005 Dec; 115(12): 2209-2212. From the Smell and Taste Center, Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Hospital...
- Upcoming Event: Philadelphia, November 2004
A symposium in the field of study for which two researchers (Drs. Richard Axel and Linda Buck) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine last week will be held on the 8th of November in Philadelphia. The symposium is sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania...
- The Nobel Nose
This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine has been announced: Press release and Nobel website page. Richard Axel and Linda Buck have been awarded the prize "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system." Here...
- Celebrating Olfaction
Sunday, April 30 is National Sense of Smell Day, and the Sense of Smell Institute is ready. Their web site includes bibliographies on topics like odor perception and the brain and human behavior, mood, and emotion (aka aroma-chology). Plus fun activities...