LOU MORIN
I finally solved the riddle of my singular talent several hours after the international chess master left my office. Meeting under the pretence of discussing his rejected manuscript, he fixed himself in the chair opposite mine and wouldn’t budge unless I offered him a publishing job — one that hadn’t been advertised and didn’t even exist. He seemed agitated and angry, desperate even. Too polite to ask him to leave, I struggled with the exchange, feeling increasingly distressed as the hour passed.
When he ran out of moves, my opponent resigned the game and left my office. A quick check-in with Google revealed the man’s stature in the chess world. As I write this now, I realize how difficult it must have been for this brilliant player and his pride, and why he felt he had to exhaust every move before conceding. He’d suffered a double loss — the editorial board had declined his life story and he hadn’t found the job he sought. And I, unwittingly, had beaten a world master.
Later that day, having reclaimed my safe space and found solace in chocolate, I had a revelation. My visitor’s departure had left a strong odour that followed me home and lasted well into evening. Alien, acrid, and unnerving, it directed my attention like an alarm. “I can smell crazy people!” I announced to my family.
When I was thirty-two, I lost my sense of smell and some of my vision following the surgical removal of a growth on my pituitary gland. Once a restaurant pastry cook, I could no longer detect familiar odours or taste many foods. Gone in seven hours was my scent taxonomy, including the splendid fragrances of loved ones, newborns, herbs of any kind, stinky cheese, frangipane, soil after rain, and newly-printed books. Suffering from anosmia, the inability to smell, meant not only grieving the loss of these treasured scents, but also the associated memories and emotions they evoked.
In the beginning, I perceived phantom odours. Phantosmia can occur after the olfactory system is disconnected. I once enjoyed the smell of roast turkey for hours, making everything I ate that day taste like Thanksgiving. In this way, I briefly enjoyed aromatic hallucinations, then nothing at all. My world was abruptly deodorized. Or so I thought.
Grateful to have survived brain surgery, I chose to focus on what I’d gained, rather than what I’d lost. I allowed my love of science to pilot this unexpected development — this corporeal terra incognita — and treated it like an experiment. As a child, I’d treasured a literary relic that somehow made its way into my possession and still lives on my bookshelf: Tom Tit’s La science amusante (Paris, 1906). I remember devouring its archaic text and surrealist engravings that described wacky DIY physics projects, all deliciously deckle-bound in worn leather and faded marbled paper. I could picture myself blowing concentric soap bubbles and fearlessly defying gravity with looped paper. Now, as an adult facing a perplexing health challenge, I indulged these childhood aspirations. My dream of becoming a mad scientist was taking shape, or scent, or whatever. I hadn’t quite figured it out at that point.
But the chemistry set and microscope of my elementary years would soon be replaced by another unique set of metrics when my newly inodorous world revealed itself to be otherwise. With the usual cacophonous range of smells stripped away, I’d somehow gained the ability to detect physiological clues normally hidden by ambient aromas. A limbic faculty, my sixth sense, detected a seemingly random odour that could last for hours, giving me pause to question its purpose. This new scent was unlike any I’d known. Chemical and somewhat unpleasant, it left me feeling alert, sometimes fearful, and it just smelled … wrong.
The distinctive odour surfaced intermittently, during odd social exchanges, maybe four times a year. I didn’t keep track back then. There was the frightening time a man knocked on my door late one night looking for a party down the block, then reappeared an hour later staring through the window. The encounter left me with a stifling sense of fear and that chemical, unpleasant scent. I was so shaken, I left and slept at a friend’s house. The alarm scent stayed with me until morning. I filed away this and other such incidents as somehow related to my long-dormant lizard brain. My twenty-first century thinking brain didn’t as yet know how to catalogue them.
Then, I had the meeting with the chess player and finally connected the mysterious odour with intense emotional distress. I was forty-six, and only starting to truly know myself. This was indeed a personal revelation: I was an olfactive savant.
I see it as no coincidence that I made this discovery in my middle years. Cultural conversation tends to focus on the often-onerous physical and emotional shifts brought on by menopause, framing this significant transition as an affliction. But I’ve also read that mid-life hormonal upheaval triggers a rewiring of the female brain, bringing gifts of heightened intuition, the ability to place ourselves first, and the resolve to stop putting up with crap. For me, this meant gaining the insight, clarity, and grit needed to journey deeper into my sensory conundrum, to embrace my inner scientist, and to realize I should have kicked the damn chess master out of my office long before he left.
Discovery led to inquiry, the next leg of my journey. How could I pick up these atypical odours when I couldn’t detect typical ones? Was there anything else I could smell that others couldn’t? Would my “normal” olfactory system eventually return? And if it did, would I lose this new superpower — my supersonic feelings radar? I turned to literature for answers. I never thought to ask a doctor, as I didn’t expect them to engage in a conversation about crazy smells and phantom odours. Instead, I saw an opportunity to be both examiner and specimen. Like daring Tom Tit, I would search for answers through a series of do-it-myself scientific trials.
I found I was far from alone. Millions of people across the world suffer from olfactive dysfunction due to surgery like mine, or to congenital conditions, head trauma, sinus infections, allergies, virus, or disease. I read on, sorting through the symptoms of anosmia, phantosmia, parosmia, troposmia, and dysosmia. But my particular type of “osmia,” one that signalled emotional upheaval, was not mentioned in scholarly articles or online discussions. Here, I was on my own.
Until recently, smell has been the outlier of the senses. Science is only now beginning to unravel its workings. As new interdisciplinary taste and smell clinics are established across Europe and the U.S. to advance the study of the two chemical senses, researchers are finding that our olfactory ecology is more powerful and complex than previously believed. Paleontologists posit that people “smelled their way to bigger brains,” driving changes in the temporal lobes, the area of the brain where smell is processed. These changes evolved into an ingenious interpersonal communication system used today to navigate social life.
On the broadcasting side, we emit two kinds of sweat — the one physical, the other emotional. This second, lesser-known type of sweat serves as a situational flag, releasing airborne chemical signals that transmit covert, often emotional, information between people. These specialized molecules, my mysterious alarm scent, make up what scientists term “social odours,” commonly known as pheromones. Corollary to these transmitted chemosignals is an accessory olfactory system that detects and processes them. When I lost my primary sense of smell, this secondary system may have stepped up, helping me chart the world on a different level — like taking a sudden exit from a predictable trajectory onto a hidden freeway of complex signals.
My younger scientist self would have been pleased. Having pieced together the fifteen-year puzzle of my altered nose, I began to channel my newfound skill. Validation came one day when I suddenly picked up the stress scent during a professional exchange with a new colleague. I guessed that one of us was in a panic, and I knew it wasn’t me. Moments later, my co-worker’s distress spilled out as he professed his marriage was breaking up, and he asked me for advice. My emotional radar was on the nose. It was an epiphany! I began to see my impairment as a gift that invited a deeper connection with the world. And I accepted that I would pass through life smelling the emotional ripples in my environment.
As a secret smelling agent, I’ve come to know when a store manager’s tolerance is stretched beyond its limits on an insanely chaotic opening day, when a colleague is suffering unduly from bullying, when someone sleeping beside me is having a nightmare. If I share the tale of my hidden talent, my phenomenose, with others, I do so cautiously. “Have you smelled it on me?” they’ll ask, worried their body odour might betray their secrets. Which leaves me wondering if most people walk around questioning their own sanity. In an imagined scenario I picture myself busking on a street corner where I take a deep whiff of my customers before handing them a yea or nay mental health report card, like Charlie Brown’s Lucy at her psychiatric help booth. “THE MAD SCIENTIST IS IN.”
Through all of this, my old sense of smell has started to drift in and out of my olfactory field like an elusive target, surprising me now and then with a recognizable odour. This happens more often of late, giving me hope it might stay permanently. I’ve read that nerves can regenerate. Over the past weeks, summer odours — chlorine rising off a fountain, sweaty teenagers, freshly cut grass, the bottom of a drained coffee cup — have brought me brief and unexpected pleasure. I dare not hope too hard.
Periodically, I step back as lead scientist and allow others to direct this experiment. Twice, my health developments have stumped the specialists: first when a second tumour was found on my pituitary, then when the gland stopped functioning many years after surgery. Bi-annual MRIs scan my skull for possible tumour re-growth, annual visual field tests scope my damaged optical nerves, and routine visits with concerned endocrinologists monitor my limping endocrine system. But the self-directed sensory study continues. While some of my earlier questions remain unanswered, new ones have joined the queue. I wonder how technology has affected our senses. Will our dependence on digital pings dumb us down, leaving humans with sensory deficit disorder? Will evolution reclaim what it gave us by conceding to our reliance on these electronic communication systems? Are there others out there who can single out social odours?
And so, after twenty years of trials, I’ve decided to offer myself up to science. By approaching the research community and offering myself as a subject, I’ll have a better chance of finding answers, opening up new paths to explore and helping others. With this mission in mind, I’ve collected the names of top international chemosensory scientists. I’ve composed and re-composed inquiries to two of them. Holding the key to the next turn in my fantastic inner voyage, the e-mails sit in my Draft folder waiting for me to click Send.
I’ve come a ways. Through pluck, chance, strategy, and blunder, I’ve shielded my queen piece from perilous attacks, taking out a dark knight and a rook or two along the way. I’m ready to make the next move, to learn as much as I can about the wonderfully enigmatic workings of my temporal lobes, and to take the next step. This will be my end game.