My ex-husband and I were an oddly mismatched couple: I loved all things fragrant, and was forever working with oils and herbs. He, on the other hand, had no sense of smell. A bad round with fibrous dysplasia ended with a surgery where his olfactory nerve was cut.
He still had a sense of taste, and he would wonder if he would have even noticed the loss of smell if someone hadn’t told him. His responses were still normal: his eyes would water if he chopped an onion wrong,1 and he said he could sense burning in the presence of ammonia. On one occasion when I tried to fry peppers, we both wound up choking and gasping from the resulting atmosphere.2
So the study released from the National Institute of Health makes sense to me, at least in an anecdotal way. “Using nasal tissue from mice, the scientists measured a variety of changes in solitary chemosensory cells as they exposed the cells to low and high levels of several irritating, volatile chemical odors.
Among their observations were changes in electrical activity in the cells — which indicates a response to an outside stimulus — and changes in intracellular calcium ion concentration — which indicates signaling to other cells. Their measurements demonstrated that the solitary chemosensory cells responded to the odors and relayed sensory information to trigeminal nerve fibers.” ((http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2008/nidcd-04.htm))
The study goes on to suggest that these cells also have a sort of “filter-sensor” that gauges whether or not certain chemicals are too much, using the citrol and geraniol in lemons as an example of our bodies knowing that we don’t need to necessarily react.
This doesn’t take into account psychosomatic reactions, such as people who have an aversion to a “pleasant” scent, or people who have an attraction to an “unpleasant” scent. If we ever do figure that out, we may know the chemistry that makes some people think huffing paint is a good idea before the damage to their brain cells.
