“Your nose, sitting there in the middle of your face, is arguably the best chemical detector on the planet, but we usually fail to realize its importance until it goes missing due to illness or injury,’’ said Stuart Firestein, a scientist who studies the sense of smell, and the chairman of the biological sciences department at Columbia University.
Research into the olfactory process has increased dramatically in recent years, with the first smell-related Nobel Prize awarded in 2004, to an American team; the discovery that smell plays a role in some brain disorders; and the hope that a better understanding of smell may offer insights into how the brain works.
In the awarding of damages in court, the loss of smell has been estimated to account for 3-5 percent of someone’s earning potential, higher if the person has an occupation such as chef or perfume maker, according to standards set by the American Medical Association.
Losing vision, by contrast, is considered by the AMA to cost people 85 percent of their earnings, according to Rachel Herz, a smell researcher at Brown University.
But losing the sense of smell can be as profound a loss as going blind or deaf, said Herz, also author of a 2007 book called “The Scent of Desire’’ about the psychology of smell.
When Birnbaum lost her sense of smell, she lost her self-confidence, her enthusiasm for food, and her career as a chef. She no longer trusted herself to be alone at home, because she couldn’t smell if gas were leaking. She cataloged her losses, her newfound fascination with olfaction, and her efforts to regain that sense of smell in a book, “Season to Taste,’’ (Ecco/HarperCollins).
