The mood I’m sensing around me is measurably brighter and more hopeful than it has been in more than a year. The longer days and warm weather definitely help. The air smells fresher and the flowers sweeter. People are outside, and I can actually see them smile. Amazing.
Those of us enjoying a new sense of freedom and appreciating the fragrant springtime, perhaps as never before, need to remember that we can’t take this for granted. Even something as basic as our sense of smell can be jeopardized by the virus which is still in our midst.
For many COVID victims, the loss of their sense of smell is the first thing they notice and can add hugely to their misery. And for many COVID long-haulers, that loss is one of many cruel reminders of a disease that continues for them with no end in sight.
Most of us are hardly aware of our sense of smell. After all, we have only a few million olfactory receptors in our noses. Why, a dog has more than 50 times that number! Plus, only a tiny area of our brain is devoted to analyzing odors. A dog’s olfactory cortex is forty times the size of ours. So why does it matter?
First of all, most of what we taste is thanks to our sense of smell, about 80%, in fact. Yes, we can get by with the basic five of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, but most of the pleasure of eating a fresh New Hampshire strawberry would be lost. That, after all, comes from those countless lovely odorants that waft into our nasal cavities, stimulating olfactory receptors that connect to our first cranial nerve, the olfactory nerve, that connects with that little patch of olfactory cortex tucked under the temporal lobes of our brains. This is where we recognize that this is no ordinary supermarket strawberry. This is one of a host of reasons why we so look forward to this time of year.
And even those among us who are not foodies or fragrance aficionados would greatly miss the fact that our sense of smell can flood us with memories we didn’t even remember we had. A friend and I were walking the other day, and couldn’t help but stop to smell the lilacs that beckoned at nose level into our path. She, in turn, couldn’t help but recall whole episodes from early in childhood and later in adolescence somehow evoked by that gorgeous scent. Our conversation took a series of twists and turns thanks to that smell. The privileged position of the olfactory cortex adjacent to the key structures in our brains’ memory circuitry ensures this is no accident.
Part of the pleasure and richness of the season we are experiencing this year is thanks to that tiny neural system that is easily jeopardized by the virus. Part of my appreciation for being fully vaccinated comes from knowing how unlikely I am to lose this small pleasure anytime soon.
Just as there have been COVID deniers all along, there are vaccine deniers now. It is troubling to me when the benefits of getting vaccinated are so clear and the risk of harm from the vaccine so small. I’m sure many of these people have rationalized their rejection of vaccines and feel they are being principled and strong by doing so. I’m wondering what it would take to convince them to change their mind. Personally, I think a one-on-one discussion with a COVID long-hauler indefinitely deprived of the pleasures of smell and taste would be enough to send me directly to a vaccine line.
If all the objective information out there hasn’t changed every single mind about the value of vaccines, maybe an understanding of the beautiful dimensions of our sense of smell, and what we might lose without it, could do the trick.
(Millie LaFontaine lives in Concord.)