The above question is a question my husband and I found ourselves asking while eating dinner (orange chicken over steamed rice). And do not be fooled by the seemingly negligible occasion that has become the American dinnertime…no, this moment was quite significant. For I, Heather…congenital anosmic…was able to SMELL something!!!!

At least, I think I did. Maybe. Well, I’m not really sure. Here’s what happened: Alan handed me a bowl of orange chicken and then I felt a “tingle” deep inside my nasal cavities.

And it wasn’t a tickle, like “oh my allergies are bad and I need to sneeze” and it wasn’t a change in temperature or moisture that I was feeling either—at least I don’t think so. It was something unlike I have ever experienced before and right now the only way I know how to describe it is with the word “tingle.” It tingled.

When I told Alan this, he was skeptical. And rightly so. I mean, I have congenital anosmia for crying out loud. I CAN’T SMELL. So, how is it possible that I can be “smelling” something now? And then he said something interesting. He didn’t think that smell could actually be a physical response, like “I smelled something and it made my nose tingle”; rather he thought that the experience of smelling was more closely related to memory. He said that when he smells that it’s less about a physical sensation or a response of “I feel something” and more of a succession of moments/smells past. Which would, to me, explain a lot in terms of how people describe smells: by comparing it to something else that smells similar.

So, what the heck is smell then? I mean, the other senses are not so heavily ruled by memory…not always anyway. I mean, I can look at a lamp that looks like a lamp my grandmother had owned long ago and say “It reminds me of a lamp my grandmother had long ago” but still keep the lamp I am looking at now separate from the previous one. And yes, there are typically occasions of comparison or a cross-reference to a different sense. For example, I might describe the lamp thus:

It’s a tall lamp, metal with a yellow spherical glass base. The shade is rough, square and rigid and you can see how uneven the threads are woven. And when turned on the lamp is warmth, filling the room with a quiet, subtle comfort. The lamp is always whispering something sternly, like an old librarian who is easily distracted.

The above description is very similar to how Alan has been describing smells to me—by describing one sensation through the other senses. Describing the lamp as yellow or as glass is simply another visual description and wouldn’t be very useful to someone who couldn’t see. The words rough and warm describe a physical sensation (i.e. touch) and whisper could be classified as both a sound and what follows…personification. And these creative descriptions really do seem to borrow much from synesthesia.

And yes, we can get philosophical here and talk about how perception is relative to the individual and no individual moment or experience is separate from the past, yadda yadda yadda…I don’t want to get into that here.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I’ve always just assumed that smell was more of a physical response to something unseen. And I’ve found all these articles on the web that describe the act of smelling in terms of molecules, neurons, cilia, esters, and receptors and these are all things I’ve known about since my basic biology class oh so long ago. But I guess that learning about smell in terms of its physical biological response has always caused me to assume that smell is perceived physically inside the nose.

So, I am asking all you olfies, is that not true?! When you smell, can you “feel” anything?