De-paywalled: Some COVID Survivors Haunted by Loss of Smell and Taste

This is far too important a subject to languish behind a paywall. Original article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/health/coronavirus-smell-taste.html

tl;dr: Scent is intimately tied to physical and emotional well-being. If you can't smell sulfur dioxide, you can't tell that the kitchen is filling with gas from the oven or stove. If you can't smell food, you're at a real loss for determining whether it's gone off, and even when nothing's wrong with it, most people say that the pleasure of eating is gone. And people with damage to their sense of smell tend to become socially isolated--because face-to-face interactions are no longer enjoyable.


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Addendum:
My immediate thought after reading this was, 'What if the Western plague of anomie is down to our cultures' insistence that smelling like oneself is unacceptable?' It's such a simple, pervasive thing. If scent is up there with touch in its ability to create feelings of interpersonal connection and warmth, then what effect does its absence have on political polarization? On a societies' degree of individualism vs. collectivism? On America's basic civil society, which has been crumbling for generations?

De-paywalled: What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?

Original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/covid-smell-science.html

tl;dr: Smell is a dominant sense, and invisible in its dominance, much like proprioception.

“People are unaware smell is important until they lose it. And then they’re terrified.”
- Noam Sobel, Weizmann Institute of Science


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