(no subject)

[simont]

For several months I've been toying with the idea of writing a FAQ about myself. This is because people often ask me the same questions when they find out I have no sense of smell, and in any such situation my finely-honed netizen instincts cry out to me to write a FAQ.

Today I gave in to them, and did so: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/smell.html.

It was a bit pointless, really, because most people who find this out about me do so when talking to me in person, which makes it unlikely that they would naturally go and read the FAQ before asking me questions about it! So I don't actually expect this to cut down on the number of times I get asked the same thing. But it made a nice break from work, and the chances are that someone out there will find it vaguely interesting, and it's stopped my Internet conscience from pestering me about it, so there we go…

Comments

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I'm suprised nobody asks you (frequently) whether you have the capability to breathe through your nose.

(I am biased though - my inability to breathe through my nose does affect my sense of smell, so it's the first thing that springs to mind.)

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

I saw a breathing exerciser in Gray's Sports, today. Some sort of mechanical resistance intended to increase your workload for 30 breath workouts, and so increase your lung power. Is this sort of thing helpful for you, or irrelevant?

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I've heard they are supposed to be quite good for some people. I wonder if they would do anything that blowing up balloons wouldn't do? (This is something I can do better than most)

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

It seemed to be designed to make normal breathing harder while using it, rather than have huge exhalations at irregular intervals, so I imagine it's just a different form of training - perhaps similar to wearing arm and ankle weights while walking around rather than doing weight training.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

One thing that blowing up balloons won't do is to have much effect on the muscles that inflate your lungs, which seem (in my case) to be the weaker ones anyway.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

How about learning to play a wind instrument?

[modulatorium.livejournal.com]

Buteyko is the most effective technique (that I am aware of) for learning to breathe through your nose when you have previously been unable to do so. If you're interested, then have a look for it on the Web, or feel free to contact me since I am fairly knowledgable about it.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I've heard such techniques are supposed to be beneficial if you have allergic rhinitis (like me), but I wouldn't have thought that they would be able to do much against physical obstructions in the nose (again, like me) - can you clarify this at all?

[modulatorium.livejournal.com]

Yes, Buteyko is potentially excellent for asthma, allergies and rhinitis, as well as for other health-related problems, so it may be worth your while investigating it. I doubt it would help with physical obstructions though - I guess you'd need an operation for that?

Allergic rhinitis

[(Anonymous)]

Hello!

(I'm a friend of Simon's, Claire(withani), and I don't have an LJ account).
I have allergic asthma, and allergic rhinitis. I recently went to the asthma nurse, who prescribed some tablets called "montelukast sodium" (Singluair is the brand name). Since taking these I have pretty much stopped sniffling and sneezing, which is a bit surprising since I've had the allergic asthma/rhinitis since I was 16 and I'm now 33. It might be worth mentioning it to someone. :)

Anyway, hello to you and hi to Simon. *waves*

Cheers
Claire

[simont]

Gosh, it's you. Hello! Long time no thingumibob. *waves back*

*waves back again*

[(Anonymous)]

Hello!

Very long time no thingumibob.
I think I might have left it under the bed and forgotten to take it with me when we (husband Simon H and I) moved house two years ago. Oops. Anyway, I hope all's well. :)

*hugs* and *waves* (of the sea variety, stuffed with turtles and brightly coloured fish and perhaps a small octopus, for a change).
Claire

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

How do you choose a deodorant/other toiletry, and avoid overapplication?

[simont]

I rely on other people to tell me if I smell bad. I try to make sure that my close friends know I have no sense of smell, in the hope that if I have an odour problem they'll realise I need to be told about it, but I am essentially at their mercy.

I measure the dose of deodorant by its antiperspirant qualities: I use it when I feel sweaty, and I use the minimum amount needed to stop me feeling sweaty. If this is serious overapplication or underapplication, I would hope somebody would have told me so by now, and I urge them to do so if they've previously been politely keeping quiet about it!

Last time I chose a deodorant, I was going out with lark_ascending, so I took her shopping and got her to choose one she liked.

I don't use any other scented toiletries (shampoo, shower gel, soap etc), because my last GP suspected them of irritating my sensitive skin.

[j4.livejournal.com]

You can get lots of "scent-free" deodorants...

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

That was really interesting! I feel guilty now, remembering that I asked you question no.5 when I first found out you had no sense of smell.

If I were to write a FAQ about myself, I guess it would be about my vegetarianism (why do I do it? don't I miss meat? am I anaemic as a result? don't I realise how unnatural it is? etc.), or possibly a collection of linguistic trivia (gender-neutral pronoun issues, etymologies of good/evil/niggardly, less vs. fewer, irrevocable decay of the language blah, blah...) since these are the things I get asked, or end up answering, repeatedly.

I wonder what other people I know would write FAQs about?

[simont]

I feel guilty now, remembering that I asked you question no.5

Don't worry about it :-) That's by far the most common question, probably because most people (I understand) can't easily perceive how much of their sense of flavour is taste and how much is smell, so they're naturally curious about it. Unfortunately, I can't be of much help in answering that question, because I don't know exactly how much I'm lacking! What would be really interesting is to talk to someone who became anosmic after having been normally, er, osmic.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

This might be partially modelled by an osmic person by a comparison of what things taste like when they have some form of nasal blockage (cold, hayfever, polyps etc) to when they don't.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

See an episode of kitchen chemistry, in which professional taste testers had their nose blocked off (presumably to stop airflow through the nasal passage to the smell receptors). Blindfolded, and fed pureed food, they couldn't tell what the food was. They picked things at random based on the messages they got from their tongue.

Which I guess makes tongues Osmic Tentacles.

[simont]

I wonder what other people I know would write FAQs about?

Oh, and that sounds to me as if it's veering dangerously close to meme country :-) Though I agree, actually; it'd be interesting to know, in general, what questions particular people got asked most often. Hmmm.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

gosh, fascinating. I never realised the condition existed...

[mpinna.livejournal.com]

Awful!

(not really, but the joke had to be made)

[simont]

"My dog's got no brain!"
"How does it know?"

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

This made me think: 'Oh so Simon.' I imagine that if I were writing FAQ, it would be about my area of study, and my undergraduate degree. My number one question used to be 'So what's an Asnac?'
For the uninitiated, it's nothing to do with New Zealand. That's ANZAC.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Interesting! And sorry for asking (I think) all the questions on the FAQ at some time or other. Although I think the reason people find it surprising is that there's no outward sign of it as there (probably) would be if you were blind/deaf -- I think the default position is to assume that somebody has all 5 senses intact unless there's reason to believe otherwise.

I do have two other Qs, but I don't know if they're FA or not so I don't know if you'd want to add them...

1. Have you ever consulted a doctor or other medical wossname to see if there's any way it could be cured? (To come back to the deafness analogy, is there any such thing as a smelling aid?)

2. Would you want to have the chance to smell if you could?

The only other point I wanted to make was about your nervousness about gas leaks -- have you got one of those gas-leak-detector colour-changing thingies? Dunno if that would assuage your worries any.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I don’t think hearing aids work for people who are completely deaf.

[j4.livejournal.com]

No, but ... oh, never mind. It was a crap analogy. I'm sorry. I will go and stick my head in a bucket if it makes you feel better.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

The university of warwick are, as far as I know, world leaders in robotic noses. They've chips with thousands of silicon receptors shaped like different molecules connected to a computer. This was in the mid-nineties, I'm not sure how it's progressed since then.

[simont]

And sorry for asking (I think) all the questions on the FAQ

Don't worry about it :-) Nobody who asked these questions is at fault for having done so; it's perfectly reasonable that they might want to know the answers! It's only people who ask questions when a FAQ is conveniently available who are culpable, and in this particular case that probably won't be true even now I've written it...

Anyway, your questions:

1. No; it's never bothered me enough to go to the effort.

2. If it were easy I'd probably give it a try out of curiosity, and I suppose the experience might conceivably change my answer to 1 :-)

When I watched "Strange Days", one of the people I saw it with made reference to the scene where the guy with no legs gets given a sensory recording of an athlete running along a beach, and suggested that if I lived in that world I could try a sensory recording from a smell-rich environment of some sort. It hadn't so much as occurred to me while actually watching the film, though, so I'm clearly not that desperately curious to know :-)

I haven't got a gas leak detector, no, but it might be a good idea now you mention it...

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

I also find smell useful for judging the off-ness of food.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I wish more people would make the distinction between tongue-taste and nose-taste if they aren't going to keep taste to sweet/sour/bitter/salty. I like to eat things with a strong tongue-taste, but a weak nose-taste, almost irrespective of the tastes.

So I like flavours like lemon, sugar, marmite, salty chips, and so on, and don't like strong cheese, most savoury tastes and so on. I even quite like the taste of Bitrex. I don't dislike smells, just eating things that smell strongly. I know that's completely different to not being able to smell, but it benefits from making the distinction.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I even quite like the taste of Bitrex

I've never tasted it (because strangely enough they only seem to put it in Really Toxic Stuff), but I've always been curious to try it!

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Usually it's shapoo or conditioner or soap (often stuff that smells nice). I'll shampoo my hair and accidentally leave a bit under a nail. And I chew my nails when I'm nervous and I'll think "ooh".

[ceb.livejournal.com]

the condition is anosmia

This is wrong. It should be anosia. (Or maybe we should save that for people with no noses.)

[aiwendel.livejournal.com]

oo thats quite interesting!
:)
followed links, but the smell directory wouldn't let me vote on my favourite/most hated smells.

Mmmm can see how it'd be scary to not be able to smell gas, but people (generally;) survived before it had a smell inserted.... guess you just have to be very careful, and yes, rely on friends/neighbours!
:)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

[http://users.livejournal.com/_kent/]

Ooh! Ooh! The first question I thought of when I read this isn't on the FAQ! Can I ask it?

(I'll ask it anyway.)

How do you react to smells that have an associated physical response, e.g. cut onions, that sort of thing?

[simont]

Onions make my eyes water; smoke makes my eyes sting.

Therefore I can only assume that the smell and the effect on the eyes are two independent effects of the vapour, rather than the eyewatering being an effect of the smell.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

My father has practically no sence of smell and I have a fairly poor one, so genetics may in part be involved. However, mine has actually got better with age, which is interesting to me. I used to have many many colds as a child, which I think means I never learnt to smell as a child, and hence as I got older (and my colds became less frequent) I had to learn to smell at a later age. I used to mis-recognise smells all the time as c. 10yo (prawn cocktail crisps were the most common: for some reason I could smell them instead of any other strong smell for some years. Eventually that stopped (thank goodness)).

In reference to Q.3: I think your teacher could well have been right. I have read about infants who became blind in one eye because they wore an eyepatch for a few weeks during a crucial part of development, and those neurons which were therefore unstimulated, died off. I've also heard of this happeing with children who for some reason had an ear blocked (treatment for an ear infection or similar) and became deaf. This is very common in infants, since far more neurons are created than can be sustained by the brain, so anything that doesn't get stimulated dies off. Possibly the same thing happened to you: it's certainly the cause I cite for my impaired sence of smell.

[drswirly.livejournal.com]

7. "Have you thought about using your nostrils for some other purpose, such as storing paperclips?"

I reckon that if I ask you that once an hour for the next few days, it'll make its way on there.