That's what I was trying to say. The sense of smells really affects you in subtle ways. A positive smell can calm you and a negative one bring anxiety. I wonders if some people are able to intuitively "feel" diseases that way.
Yeah, unless they've been examined by a doctor, it's hard to overstate the power and seeming realness of psychological symptoms that may simply be triggered by a bad smell.
I'm someone with an extremely sensitive sense of smell.
When I had COVID (the first time) at one point my sense of smell became corrupted. I didn't realize it at first. For days I smelled a tangerine smell in my apartment (where I was mostly holed up in those days). I kept thinking that they were cleaning the building carpets with some sort of new cleaner, and it was coming in the vents.
After days of this I opened the window and smelled this smell much more intensely in the wind. Then with some experimentation I realized, it's me not the world.
I worried that everything would smell like that forever, but luckily it came back. Something similar happened with smoke, where I felt like certain smells (coffee, for example) smelled like someone was smoking. Another confusing experience.
Where you get extremely heightened sense of smell?
Because you know how covid made many people lose their sense of smell, many permanently?
It did the reverse to me, it made my sense of smell exponential. I've only read a couple stories of other people having this problem.
It's not a good thing. The world smells horrible. Way way before I can even hear the garbage truck I can smell it blocks away. Even if a street is empty early in the morning I can smell when someone has been there recently smoking cigarettes or other.
It's like some kind of fight or flight survival instinct or adaptation is triggered by the immune system.
Yes. What you are saying is not really contrary to what I believe. I exaggerated a little to make my point. What I described is the first approximation, because it is often far from what people really believe to be true. One would not need sense of "smell" when something is off, if there would not be things that are not off.
20 years ago, my marketing professor was talking about scent being the sense most strongly linked with memories. The smell of exhaust taking him back to his country of origin. Sticking with medical smells, my sister can smell bladder cancer. Not sure how common that is, but she used to work in urology and after a urine sample was turned in, she could tell ahead of time who was sick.
I imagine that smell has helped shape how we find food and avoid disease and has been reinforced since some long ago ancestor likely common to many mammals or even further back. We often think of dogs or bears for their well developed sense of smell or even sharks sensing blood in the water.
Fun fact: humans are more sensitive to the smell of petrichor (fresh rain on dry ground) than sharks are to blood.
These things have always been pretty obviously uncomfortable for me to be around, since way before I've come across research like this. Have you considered that your body just doesn't have the capacity to notice it? A poor sense of smell is possible, and is a risk factor for many things.
Worth pointing out that humans can also smell disease in human breath - broad odours point to disease of particular organs (liver, kidney) and also to some specific diseases (diabetes).
People can communicate by smell too - willy-nilly. Most often it's bacteria on human skin that detects changes - such as stress hormones - and respond in their own ways. Some people can smell stress in other people.
I think the parent comment meant that the infected individual might not be addressing the smell because they could not perceive it, and it would therefore be greater than typical for them.
I've been able to smell infections (which makes sense, the immune response of an infection would mis with your whole microbiome). That's pretty different from smelling Parkinson's.
There are just distinct smells you start to pick up on as you treat a variety of illnesses. There is no superpower to it. Scents tend to form a long memory, so if you catch a good whiff of a suppurative exudate you'll never forget it. For many of us we probably pick up on some VOCs emitted by various bacteria and it can give us the strong intuition the poster above describes.
I bought a air filter with a smell detector. The smell detector can detect a fart and then ramps up the fans, but it can also detect some feelings/emotions like anxiety. This makes me believe our subconscious can pick up these feelings as "smells".
I have suffered with severe nasal allergies as a kid. And had a hard time smelling anything because my nose was stuffed. I realized that I developed a sense of "smell" in my hand. I could actually feel the air. And tell what it smells like.
For those who can't believe it, smells have a pH, humidity, heat capacity, temperature, density, and pressure to them. So if you can train your skin to be sensitive and concentrate on those things you can feel smells.
It was not long till I realized that people give off a certain odor. And those odors are often related to the germs on their body. And the food they ate. Sometimes I could even tell if the person was sick.
I never developed a method of detecting illnesses simply by waving my hand on the person unless I was acutely familiar with the sickness, but if we can develop machines to detect "smell" (a fact I did not know) then we can definitely detect machines to scan people as they walk through a door and tell what germs they carry.
Of course my dream powers are to tell what antigerm ointment each person should use.
I actually met a friend of mines recently and unfortunately due to a head injury lost his ability of smell. The doctor’s didn’t realize it and neither did he for quite while till one day he got sick eating fish from his refrigerator that was stale and he couldn’t figure out. So, it definitely plays an important role. On the positive side he doesn't detect any bad odors, but that means he wouldn’t know he is stinking either. He makes sure he is well cologned/deodorant-ized :) Also, he misses the smell of delicious food and other good things!
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