His diet is rather plain, and he doesn't enjoy a lot of food. It's mostly meat, fried things and sweets he enjoys. Most vegetables and low-fat dishes he just can't enjoy at all. Luckily he doesn't get a lot of pleasure from eating and that's what keeps him from getting obese.
It also gives him a lot of anxiety that he or his clothes smell bad. He often just can't assess it from other clues. He often needs to ask people to smell him during the day, which leads to some hilarious situations sometimes, but it's not by choice. It's driven by the fear of smelling bad and not realizing it.
It can also get dangerous in some situations, not being able to smell a gas leak, only noticing smoke once it got so thick it will hurt when breathing, and not being able to smell when food goes bad.
Smell and taste seem to be the last two senses/modalities we can't really work with using technology. Vision (cameras) and sound (microphones) have existed for a long time but it's only within the last decade that they've become ubiquitous in the form of a smartphone, and only within the last 5 years that ML is good enough to work across them (ocr, stt).
But for some reason (maybe lack of easy commercial opportunities) we haven't even come close to making "artificial noses" to record raw input. Maybe as part of the push for "embodied humanoid AI" (e.g. Figure) we'll find a way to do that.
The second is that what they’re doing is _fantastically_ complex from a physical standpoint compared to sight and vision - sight is the detection of photons of various wavelengths and energy levels; hearing is the detection of vibrations. Smell and taste are molecular docking problems: they are the detection and identification of the actual structures (or at least substructures) of molecules. The closest we have to that is mass spectrometry, which basically involves flinging molecules hard enough to break them and weighing the parts.
tell him to use Dry Idea antiperspirant (I'd say unscented), the stuff blows anything else away. no need to thank me. (no I don't work there, long term user who ever now and then runs out and is reminded how good it is)
what's up with vegetables though? I love vegetables, but if I were asked what was the thing I least liked about them, I'd say "the smell"
I can smell just fine but I still have carbon monoxide and smoke detectors in my house to alert me if I am asleep and there is a gas leak or fire.
Better than subsisting on fried food and sweets - take the fatty and sweet element from that and apply to veg
I've woken up at night to investigate weird smells. Maybe the smell didn't wake me up, or maybe it didn't wake me up quickly, but I smelled the smell as I was waking up and then did the find the vaguely burning smell game. Last one I remember was a neighbor's bonfire left going when they went to sleep inside.
When I had covid I noticed a difference in how food tasted but it was kinda irrelevant. Food still tasted very good. It might be genetic or something as well. For instance, I can have a double shot of expresso and go to sleep 30 minutes later.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia
Anosognosia is relatively common following different causes of brain injury
The condition does not seem to be directly related to sensory loss but is thought to be caused by damage to higher level neurocognitive processes
I know this is probably just a bit of "editorial spice" because it's an obvious example for "what would you do if you could eat anything" I guess, but I thought capsaicin/spicyness was NOT a taste-perception thing. Isn't more of a pain feeling? I would've assumed you would retain that, while losing the olfactory perception you need for flavours.
I am no expert in this sort of thing, so if anyone knows I'd be genuinely curious about why COVID would affect both of those senses.
Covid is a weird virus. I'd be really curious about the mechanism behind this. I'm sure it's nothing great, like some sort of nerve damage, but at least in my friend's case he and his senses made a full recovery as far as he can tell.
I didn't feel like looking up how to spell allyl isothiocyanate when writing my initial comment. Maybe I should have! I've edited it for clarity, since it's an important distinction which adds to why I'm so danged curious about the mechanism behind my friend's temporary inability to perceive pungency. I also see how my original wording may have implied I was conflating the two, so I've expanded on my friend's experience a bit. He experimented with pepper and radish based spice sources in his pantry.
But also, outside of Japan, 95% of the time the stuff with your sushi isn't wasabi, it's green-colored horseradish-and-mustard paste.
The heat sensation from capsaicin was unaffected. I was eating a lot of vegetable bowls at the time. Adding spiciness was the only that kept them palatable.
There were a few tastes that I could dully perceive but, stupidly, I didn't make notes about what they were.
I can recall one thing that I didn't like: I tried peanut butter, which I typically find delicious, and found it a horrifyingly disgusting soulless paste. It made me wretch. It was awhile, even after I got my sense of smell back, before I could eat it.
I don't believe my sense of smell has recovered to my pre-COVID capability. This story is very interesting to me.
The only “sensation” I had eas texture which I found very gross without flavor.
It was like that for about 2 months and it slowly came back over another 5 maybe 6. Salty was the first thing I noticed.
5 years later and I still don’t smell coffee, gas or a few other things. It’s weird walking down the coffee isle at the store and not smelling it at sll
It's powerfully off-putting, isn't it? I had no idea tasteless texture would be so upsetting.
I hope this treatment becomes something I can partake of personally. I find that I'm using a lot more salt than I used to trying to make up for lack of taste. I switched to a potassium salt substitute to try to reduce my sodium intake.
I could smell fats (e.g. a grilled steak) but anything vaporous just smelled like the sea. Even diesel cars smelled like low tide. Ugh!
Apart from not being able to taste coffee, I also could not taste freshly ground black pepper, fresh spicy peppers, nor Tabasco sauce.
I could only feel the effects of the capsaicin at the back of my throat after having swallowed.
Not totally sure I fully believe it; but it seemingly worked for me.. shrug
It took 10 days to get rid of the flu like symptoms, two weeks to get to semi normal, but my taste hasn't been the same since. Not entirely gone, but very muted.
If these gums were available off the shelf I would buy them in a heartbeat!
The smell/taste of my favorite foods no longer there is one thing, but the lack of ability to tell whether there is something wrong with whmy food was far more concerning.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07498062
looks like it uses flavorings from these folks https://www.tastetech.com/
I eventually adjusted and got used to it and then everything tasted weird again for a while when my senses finally restored after a few months.
It came back very slowly, and unevenly. My coffee/chocolate taste is still quite dim.
Of all the possible smells to lose, why did it have to be those?
It's strange how much these things are hard to discuss without the immediate context - I remember what it was like, but the translation without ready access is surprisingly challenging.
And since taste and smell are so closely related, I haven’t been able to drink colas for about 3 years. Dr Pepper is fine though, so I’m okay.
I wonder if it dulls other senses the opposite of blind people who develop more sensitive hearing.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka formulates a new kind of gum that provides the flavor of a full-course meal in a single stick. Violet Beauregarde steals and chews a piece, but the formula hasn't been worked out yet so when it gets to the blueberry pie she plumps up and turns into a giant human blueberry.
I don't really enjoy the taste or smell of things, and I usually only notice stuff if it's especially strong, or right next to my face. I see that whole sensory thing to being a kind of distraction from living life. Like, why should you care if something smells good or not? I just don't see the point. Regardless, I'd still be interested in it because I can smell stuff like rotting fruit or feces or whatever, so I do understand that there are clear and obvious benefits to knowing "Hey, don't eat that!" because it can make you sick or kill you or whatever.
I think that, being able to smell and taste everything would probably be kind of gross and overwhelming, but it may be worth exploring since so many people make such a big deal out of it. From my perspective though, it all feels like a kind of mass hallucination on a global scale.
If nothing else, it would probably make my cooking a little bit better. I obviously tend to go very crazy with spices and stuff, and my wife kind of suffers through some of it. I've wondered what it'd be like to be able to detect anything other than a kind "terrible taste" for something like wine, or what the hell Swiss cheese is actually (supposedly) "taste" like. And for the record, I still refuse to believe that: Munster, Swiss, Provolone, American, Feta, Parmesan, Beaufort, Camembert, and Romano cheese have an actual "taste" to them! Blue cheese and Roquefort have some flavor, but everything else is just tastes like slightly different cuts of a cold, textured "food substance". It's like insisting that lettuce or spinach have a "flavor"! They're just some crunchy nonsense that you put in between the bread to make the mouth-feel vaguely more interesting; little green piles of nonsense.
[1] I don't know if my issue was from birth, or came on later from a blow to the head, or what. I didn't realize I had Hyposmia until I mentioned how, "All bread tastes exactly the same" in my mid 20's and multiple people started looking at me funny.
Sounds like an amazing product that I would want to buy. I probably chew 20 sticks of gum a day.