Remembering Smell

Overall, I found this book fascinating. The neuroscience of smell compared to other senses is a topic that interests me, moreso since last winter I lost most of my sense of smell for a few months as a lingering effect of COVID-19. I didn't lose it completely like the author did (and I've never had scent hallucinations), but she was absolutely spot on with describing how losing the sense of smell dulls the whole world, far beyond experiences of food.

Like the author, I am also very emotionally connected to my sense of smell, though for different reasons than hers. I went into this book expecting a combination of science and memoir, and for the most part it did not disappoint. But when it did disappoint, it was extremely concerning.

There were some parts that were more conjecture than reporting on research, which I found off-putting. If the author were a biologist or social scientist (or even someone who wasn't cis and straight, when talking about gender and sexuality), her conjectures wouldn't have been so off-putting, but even with her caveats about being out of her expertise, it was inappropriate much of the time.

She occasionally remarks on the phenomenon of smell loss (or smell reappearing) correlating with weight changes, and how olfaction affects one's levels of hunger and satiety hormones, and she wonders if food manufacturers manipulate the smell profile of high-fat foods on purpose. She mentions how (newly) sorry she feels for fat people in light of learning about how disrupted hunger and satiety hormones can affect weight. (The research she reports on doesn't make an assumption of “eureka! this is what causes all fatness!”) She point-blank states that she previously assumed we fat people were just gluttons who don't have the moral character required not to overeat. It would have been fine for her to speculate that her anosmia altered her hunger and satiety cues, and for her to relate this to her own weight changes, and even for her to relate how she felt compelled to lose weight. But she didn't stick to her own experiences, and just assumed that her reason for weight gain (inadvertently overeating) was the reason for all weight that's judged by society as “too much.”

I recommend skipping the entire gender and sexuality chapter. The arguments involve the idea of prehistoric humans following the recently-debunked “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” division of labor, the specter of pheremones as an explanation for human behavior as complex as infidelity, the labeling of lab rats that engage in same-sex sexual behavior after having their pheremone senses altered as “gender confused,” and brain scans being interpreted in ways that equate straight man sexuality with lesbian sexuality (and straight woman sexuality with gay man sexuality), and using the words “masculine” and “feminine” to describe (heterosexual) reproductive behaviors in animals. (In my queer transgender opinion, calling rat mounting “masculine behavior” makes as much sense as calling bathing a “feminine” activity.)

There's inconsistency in the book about what a pheremone is, when discussing the possibility of humans having them. In rats and fruit flies, pheremones directly cause reproductive behaviors, like mounting or going into the lordosis position, and there is no choice involved; they will do it no matter what. Humans are neurologically able to choose to stop doing a reproductive behavior at any time, and at no point in the book does the author mention this problem when describing how various researchers have responded to the question of whether human pheremones exist. A major criticism of the idea that humans have pheremones is indeed that humans choose how and whether to respond to feeling arousal and attraction. (Humans don't go into heat, and even the most attraction-driven straight cis dude doesn't act on every attraction he has.)

In passing, there's also reference to the tongue map and menstrual synchrony myths as if they're true facts. The section with the menstrual synchrony has evopsych conjectures that fail to consider that if half of the prehistoric human group gives birth at the same time, that is extremely disadvantageous for the group's survival. There's also a weird conjecture that abstract thought requires language? I don't even know how it related to olfaction. The idea of language as a prerequisite for experiencing abstract thought is not innocent and has been used to harm babies, deaf people and people with language disabilities; it's still used to harm those groups. My thoughts are not all in words, and many autistic people's thoughts are not in words.

Overall, I liked the parts of the book that stuck to memoir and to reporting on science without inappropriate conjectures about gender, fat people, linguistics and sexuality.