Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind by A.S. Barwich

Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli “spark” neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell―only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience―doesn’t work this way. So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?

A. S. Barwich turned to experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the mechanics and meaning of odors. She discovered that scents are often fickle, and do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Upending existing theories of perception, Smellosophy offers a new model for understanding how the brain senses and processes odors.

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Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food by Rachel Herz

How is personality correlated with preference for sweet or bitter foods? What genres of music best enhance the taste of red wine? With clear and compelling explanations of the latest research, Rachel Herz explores these questions and more in this lively book. Why You Eat What You Eat untangles the sensory, psychological, and physiological factors behind our eating habits, pointing us to a happier and healthier way of engaging with our meals.

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Remembering Smell: A Memoir of Losing - And Discovering - The Primal Sense

In November 2005, Bonnie Blodgett was whacked with a nasty cold. After a quick shot of a popular nasal spray up each nostril, the back of her nose was on fire. With that, Blodgett—a professional garden writer devoted to the sensual pleasures of garden and kitchen—was launched on a journey through the senses, the psyche, and the sciences. Her olfactory nerve was destroyed, perhaps forever. She had lost her sense of smell.

Phantosmia—a constant stench of “every disgusting thing you can think of tossed into a blender and pureed”—is the first disorienting stage. It’s the brain’s attempt, as Blodgett vividly conveys, to compensate for loss by conjuring up a tortured facsimile. As the hallucinations fade and anosmia (no smell at all) moves in to take their place, Blodgett is beset by questions: Why are smell and mood hand-in-hand? How are smell disorders linked to other diseases? What is taste without flavor? Blodgett’s provocative conversations with renowned geneticists, smell dysfunction experts, neurobiologists, chefs, and others ultimately lead to a life-altering understanding of smell, and to the most transformative lesson of all: the olfactory nerve, in ways unlike any other in the human body has the extraordinary power to heal.

Navigating Smell and Taste Disorders by Dr. Ronald Devere, MD and Marjorie Calvert

"Demos Health and the American Academy of Neurology Present a New Book for Patients with Smell and Taste Disorders

Over 200,000 people visit doctors each year for smell and taste problems. Since our ability to smell and taste decreases with age, up to 14 million Americans aged 55 and older may live with these disorders, undiagnosed. Smell and taste disorders affect a person's ability to enjoy food and drink and may result in decreased appetite, weight loss, and too much added sugar and salt in the diet. In severe cases they may lead to depression. Smell and taste problems can also interfere with personal safety, limiting the ability to notice smoke and potentially harmful chemicals and gases.

Navigating Smell and Taste Disorders is a unique collaboration between a doctor and a food consultant that both addresses the subject of smell and taste loss and provides food preparation tips and a special recipe section that will appeal to other senses and make food attractive again. This is a must-have reference book for all those living with smell and taste disorders.

The book covers the whole disorder including

• How smell and taste work

• Causes of smell and taste problems

• Treatments

• What you can expect when you visit a specialist

• Recipes that will appeal to other senses and make food attractive again

• First-person accounts of coping with this disorder

Navigating Smell and Taste Disorders is the inaugural book in the series Neurology Now Books from the American Academy of Neurology. Inspired by Neurology Now, the AAN's leading neurologic patient information magazine, Neurology Now Books are written from a multidisciplinary approach, combining the expertise of a neurologist with other related experts and patients and caregivers. Each volume will provide the reader with the most up-to-date information, answers to questions and concerns, and first-person accounts of others who are living with a neurologic disorder."

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A World Without Smells by Lars Lundqvist

Imagine what it would be like to live in a world where smells do not exist.

How does food taste without smells and how do you avoid eating bad food? How do you keep yourself, your cloths and your home clean if there are no smells to tell you that things are dirty? In this book Lars Lundqvist tells you about his anosmic life, about living without a sense of smell, about living in a world where everyone around him perceives a dimension that has never existed in his world. Learn how being anosmic affects the perception of both space and time, how to spot if your child is anosmic, of being an anosmic parent and of the dangers anosmia may cause. Learn how being anosmic can cause anger, frustration and sorrow, but also comic situations and situations where being anosmic makes you a superhero. Learn about causes, cures and technical aids, and how anosmics around the world use the internet to support each other.

Welcome to a world without smells!

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Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way by Molly Birnbaum

An aspiring chef's moving account of finding her way—in the kitchen and beyond—after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smell

At twenty-two, just out of college, Molly Birnbaum spent her nights reading cookbooks and her days working at a Boston bistro, preparing to start training at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. She knew exactly where she wanted the life ahead to lead: She wanted to be a chef. But shortly before she was due to matriculate, she was hit by a car while out for a run in Boston. The accident fractured her skull, broke her pelvis, tore her knee to shreds—and destroyed her sense of smell. The flesh and bones would heal...but her sense of smell?And not being able to smell meant not being able to cook. She dropped her cooking school plans, quit her restaurant job, and sank into a depression.

Season to Taste is the story of what came next: how she picked herself up and set off on a grand, entertaining quest in the hopes of learning to smell again. Writing with the good cheer and great charm of Laurie Colwin or Ruth Reichl, she explores the science of olfaction, pheromones, and Proust's madeleine; she meets leading experts, including the writer Oliver Sacks, scientist Stuart Firestein, and perfumer Christophe Laudamiel; and she visits a pioneering New Jersey flavor lab, eats at Grant Achatz's legendary Chicago restaurant Alinea, and enrolls at a renowned perfume school in the South of France, all in an effort to understand and overcome her condition.

A moving personal story packed with surprising facts about our senses, Season to Taste is filled with unforgettable descriptions of the smells Birnbaum rediscovers—from cinnamon, cedarwood, and fresh bagels to rosemary chicken, lavender, and apple pie—as she falls in love, learns to smell from scratch, and starts, once again, to cook

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The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell by Rachel Herz

Embark on a voyage of scientific and cultural discovery that covers the many varied aspects of scent and how it affects our emotions, preferences, memories, health, sexuality, relationships, and food cravings.

The Scent of Desire fascinates readers with how and why the sense of smell is so powerful and how it is even being harnessed by business and in new innovative technologies.  This book compels the reader to never again take their sense of smell for granted, because once these pages have been turned one will never forget how vital the sense of smell is to the most important aspects of our life.

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