Congenital anosmia

I am anosmic. Do you know what that is?

Anosmia comes from the Greek an meaning ‘without’, and osme meaning ‘smell’. Together they mean ‘not having a sense of smell’, no olfaction system. So being anosmic means that you live in a world without smells.

In some ways our world is radically different from you world, but having grown up in our world we are so used to living in a world without smells that we seldom think about how different it is compared to the world of people who can smell. One example: our world is essentially always clean. It can be disorganized, or full of litter, but it can never be dirty in the way it is for people with a sense of smell because being dirty is very much a question of smell. If you take away the smell, you take away the very thing that tells people that something is unclean.

Anosmia is an invisible condition. You quickly notice if someone is blind or deaf, but how do you notice if someone is anosmic? It does not show on the outside, or in the way the anosmic behaves. A person that is born anosmic communicate in the same way as everybody else, eat the same food, and appears to function just like anyone else. But underneath the surface there are differences.

For those that want to know more about anosmia, and especially congenital anosmia, I have written a book (se the menu above) and also collected some useful links to other web sites of interest.

Welcome to my world, a world without smells!