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A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells
T
he ability to imagine smells, in normal circumstances, is not that common—most
people cannot imagine smells with any vividness, even though they may be very
good at imagining sights or sounds. It is an uncommon gift, as Gordon C. wrote to me in
2011:
Smelling objects that are not visible seems to have been a part of my life for as
long as I can remember.… If, for instance, I think for a few minutes about my long
dead grandmother, I can almost immediately recall with near perfect sensory
awareness the powder that she always used. If I’m writing to someone about lilacs,
or any specic owering plant, my olfactory senses produce that fragrance. This is
not to say that merely writing the word “roses” produces the scent; I have to recall
a specic instance connected with a rose, or whatever, in order to produce the
eect. I always considered this ability to be quite natural, and it wasn’t until
adolescence that I discovered that it was not normal for everyone. Now I consider it
a wonderful gift of my specific brain.
Most of us, in contrast, have diculty summoning smells to mind, even with strong
suggestion. And it may be oddly dicult to know whether a smell is real or not. Once I
revisited the house where I grew up and where my family lived for sixty years. The
house had been sold to the British Association of Psychotherapists in 1990, and what
used to be our dining room had been turned into an oce. When I entered this room on
a visit in 1995, I immediately and strongly smelled the kosher red wine which used to be
kept in a wooden sideboard next to the dining table and drunk with Kiddush on the
Sabbath. Was I just imagining the smell, assisted by these once intensely familiar,
beloved surroundings and nearly sixty years of memory and association? Or could a few
nanograms of wine have survived all of the repainting and renovation? Smells can be
oddly persistent, and I am not sure whether my experience should be called a heightened
perception, a hallucination, a memory, or some combination of all these.
My father had an acute sense of smell as a young man, and like all doctors of his
generation, he depended on it when seeing patients. He could detect the smell of
diabetic urine or of a putrid lung abscess as soon as he entered a patient’s house. A
series of sinus infections in middle age blunted his sense of smell, and he could no longer
rely on his nose as a diagnostic tool. But he was fortunate that he did not lose his sense
of smell entirely, for total loss of the sense of smell—anosmia, which aects perhaps as
many as 5 percent of people—causes many problems. People with anosmia cannot smell