Forgotten senses

At school, we learned that we had five senses. Sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling/touch. The last one was a bit odd because it came from our skin and hence from all over the body, but the first four related to parts of our face, which made them quite intuitive to learn about. If I recall correctly, these fours senses were taught over a similar timespan.

 

This little nugget came back to my mind when reading an article recently about what is the best smell. The content of the article was predictable enough, with advocates for smells from baking bread to particular flowers. But I was struck by something in the commentary, Two of the judges out of five (maybe the oldest two?) had lost their sense of smell.

 

Then I recalled that my Dad also lost his sense of smell. And I wonder if I have partially lost mine too. If I am out with my family, I always pick up a scent more mildly and later than others, especially the kids. I seem to be quite lucky in that I can encounter bad odours without as much discomfort. Presumably the other side of the coin is that I am picking up less sensory pleasure from good odours.

 

I also notice that my sense of taste is not as acute as the kids’. One of them especially has an amazing ability to place tastes, describe and link them, and recall his history with them. I often sit in wonder at this. But maybe I used to be like that as well.

 

Since being in New York, I have been tested for ailment after ailment. I confessed to some loss of hearing so was sent to an ear expert. Even the GP gave me a sight test, and indeed it is hard to avoid sight specialists and shops and tests, including one for my NY driving licence. But there it stopped. No-one ever asks about my sense of smell. Or, for that matter, taste. Feeling is only tested, as far as I can tell, by things like the knee-jerk test.

 

Now, I wonder why this should be. One sense gets all the treatment it could possibly wish for, and has sprouted a large industry. A second one (I blogged before about hearing seemed to be the poor relation of sight) is starting to generate interest too, albeit too slowly for my taste (or should that be my hearing). But the others are just ignored.

 

Now this strikes me as rather unbalanced, and rather sad, and maybe is an opportunity for someone. Evolution has presumably given us all the senses for a reason. Even nowadays, when our hunter gathering is rather sporadic and our methods for selecting mates are maybe a bit more sophisticated than they used to be, these things must have some uses. They can protect us from danger – eating bad food for example – and have the potential to give us a lot of pleasure. Indeed, if you think about it quite a large part of our pleasure is associated with the senses.

 

Sight somehow has gained prime position. Maybe there is a clue in the driving licence, because there are activities which we now consider quite basic, many work related, which simply require good sight. Given this, the medical industry has responded. It developed good tests with simple, standard, metrics, and then produced workable corrections. I had laser eye surgery and feel it was a good investment and it has improved my quality of life.

 

Hearing is way behind. The test is still pretty awful and unreliable, the metrics are very simple, and the corrections are crude and rather ineffective. Belatedly, the medical industry has woken up to this, and I see a lot more hearing clinics about nowadays. Maybe hearing aids (or laser hearing correction?) will improve markedly in the coming years. I certainly hope so, for my partial deafness (very minor, according to my most recent test) still inhibits my life, and it seems likely to get worse.

 

Why was medicine so far behind? I don’t accept that the science is tougher. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, but medicine generally finds solutions once it starts seriously looking for them, which is when it gets funding or companies see the chance to make money.

 

Hearing loss seems to be associated with age, whereas many people suffer short sight from youth, and that may explain the lack of attention. Old people did not used to be as plentiful as they are now, and their ailments were seen as something they just had to put up with.

 

But I have a theory that more people are slightly deaf than they realise, and that it does marginally disable them. We realise that listening is a key skill in life, but some of us find it physically harder to do that than others, especially in somewhere like a crowded restaurant with modern, metallic furniture.

 

What gets measured gets fixed, and until now the hearing test has held science back. It has not been routinely available at the GP, and seems to be quite susceptible to bad readings. I remember once being asked to press a button when I heard a sound, and it was only half way through that I realised I could see the nurse activating the equipment to make the sound!

 

So I predict a greater interest in hearing solutions in the years to come. And, by the same logic, I predict the same for smell and taste, albeit slowly.

 

While I can make a case that poor hearing can be disabling in a job context, that is harder to do with smell or taste, unless one happens to be a chef or involved in sanitation, I suppose. Often, avoiding pain and disability has led medical progress. But, now we are a bit richer, pleasure can play a role too. Just look at all those ads for facelifts and the like!

 

My theory is that many of us are losing out on a lot of pleasure due to our weak smell or taste. Perhaps all our sense get weaker once we past forty five? Perhaps there are techniques we can deploy that would not even need medical intervention? A Paulo Coelho novel talks about love between two people only being real once it has been experienced with all five senses. This rings pretty true to me, and probably all the senses matter in other contexts too.  

 

What I know is that smell (and taste) are powerful, and that the money men should be interested. When I worked for Shell I was for a time involved in marketing our shops. I became convinced that an odour was potentially a massive hidden inducement to buy, especially an odour of bread or, even better, coffee. At the time the science of this was nascent, and I was told that chemicals would soon be available to simulate things smells, but not yet. Finally, people are catching on to this, and soon these chemical odours will be routine in some shops.

 

And then, marketers will finally realise that us oldies have partially lost our sense of smell. And the medical industry will finally step up. They will develop reliable tests, metrics, advice and corrections. Maybe when I reach seventy and I visit the GP for routine tests, these will for the first time include smell and taste. And even something more subtle for feeling than the old knee jerk too.

 

Perhaps this will be a bit late for me, but not the next generation. Another theory I have is that glasses will soon be obsolete (except as a fashion item) as someone will develop a reliable life-long correction that can be cheaply applied in childhood. Then, maybe twenty years later, similar innovations might become available for the other senses.

 

So, there is an investment opportunity for someone, and something the medical industry can more usefully focus on than wholly cosmetic things. Let me know please when something useful becomes available. Just remember please to use large print or a loud voice.