title: A world without the olfactory dimension.
abstract: This article aims to describe what is it like to perceive reality when suffering from congenital anosmia. Nevertheless, this objective entails a fundamental difficulty. Since I have never had the experience of olfaction, it seems natural to me to live in a world lacking the olfactory dimension; this subjective perception is the only one I know and in consequence it is difficult to describe. For this reason, in recent years I have begun to develop long conversations with other people suffering from congenital anosmia, people who have lost their sense of olfaction in adulthood and also people with a good sense of smell. My goal is to draw a map showing the principal differences that might allow us to develop a systematic comparison. Obviously, this is not an experimental or quantitative scientific procedure, but only a modest attempt to compare personal stories about subjective experiences. It is a philosophical-literary exercise, and does not aim to be anything other than that. But I hope it will help to formulate meaningful questions, which would then need a properly scientific approach. In the first part of this article I want to try to describe how I became aware that other people could smell; and in a second part, I will try to examine the consequences of anosmia in different areas of everyday life: nourishment, relationships with people, own body perception, natural or urban environments perception, time perception, and finally aesthetic appreciation and the implications of living in a world without stench.
authors.affiliation: Philosophy Department, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Campus de Bellaterra, Cerdanyola del Vallés, Barcelona, E-08193, Spain. Marta.Tafalla@uab.es
authors.forename: Marta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tafalla
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological; D001364:Awareness; D001828:Body Image; D017281:Cost of Illness; D004777:Environment; D005247:Feeding Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D009666:Nose / Q000294:innervation*; D009812:Odorants; D000857:Olfaction Disorders / Q000151:congenital* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D009833:Olfactory Pathways / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055696:Olfactory Perception; D011788:Quality of Life; D012903:Smell
keywords: aesthetic appreciation; anosmia; environment perception; nourishment; olfaction; perception; stench; time perception