Re:You can make smells with ultrasound
by shaky-carrousel on Saturday November 22, 2025 @08:15PM
(#46019847)
This is something I'm still testing, so take it with a bucket of salt, but I've found that exposing myself to very strong samples of things that I was unable to smell made something click again and I started to smell them again. Seems like something in there needs to be retrained to odors.
I'm convinced that over the decades we'll continue to be a little surprised but just how much of our body-machinery is doing jobs of self-calibration, regulation, and safety-interlocks.
Re:You can make smells with ultrasound
by robrain on Saturday November 22, 2025 @10:19PM
(#46020463)
That's the basic method of retraining. I've got a bunch of essential oils in tiny jars and I regularly take a 20 second sniff of each whilst thinking strongly about the smell in context. For example, when I smell the lavender oil I recall the garden at my grandma's house which obviously was full of lavender. It's definitely helping, but there are still a lot of gaps.
There has been promising work on olfactory training, which you can do very inexpensively at home. If you can, I would consider seeing any ENT first to rule out polyps, etc.
Intriguingly some of the really unpleasant smells never get through to me - I could probably work at a sewage works now. Worryingly I have next to no ability to smell burning, though I do now get the smell of natural gas (or the additive used to make it smell).