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about the far-reaching implications of his and Buck’s discovery. “Molecular biology and genetics,” he said, “could now interface with neuroscience to approach previously tenuous relationships between genes, behavior, cognition, memory, emotion, and perception.”
    HOWEVER MY BRAIN processed smell, however it allowed me to understand the significance of stock or perfume, it ended when I smashed my skull against the windshield of that car on that August morning. Suddenly, it didn’t matter how my olfactory receptors attached to those poultry-rich molecules. There was nowhere for the signals to go. When my head hit the car, my brain had bounced against the inside of my forehead. With that impact, there was friction. My brain rubbed against the cribiform plate and sheared off the little neuronal endings coming toward it, like a lawn mower over grass. In effect, the impact severed the neurons that connect my nose to my brain. Like the tendon in my leg, they snapped and then receded. No longer could patterns of smell be sent to my brain. With that split-second crash, my sense of smell vanished.
    I had a complete case of anosmia, the clinical term for the lack of ability to perceive smells. Years later, I took the train to Philadelphia to speak with Beverly Cowart, who was the Scientific Director of the Monell-Jefferson Taste and Smell Center, one of a small handful of clinics devoted to those with disorders of olfaction and gustation until it closed in 2010, and to her colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit institute dedicated to the scientific study of taste and smell. It was a bright, clear day and I approached the center, tucked off to the side of the University of Pennsylvania campus in a thick brick building, carrying a bag of notebooks and my digital recorder. I paused for a moment in front of the statue guarding its entrance. It was the fragment of a face by artist Arlene Love, sparkling gold and as tall as the door. The forehead and eyes looked as though they had been ripped off, torn like paper ready for the trash. The disembodied nose, dimpled chin, and lips slightly agape looked mournful and forbidding at the same time. Standing there I felt apprehensive, like I was about to rip the bandage off a very deep wound.
    Here we go, I thought, as I walked in.
    Cowart has seen hundreds of cases of anosmia since 1986, when the center opened. She has seen well over one thousand cases of hyposmia, or a severely reduced sense of smell. She’s seen those with olfactory distortions, for whom the once-familiar scent of butter cookies baking in the oven can turn hard and metallic, like aluminum. She’s seen those with ghostly smell sensations that come from nowhere but within, those known as phantoms. She told me that there has never been a comprehensive study done on the number of those affected by loss of smell in the United States. But numbers in various scientific studies have estimated that 1 to 2 percent of the population under the age of sixty-five has a disorder of some kind, a number that spikes with age. In Sweden, Cowart told me, a study was published to say that 19.1 percent of the population between the ages of twenty and ninety suffered from some kind of olfactory malfunction, while 5.8 percent were fully anosmic. So there must be millions of people around the world with a lost, distorted, or severely muted sense of smell.
    Cowart has seen those who have watched scent gradually melt away, the aroma of coffee brewing weaker each morning, and those who lost it in an instant. For a great number, the cause remains a mystery. But, Cowart says, the “three most common problems we see are either related to ongoing nasal sinus disease, to a prior upper respiratory infection, or to head trauma.”
    After the accident, it would be years before I met anyone who also couldn’t smell. It would be years before I understood the breadth of my invisible loss. But Cowart knew: I wasn’t alone.
    I RECOVERED