Anosmia

Making coffee in the morning, baking a cake, and walking through a garden are delightful experiences to anybody but what makes them wonderful is what most of us take for granted: the smell of each. I think the sense we think of the least is our sense of smell. We don't often think of what it would be like if we didn't have it. Olfaction is vital for the ability to taste a variety of flavors and without it, we can only taste the basic tastes of bitter, sweet, and sour. We would also be unable to detect if something is burning or if there's a gas leak, which is very dangerous. 

Anosmia is when a person loses the sense of smell. It can be caused by a head injury, certain chemicals, or can be congenital. There are other causes listed in this website.  The way we can detect odors is by our olfactory cells in the nose which then send signals to the brain. When someone has lost their sense of smell it's because either something is blocking these nerve cells or they have been injured and can't send messages back to the brain.

The following video demonstrates how many people don't know what anosmia is or have never heard about it. They show two people who have anosmia, a teenager girl and a middle age man. The girl lost her sense of smell when she was a baby through a head injury. The man lost it due to being exposed to certain chemicals during a class. They mention that the taste is more appreciated and associated with the texture of the food. 

Don't take your sense of smell for granted! 

I don't remember...

I remember when my grandfather would pass his days in an absent state of mind. He would just sit for the most part of the day, maybe watch tv. We all knew he had problems remembering things, people, and names but he was never actually diagnosed with a type of dementia. He lived in Mexico and his doctor visits weren't about cognitive function but more about physical condition.

After my grandmother passed away, he would ask where she was even though he went to the funeral. My aunts and uncles wouldn't tell him over and over again because they didn't want him to get upset. They would tell him she was out visiting a relative and would come back later. I think that after a couple of months he started to really miss her though. Only four months went by when he had a stroke but, sadly, wasn't able to recover from it. He was, at the time, 88 years old so the doctors explained that there wasn't much hope. Looking back now and with what I know about dementia, he might have had vascular dementia. That's "...subtle, progressive decline in memory and cognitive functioning. It occurs when the blood supply carrying oxygen and nutrients to the brain is interrupted by a blocked or diseased vascular system." It explains more about it in this website.

We shouldn't just assume that a person has dementia if they are just forgetful. Dementia engulfs more symptoms besides memory loss. This video explains the difference between forgetfulness and dementia or Alzheimer's. Dementia is the term used for the general problem of cognitive failure and memory loss but there's actually many types of it, most common one being Alzheimer's.

Why we say what we say

Communication is, most of the time, taken for granted. We don't realize how essential it is to our everyday lives. We are always communicating with other people around us via different means of expression. The most common type is our language and writing abilities. Now, you might think, how is it that we can talk and write? We often don't think of what part of our brain is responsible for these important tasks. For the majority of humans, the area responsible for language and writing is the left hemisphere of our brain. Broca's area is responsible for the spoken language and forming complete sentences. Wernick's area is responsible for the comprehension of such language. Imagine if you weren't able to communicate what you're thinking to another person? It would be incredibly frustrating.

Usually when people aren't able to communicate what they want to say it's because they've had a stroke and it affected the left hemisphere of the brain, and in consequence also the language areas. The term for term used to describe someone who has had this happen to them is aphasia, which is a language disability. The following video shows a guy that had a stroke and affected his left hemisphere. Due to the stroke and since each hemisphere is responsible for the opposite side of the body, he experiences Broca's aphasia and right side weakness on his entire body. It shows how he has difficulty forming words he wants to say as well as walking.

There are rehabilitation services for these kinds of situations and it seems he is recovering well. Of course, it takes extensive hours of hard work and patience to recover from something like this but it's totally doable.