Originally aired October 15, 2007.
Tom Fudge: The sense of smell is something that all healthy people have. But it has a bit of an image problem. Can you imagine the Lions Club raising money to help people who have problems smelling things? They do it for people with vision problems, but unlike a person's loss of vision or hearing, we somehow don't consider the loss of sense of smell to be a serious disability.
Rachel Herz, however, says when sense of smell is lost, it is a serious problem. It affects a person's ability to eat, to fall in love, to remember things and to experience life as we expect to be able to. In fact, serious depression often accompanies the loss of sense of smell.
Guest
- Rachel Herz , faculty member of Brown University . She is the author of the book The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell .
