A century of garlic soups

2022-07-28T05:27:32.062Z

The loss of smell caused by covid is due to infection of the brain. The long covid pandemic requires attention

You're walking down the street of an unknown city, it's raining cats and dogs, you get into a doorway to protect yourself from the elements and, suddenly, without warning or for nothing, the smell of those stairs perfumed by a century of garlic soup and rancid ham broths transports you to a childhood scene forgotten for 40 years, but now presented to you in a form as vivid and vivid as the original experience.

The sense of smell has these things, as the reader will often have seen.

It is very curious that a sense that emerged in evolution as a toxic detector has mastered the art of evocation with such mastery.

The paradigm of this talent is Marcel Proust, whose greatest work,

In Search of Lost Time,

emerges from the smell of a cupcake dipped in chamomile tea.

I say that it emerges from smell, not from taste, because taste is a gross sense that only distinguishes the five coarsest categories (sweet, salty and little else), and it is smell that gives perception its vast range of nuances, its accuracy and sharpness.

Where Proust says taste, he must say smell.

A simple literary error.

The inner wall of the nose is the organ of smell, as the eyes are of sight.

Its function is not to brighten Mother's Day, but to identify the chemicals that circulate in the air.

Whether they come from a flower or from a vegetable water cooker is a minor matter in the larger framework of things.

The nasal epithelium is covered with highly specific chemoreceptors for each substance in the environment, each one made by a gene.

A typical mammal has up to a thousand genes for these receptors.

We can only display about 400, perhaps because our ancestors' brains had to make room for color vision.

The square centimeter is very expensive in the cerebral cortex, the seat of the mind.

The exact list of genes differs in each species.

Bees, for example, have amplified genes that recognize flower scents.

One of the most common symptoms of covid was the loss of smell, anosmia in the jargon.

Many patients have recovered it, but many others continue to be affected months or years after infection, in what is one of the most common signs of long-term covid.

This baffled everyone, including scientists, because a respiratory virus should not be

licensed .

to penetrate the brain, which is where our ability to smell things resides, in addition to all the neurological symptoms that constitute the lion's share of the long covid.

The latest research from the Pasteur Institute in Paris offers a startling explanation.

SARS-CoV-2 induces the formation of a nanotube tunnel through which the virus sneaks from receptor cells in the nose to neurons in the olfactory lobe, the brain's center for processing odors.

A century of garlic soup can be ruined by a simple virus, and with it the memories it evokes, surely the only way to access them, the key to our memories.

We have focused on losing the pleasure of eating, but the problem is much broader.

What things does nature have?

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