The man whose smelly hallucinations predict the weather

A 64-year-old man with Parkinson's Disease has been putting on weight these last five years. It's hard not to because he's found that eating brings him relief from unpleasant phantom odours. Things are normal when he wakes up each day, but as time progresses he comes to experience an increasingly intense smell of skunk excrement mixed with onion. Stranger still, he's found that on a 0-10 scale the stench intensifies from 0 to 7-10 in the few hours preceding a storm. Writing in the International Journal of Biometeorology, S.R. Aiello at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Alan Hirsch at the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation state that this is the "first reported case of weather-induced exacerbation of phantosmia." Apart from a pending storm, other factors that intensify the man's odour hallucinations include "coughing, nasal congestion, and tiredness". Relief comes not just from eating but also "watching TV, nasal irrigation ... occluding the nostrils ... snorting salt water, blowing of the nose, laughing ... humming and talking." Aiello and Hirsch conducted extensive tests of the patient's smelling abilities and found him to be significantly impaired. This is consistent with a diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease and makes sense in terms of his hallucinations, the researchers explained, because "impaired ability to smell allows disinhibition of spontaneous olfactory discharge." The researchers present several possible explanations for why the man's phanto...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs