‘ The memory is still there’
Yale doctor: Holidays different for those with COVID-19 who lost sense of smell
NEW HAVEN — Being sick with COVID-19 is bad enough, and when it happens during the holiday season it’s even worse.
But must it rob us of our memories of holidays past as well?
Dr. Sharon Stoll is a neuro-immunologist and an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine. She sees patients in the school’s clinical practice, Yale Medicine.
In May, she got COVID-19.
“I had a lot of typical symptoms, minus the cough,” she said.
The symptoms included migraine — “that was the worst” — muscle aches and difficulty with exertion. But as a neurologist, it was the loss of her sense of smell, which lasted for more than three months, that she has thought about the most.
That’s because our sense of smell is intimately connected with our memories, and the smells of Hanukkah or Christmas may recall the most emotional memories of all.
“This year in particular, it’s not just depressing that you can’t visit your family and your family can’t come and visit you, because that’s what the holidays are all about, spending time with family,” Stoll said.
“But those that have COVID or are still in that postCOVID syndrome with loss of smell, it’s going to be extra hard for them because not only are they not with family but they also can’t access those memories by making those foods that their grandmother, their aunt, their mother made for them,” Stoll said.
“And that adds another layer of isolation for those
people in particular.”
Smell is much more associated with memory than vision or even taste, Stoll said.
“If you’re wearing grandmother’s broach, nobody says, ‘Oh, that reminds me of Grandma,’ even though that was literally her broach,” she said.
But if you make Grandma’s latkes or turkey stuffing, you will be instantly transported back to Grandma’s kitchen, she said. That’s because smell and memory are intimately connected in our brains.
“It’s a common link that olfactory and memory go hand in hand, but it was never as apparent as it is now, during COVID, when so many people lost their sense of smell,” she said.
The reason is our smelling sense is connected to the parts of our brain linked to emotions and memories, known as the limbic system, she said.
“The memory is still there, but you can’t access it” without a sense of smell, she said.
The olfactory bulb, located above our nasal cavity, collects aromas from the receptor cells in the cavity and sends signals via cranial nerves to the amygdala, which is involved in emotion and memory, and the hippo
campus, which forms new memories. Both are central parts of the limbic system. The hippocampus is the first part of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease, so while old memories remain deep in the brain, new memories can’t be formed.
“One passes down recipes and we all can buy cookbooks or Google recipes that taste delicious,” Stoll said.
“But one of the reasons that people, especially during the holidays, will bring out those old recipes of Grandmother’s turkey or ham or sufganiyot is to remember what it was like back in the day,” Stoll said. “And one of the reasons … that memory is connected to the sense of smell is because … of that connection between the olfactory bulb and the limbic system.”
Sufganiyot are small jelly doughnuts made during Hanukkah. Stoll, who is Jewish, was fortunate that she lost her smell after Passover, and “by Hanukkah, my smell came back, so I could enjoy all the Hanukkah foods,” including latkes, which her grandmother made.
Losing her sense of smell in the spring didn’t connect so much to those memories.
“When I went outside, it was springtime or the beginning of summer, and I was looking at all the freshly cut grass and all of the freshly mulched lawns.” She couldn’t smell any of it, including flowers or fertilizer in the garden.
While smells can bring back memories of long ago, even in people with Alzheimer’s, “it’s not the same for sight, and it’s not the same for taste, because those nerves don’t have the same access to the limbic system as smell does … or the olfactory nerve,” Stoll said.
While COVID-19 affects taste, it’s not so much a loss as an altered sense, a perception of taste. “Things don’t taste right or taste the same,” Stoll said.
COVID-19 “doesn’t affect the cranial nerves that make up taste. … It’s more of their perception of taste, how it’s supposed to taste,” she said. While holiday foods may not taste the same, the inability to remember holidays of long ago is one more loss the pandemic has delivered.