After contracting the coronavirus in December, the Times food writer Tejal Rao was left depressed and disoriented when her sense of smell disappeared. “All of the foods I loved became unrecognizable, turning into a series of unappealing textures,” she wrote.
To help recover what she had lost, Tejal turned to smell training, which involved hours of sniffing particular scents. “Recognizing a smell when you’re in training can feel a lot like picking up a fragment of a familiar song from a passing car,” she said, “hooking onto the short sequence of notes you recognized, and having the name of it just on the tip of your tongue.”
The New York Times