Ted Audio Collective.

My favorite smell is wet sage brush.

Grill cheese that is directly off of the skillet.

The smell of being in Japan.

Tomato plants, when you pinch off the suckers to help them grow better,

that's the humidity smell of like a mix of plants and water and rain and just warm weather.

When my family and I drive up the Northern California coast, we keep our windows rolled up.

So when we arrive, we can get slammed with the smell of the sea and cypress trees and grass and evergreen trees.

The scent of wool, the smell of soil, goat manure, home remedy, my grandmother used to make.

I live in the tiniest town called Puerto Williams.

And for Christmas, Santa would arrive in a helicopter.

This very strong smell of gasoline means that Santa is coming with gifts.

Smell reminds us of home, of nature, of childhood, of holidays.

It's wrapped up in so many of our memories.

But when asked which of their five senses they'd be willing to give up,

smell is the one most people choose.

What's everybody got against our sense of smell?

Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant dismissed smell as unrefined or even a vulgar sense.

A lot of people think of vision and hearing as much more powerful,

more important to our lives and our survival than smell and the closely related sense taste.

But the COVID-19 pandemic got us paying more attention to these two senses and how they're connected.

At the beginning of the pandemic, before testing was readily available,

...