She is a nurse who became a scientist of the senses most of us ignore. A conversation about why flavor is mostly smell, what a fading sense of smell can reveal about your brain, and why she says paying attention is its own kind of science.
When you think you are tasting your food, you are mostly smelling it. Paule breaks flavor down into smell, taste, texture, and temperature, and smell does most of the work. It is also the one sense wired straight to memory, which is why a single smell can throw you back to a specific kitchen from decades ago.
Losing your sense of smell can be one of the earliest signs of Parkinson's or dementia, sometimes years ahead of any memory or movement changes. Paule spotted her mother-in-law's dementia because her cooking suddenly got too salty and too sweet. She wants a smell test to be as routine at the doctor's office as checking your eyes or your ears.
Patients kept telling Paule their food tasted like nothing after weight-loss surgery, and it never made it into their charts. She would also walk into a hospice room and know something was wrong from the smell alone. Her mom in Venezuela taught her to pay close attention to people, and that habit of noticing became her science.
Paule almost didn't apply for the Guggenheim because she saw a Nobel winner had won it the year before. She applied anyway, and became the first nurse scientist to get it in the fellowship's hundred years. Her point is simple: not applying is just saying no to yourself. And she is proud that all of this started at a community college in the Bronx.