You know how you always here that you smell burning toast or smoke of something like that right before you have a stroke? Why is that? Is it just anecdotal or is there science behind it?
In: Biology
Smelling burning toast is related to seizures, not strokes, and this is anecdotal not actual scientific fact.
Where this comes from is a patient of Canadian Doctor Wilder Penfield, a pioneer in neurosurgery.
He was treating a woman with seizures who could swear she would smell burned toast before each episode. He opened her skull and electrically probed her brain looking for a part that triggered her sensation of smelling burnt toast, which by extension could be responsible for her seizures.
The case was featured as a vignette called ‘Heritage Minutes’ which aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or CBC in the 1990s. Many of these vignettes entered popular culture.
This created a collective memory of people associating the smell of burnt toast with seizures.
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