Issue 222

October 2025

Ray Klerck sniffs out new science showing fighters may be losing their sense of smell — and gaining something far stranger.

 The world is not the same for everyone. Most of the time, you only see it through the lens of the scalps and scars you’ve earned. As life interacts with your senses through light, sound, touch, and smell, MMA can often neurologically rearrange them in somewhat curious ways. Our curiosity piqued about these changes after a Brazilian study published last month in The International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology found that MMA fighters scored lower on smell tests than non-fighters. Okay, so expecting to enjoy a refined sense of smell if you’re an MMA fighter is like wearing a white shirt on pasta night, optimistic at best. That said, it does represent a slow dimming of one of your oldest senses, where the olfactory bulb —a tiny nerve cluster that sits behind your nose —is the primary shock absorber for jabs. Yet for all the senses that are dulled by violence, others often sharpen in rather unexpected ways. Vision gets focused. Hearing can become more acute. Touch grows oddly predictive. As this sensory rewiring happens, here’s why your eerie sixth sense can light up with a unique awareness we’re only just beginning to understand. 

THE SCENT OF VIOLENCE

We’ll start with the most boring of the senses, that’s the first to throw in the towel: smell. What you may not realize is that smell is your memory’s back door. A single whiff can transport you back in time. Mum’s brownies. The stale sweat in your first gym. The muscle rub on your first coach’s hands. It’s called the Proust Effect. Scent unlocks memories your brain forgets, giving them more emotion and detail than almost any other sense. It’s nostalgia, directly connected to your brain's amygdala, that may be nearly imperceptible to you. For fighters, the door to that time machine may close very slowly, according to the Brazilian research, which is why memory can start to dim as a fighter's career ages. Without those scent triggers, you may lose the sensory shortcuts that connect your neurons to the past. It’s not something to be overlooked, because when people with a poor sense of smell were surveyed, 33% had more food safety issues, and 14% couldn’t detect gas leaks, resulting in someone being hurt. Fortunately, you can regain this smell, especially after mechanical problems, such as a deviated septum, have been surgically corrected. Once you’re no longer rocking a Jack Della beak, Harvard University suggests the healing process can be unlocked by sniffing intense aromas such as oranges, peanut butter, eucalyptus, rosemary, cinnamon, pine, peppermint, or cloves. You can do this by purchasing a smell retraining kit online and repeating it twice per day, smelling each scent for 30-120 seconds each time. After a few months, your smell should return, in a kind of olfactory rehabilitation, as your neurons relearn what life used to smell like. And if you start keeping your distance from your hand wraps, you know you’re making progress. 

THE ILLUSION OF FLAVOR

Exercise changes everything. Especially flavor. And the higher a fighter travels up the training ladder, the more their taste buds act like interns on minimum wage. A Kyoto research paper had participants perform repeated bouts of cycling and found that as fatigue increased, taste intensity rose. For evidence, just watch a Paddy Pimblett video of him eating post-training. Your taste buds become more sensitive to sweetness and salt after exercise because your brain is desperate for fast fuel. MMA is all about extreme exercise, creating blood sugar drops that make every cell beg for sustenance. This means fighters may be more prone to stronger urges to make poor food choices than most other athletes. What’s more, a weight class athlete’s diet can be unforgiving compared to other athletes'. When you look at long-term fight camps that include weight cuts and bland diets, this can dull flavor recognition. If you eat spicy foods all the time, they stop having as much kick after a while, so the reverse happens if you’re always eating bland foods. This won’t make you develop superhuman taste, but it will most likely create a taste system that prioritizes what keeps you fueled up and alive. So that steak and rice are just a meaningless survival tool, not some sort of food experience you appreciate. You can retrain those taste buds to come back online, suggests a paper in the journal Nature. By tasting something deliberately, it tells your brain to slow down when you’re eating, almost as a pacing measure. Eating more leisurely and consciously tasting your food can restore sensitivity if you’re feeling unenthusiastic about the taste of bland prep diets. The researchers suggest it may even help with weight management as your brain relearns the signals that tell you that you’ve had enough. You won’t taste more. You’ll just taste better. 

THE EYES OF WAR

Eyes are not MMA’s battering ram. Sure, there’s the odd injury that goes viral, but 2024 research in Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery examined two decades of data and found that while boxing recorded more overall eye injuries, MMA caused fewer severe ones. Most cuts were just swelling and short-term trauma. A Picasso painting for a week, then back to normal. What’s more interesting is how MMA changes a fighter’s vision through a phenomenon called perceptual narrowing. A meta-analysis on the topic found fighters really do see the fight differently. They looked at 27 studies and found elite fighters were 50% more accurate than non-experts when anticipating attacks because they used fewer visual fixations. They were able to lock into information-rich zones, such as the shoulders and hips, which helped predict movement before it happened. That’s neural efficiency harnessed over thousands of hours, where the visual cortex learns what matters and deletes the rest. Their quiet-eye periods, during which the final gaze steadied before movement, lasted longer and aligned perfectly with the act of taking action. The microsaccades, which are the tiny tremors the eyes make during fixation, become more precise to give the brain rapid-fire data about an opponent’s intent. Think of it as being able to spot the feint before it’s born, while the rookie sees nothing but static. This means fighters don’t learn to react faster; they just anticipate sooner, which can narrow the world, since their brains can edit out everything that doesn’t matter. 

SOUNDS OF SURVIVAL

Your ears are training, whether you’re aware of it or not. The thud of the gloves. The hiss of a breath leaving someone’s body. It all creates a soundtrack scientists call an auditory feedback loop. These cues help an MMA fighter learn, whether they know it or not. A study published in Behavioral Interventions found that when MMA coaches used a handheld clicker, like the kind a dog trainer would use, to reinforce the correct striking step, fighters’ technique accuracy improved by almost 90% and stayed there during a follow-up. The click was a Pavlovian cue that created a reward system that, in this instance, worked better than the coach's voice. This meant that a punch didn’t just feel right, it sounded right. These same ideas echo in other research that found MMA fighters listen to their way through most training sessions. The pops, whacks, and booms from heavy bag work were feedback that told them about rhythm, focus, and discipline. A good hit created a sound everyone recognized. The bad hits created a silence that no one respected. Break it down, and it’s all about frequency, which fighters often trust these far more than spoken words or mirrors. “Sound creates a habit of knowing,” wrote the researchers. These studies show that MMA isn’t going to give you ninja-hearing that could hear a snake blink, but during training, it acts like the deep baseline that everyone subconsciously nods their head to. Fighters develop selective auditory gating, allowing them to mute everything but the signals that matter. Think of it as that moment when your girl talks to you during a football game, but all you hear are the commentators. This is why a coach's voice can slice through the crowd's roar because the fighter’s brain knows this is the frequency that carries survival data. Whether the dog clicker will ever carry the same weight, we’ll never know, but cauliflower ears are clearly nature’s noise-cancelling headphones.

THE SENSE OF IMPACT

Touch has always been MMA’s truth serum. It tells you everything you need to know about distance, timing, and pain. However, there’s a deeper story that runs beneath the skin, one bound by fascia. In The Secret of Fascia in the Martial Arts, author Sol Petersen describes this connective tissue as “a living tensional network that listens.” Fascia is that white web of connective tissue that encapsulates all your muscles, and we used to think it was just a sack that held everything in place, but we now know that it’s your body’s biggest sense organ that links everything together, including your organs. It sends real-time feedback about pressure, movement, and energy faster than your brain can process it. It’s a communication device that works through vibration, and in fighters, it’s conditioned to become a predictive system. Grapplers read and feel the tension. Strikers hit and feel the recoil. This is a conversation that runs deeper than your skin, because sensitivity comes at a price. A paper found that MMA athletes develop stronger neck muscles but have reduced mobility compared to regular exercisers. Repeated impacts make you adapt, so the neck and shoulder fascia tighten, which can make movement stiffer over time. Ironically, this is a protective seatbelt, but fighters need this fascia to be looser for faster punches and better defense. To preempt this loss of mobility, the researchers recommend rebuilding fascial flexibility before it’s lost through slow neck-rotation drills, balance work, and recovery protocols to keep this tissue supple and responsive. The take-home message is that when fascia stiffens — because it’s adapting to MMA — your reactions may slow. By keeping it supple, you’ll keep your feel for the fight alive. 

THE SIXTH SENSE

Almost every fighter will eventually train and compete past the five basic senses and sweat themselves into a headspace that’s difficult to explain. It’s something that lets you read an opponent before the punch leaves the dock. It’s the way long-term MMA practitioners describe the practice —not just as a sport, but as a sense of identity that shapes how they perceive the world. They report enhanced awareness, emotional control, and better self-regulation thanks to the lifelong embedded learning. That’s the sixth sense. It's a complete body intuition built by thousands of micro-corrections and feedback loops. The lessons this sport offers impact you so profoundly that training becomes indistinguishable from living. It's why elite fighters never chase adrenaline. They only chase calm. It means that when the battle starts, violence is only the backdrop, because the real fight is about finding harmony between their perception and the control they have over it.