What causes smelling burnt rubber with no source and could it be an aura?

[JoshuaD]

I’ve been having these strange episodes where I’ll suddenly smell something very strong, like burnt rubber, but no one else can smell it and there’s no source. It only lasts for a minute, but it’s so vivid and unsettling. My doctor mentioned it could be a type of aura from a focal seizure, which really surprised me because I don’t have any other symptoms I recognize. Has anyone else experienced these isolated olfactory hallucinations?

[OliverA]

I get this too, and it’s really unsettling when there’s no source. A few years ago I had a brief spike where I smelled burnt rubber for about a minute. No one else noticed anything, and there didn’t seem to be a trigger I could name. It faded as quickly as it appeared, and that was that for a while.

[EthanM]

Has anyone else experienced this isolated smell thing? It feels like a tiny storm in your nose, there’s nothing around you that matches, and then it’s gone. For me it tended to show up during stressful days, but tests with the doctor didn’t pin anything down.

[LunaLM]

I did read about olfactory aura as a possible focal seizure symptom. Some people report it as a single episode with no other signs, and then nothing. I’m not saying that’s what this is, but it did make me rethink what ‘normal’ can look like in the moment.

[MatthewA]

Sometimes I worry I’m overthinking it, but other times I forget about it until the next whiff. If it keeps happening, I’ve thought about keeping a simple log of when it comes up and what else was going on, just to see if there’s any pattern at all.