--- title: "Study: Smelling Stuff While You Sleep Could Improve Your Memory" description: "An experiment on older adults found that diffusing smells during sleep dramatically boosted their memory over the course of six months." date: "2023-08-07" modified: "2023-08-07" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/smelling-sleep-improve-memory" categories: - "Health & Medicine" - "Sleep" tags: - "dementia" - "memory" - "memory loss" - "smell" --- # Study: Smelling Stuff While You Sleep Could Improve Your Memory ![Getty / Futurism]() How do you keep your memory sharp in old age? Try going to bed and smelling the roses, according to scientists. A new [study published in the journal *Frontiers in Neuroscience*]() details how exposing adults between the ages 60 and 85 to different odors while they slept dramatically boosted their cognitive capacity — providing a hopeful avenue of staving off dementia (and maybe some incentive for you to buy a new candle). "The idea is that it will keep the memory centers of your brain in good condition throughout life, and perhaps prevent memory loss older in life," said co-author Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM), in an [interview with *NPR*](). You might even yourself be familiar with smell's powerful link to memory — maybe you've heard of [a Proustian rush]()? An errant whiff of a perfume could suddenly dredge up long-forgotten episodes, the same way a taste of food [can conjure up a feeling someone thought they'd lost forever](), for example. "The olfactory sense has the special privilege of being directly connected to the brain's memory circuits," explained Michael Yassa, a fellow neurobiology professor at CNLM, in a [statement](). "However, unlike with vision changes that we treat with glasses and hearing aids for hearing impairment, there has been no intervention for the loss of smell." In the study, researchers drew from a small pool of 43 participants not suffering from memory loss, who they divided into two groups. One group received a natural oil diffuser and seven powerful fragrance cartridges: rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender. The control group, not as lucky, were given "sham" cartridges with barely any scent. Over the course of six months, all participants were instructed to diffuse a different cartridge before going to bed, emitting either pleasant odors or almost nothing at all for two hours while they dozed off. And voila: by the end of the study, the adults with the scents showed a remarkable *226 percent* improvement in cognitive performance, evaluated via [a word learning test](), and backed-up by imaging that revealed strongly functionality in a brain pathway associated with the formation and retrieval of memories. It's worth noting that scientists have known that the loss of olfactory senses can predict the onset of dementia and other neurological diseases. Using smell as a memory booster in such patients has also been explored before, with one previous study finding moderate dementia patients could benefit from being exposed to 40 different smells twice per day. "But it's not realistic to think people with cognitive impairment could open, sniff and close 80 odorant bottles daily," Leon said in the statement. Instead, what this new research demonstrates is that exposure can be done passively, i.e. in your sleep, using far fewer odors. In other words, it's a lot more practical — but further research using a much larger sample size and, ideally, on those with diagnosed memory loss, will be needed before any of this smell science is set in stone. **More on neuroscience:** [*New Drug Hailed as "Turning Point" in Fight Against Alzheimer's Disease*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()