Sweet Smell of Success: Simple Fragrance Method Produces Major Memory Boost When a fragrance wafted through the bedrooms of older adults for two hours every night for six months, memories skyrocketed. In fact, participants in this study by neuroscientists from the University of California, Irvine (
Alright, maybe I’m just cynical and jaded, but this was put on by Proctor & Gamble, and I get the feeling this was just made for the purposes of having a study they could link to for claims that their new scent plug in can improve memory retention in certain groups of people. The fact that the total sample size was less than 50 and split between control and variable means that about 20 people of different age groups participated. That’s not much for a study. Also, the control group actually did worse during the experiment than normal, which leads me to believe that the control wasn’t handled very well, or that natural deviance in data is greater than the “improvement” they claim. Either way, I’m dubious. It feels like it’s destined for a fine print in a commercial that shows between reruns of Law and Order.
I agree and some of those scents are super strong and can give migraines. They’re not wrong about the diseases where you lose your smell though.
I also think people need more real scents in their lives, but not from a corporation or an mlm. Go outside and smell the flowers, the forests and the herbs. Use real herbs in your cooking and buy a real scent from a no name from the farmers market. Put the oil from the farmers market in a water bottle and spray. Citrus is great for that and kills dust in the air.
No, this is warranted skepticism.
It’s destined for a another study by independent researchers. As simple as that. Also more than one and substantially larger ones would be good given the simplicity, more or less innocuous study design, and the potential benefits. Maybe people assume that if a study says something, you’re supposed to immediately take that as the truth. That is never the case. This study is just a very clear case for more good studies on this.