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Nice Smells, Good Memories: Improving Your Brain with Your Nose!

Could the pleasant smell of essential oils while you sleep build your brain and improve memory and cognition? This intriguing new study says it could!

A little discussed and underutilized development in cognitive science is the discovery by several recent studies that stimulating your sense of smell improves memory and cognition.

Of all the senses, the sense of smell is the only one that connects directly to areas of the brain that are crucial for memory and emotion. As we age, deterioration of the ability to smell precedes deterioration of cognitive abilities. Loss of smell leads to loss of gray and white matter in the brain. Of current importance is that loss of smell from COVID can result in long term cognitive loss.

You can actually predict the loss of gray matter in seniors by the amount of their loss of smell. Continuing loss of the sense of smell predicts the continuing loss of gray matter as they advance to Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. Deterioration of the sense of smell actually predicts which people with Mild Cognitive Impairment will develop Alzheimer’s.

A number of new studies in the past six years have shown that stimulating the sense of smell improves parts of the brain that are relevant to memory and cognition. More importantly, the past two years has seen several studies that show that stimulating the sense of smell actually improves cognitive abilities.

This ground breaking research has discovered that one of the keys is novelty. To get the cognitive benefit of smells, you need to expose yourself to multiple scents individually. The practical problem with that is that many of the studies used 40 different essential oils. That can not only become expensive, but changing essential oils in your diffuser 40 times a day is difficult, and not only for seniors.

So, an exciting new study tried using just one essential oil at a time for two hours a night while you sleep: little expense, little effort. And it worked.

The study asked 43 seniors with normal cognition to place a single essential oil or a placebo in a diffuser each night for 6 months. They rotated 7 pleasant scents: rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender.

The people who smelled the essential oils at night experienced a significant 226% greater improvement in learning and memory than the people in the control group. In the control group, only 3 of 11 improved, 1 of 11 stayed the same and a full 7 of 11 did worse; in the essential oil group, 6 of 12 improved, 5 of 12 stayed the same and only 1 of 12 did worse. The people in the essential oil group also had significant improvement in parts of the brain relevant to cognition and memory.

This novel and exciting study suggests that simply using safe, inexpensive and pleasant smelling essential oils at night could significantly improve your cognitive abilities, including memory and learning.

Front Neurosci. 24 July 2023;17:doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1200448.