Thread: Want A Better Memory? Stop And Smell The Roses

Study involving scents, sleep and learning:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070309/od_uk_...k_memory_smells

Excerpts:

Jan Born of the University of Lubeck in Germany and colleagues had 74 volunteers learn to play games similar to the game of "Concentration" in which they must find matched pairs of objects or cards by turning only one over at a time.

While doing this task, some of the volunteers inhaled the scent of roses. The volunteers then agreed to sleep inside an MRI tube. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to "watch" their brains while they slept.

At various stages during sleep, Born's team wafted in the same scent of roses.

The volunteers were tested again the next day on what they had learnt. "After the odour night, participants remembered 97.2 percent of the card pairs they had learnt before sleep," the researchers wrote.

But they only remembered 86 percent of the pairs if they did not get the rose smell while sleeping.

And the stage of sleep was important too, the researchers said in a finding that will add to the debate over whether people "learn" in their sleep the way some animals have been shown to.

Research has shown, for example, that rats learning a new maze will rehearse their movements during sleep, and that songbirds rehearse their songs.

. . .

What?
That's...
Weird.
Roses make your memory better?

Interesting. In a way it makes sense; if you think about the power of a scent to bring back a whole memory.

Originally Posted by Moonbeam

Interesting. In a way it makes sense; if you think about the power of a scent to bring back a whole memory.
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Yeah, scent is supposedly the strongest sense tied to memory, so I guess it would make sense to use scent to bring back memories. Weird, but kinda logical.

Originally Posted by pj

The volunteers then agreed to sleep inside an MRI tube.
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That would scare the hell out of me... I'd never get to sleep inside one of those things.

Originally Posted by Areyoudreaming

That would scare the hell out of me... I'd never get to sleep inside one of those things.
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LOl I didn't even think about that....all the clanging...

note to self on't get her roses

Yeah, this makes sense to me. Sometimes, usually in Spring or Summer, I always get these smells, that bring childhood memories rushing back to me, it's a really odd but enlightening feeling. Things that I haven't thought of, or even remembered ever doing come flying back to me. Pretty cool.

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it, PJ.