Isn’t it remarkable the way certain smells can instantly transport you to a different place or time in your life? Perhaps the smell of fresh baked apple pie can bring you right back to your grandmother’s kitchen. Maybe the smoke of a campfire evokes your summers spent with childhood friends. Your sense of smell can awaken forgotten memories and different parts of your brain. 

Recently, a study performed at the University of California, Irvine and published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience yielded some very interesting findings, which confirmed the deep connection between the sense of smell and memory.

The study demonstrated that adults 60 to 85 years old who were exposed to a variety of different scents over a period of several months using a diffuser showed a 226% improvement on a standard memory test. These benefits were achieved even if the subjects were exposed to specific odors while asleep.

Results like this seem almost impossible, but they aren’t completely surprising when you consider the role smell played in human evolution. Early hunter-gatherers needed to rely on smell for everything from tracking down food to finding their way. In our modern, sanitized world, our sense of smell is suppressed - cleaning products, air condition, perfumes that mask odors - all of these conspire to isolate us from smells that have been deemed unpleasant or distasteful. Yet smell can still play a huge role in how our brain functions.

At this point it isn’t completely clear how the results of this study can be practically harnessed with the goal of improving your memory, but it certainly suggests that making an effort to expose yourself to different smells can  have a positive benefit.

Consider taking a moment to smell the flowers, inhale that glass of wine or check out different herbs and spices when you cook or acquiring a diffuser and rotating a variety of scents that you put into your environment. Your odiferous efforts may help you to keep track of things better now, and retain more later.