KRISTEN BIELER

Can Sensory Analysis of Wine Deter Dementia?

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Recently I came across a study published last summer that provides some pretty astonishing evidence that training one’s sense of smell–”olfactory stimulation”–improves memory and prevents mental decline.

Conducted by Michael Leon, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, and published by the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, the study exposed older adults (age 60 to 85) to an array of scents at night while they slept and found that their memories improved significantly. Participants slept with odor diffusers in their bedrooms that distributed different scents every two hours: After six months, they showed a 226% improvement on a standard memory test. The control group showed no improvement.

“As you age, your memory walks hand in hand with your ability to smell things,” Leon explained when I called him. “Pretty much everybody in our modern, affluent world is odor-deprived. Humans’ brains evolved at a time when nobody bathed! Everyone was exposed to a rich, complex olfactory world. The loss of that stimulation may make our brains vulnerable to memory decline, depression and a wide variety of diseases.” Added to that is the environment’s wear and tear on our olfactory system–pollution, chronic stress, common colds, injury and aging all take a toll, he said.