Can incorporating smell positively affect one's mood and learning efficiency?

                                                                  Needa Shaikh

With final exams in full bloom, students are busy preparing and stressing over their grades as the semester comes to an end. Finding motivation to get things done in a timely manner is difficult, given our current COVID-19 situation. Cramming last minute is a bad but guilty act that every student faces, and many try to incorporate different studying methods in order to quickly gain the most knowledge in a short amount of time. 

Many people know that sleep plays a huge role in supporting memory consolidation. We often hear our professors telling us to not stay up too late and be fully rested, and that is due to the fact that it enables students to improve our ability to consolidate what we have studied, as well as gives us the ability to learn new information as well. Recent studies have shown that smell can help boost learning and can be incorporated in studying.

Laura Shanahan’s article, “Scents and Reminiscence: Olfactory Influences on Memory Consolidation In the Sleeping Human Brain” talks about the unique relationship between odor and how it holds a positive effect on memory. In their study, they investigated the influence of odors on memory consolidation during human sleep. Their study involved pairing a rose odor (phenylethyl alcohol) with a visuospatial learning task, in which the subjects were told to learn locations of several cards. After they learned them, they went to sleep and the rose odor was presented. When the subjects woke up, they were asked to recall the card locations pre-sleep learning. Surprisingly, subjects performed better when they were exposed to the rose odor. The pairing of rose odor with learning proved that odors enhance the consolidation memories during sleep, without having to be aware of the sleeping subject.  

A similar article written by Tim Newman (MedicalNewsToday) confirmed that another study examined the role of odor in learning and memory, and they found that a strategic use of aromas could improve exam performance. The ties between olfaction and memory could be helpful in enhancing our learning abilities for not only finals, but for the entire academic year! This study involved participants keeping rose scented sticks next to them as they learn vocabulary at home, and a week later they were tested in an exam format. The students showed an increase of learning by 30% when the rose scented incense sticks were used both in the learning and sleeping phases!

For my students that struggle with studying, this could be a beneficial and easy method in order to boost your learning. Both of these articles contributed to the evidence that pairing learning and sleeping with a certain aroma/olfaction can help boost memory performance.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/using-scents-to-boost-learning-during-sleep#Real-world-applications

Shanahan, Laura K., and Jay A. Gottfried. “Scents and Reminiscence: Olfactory Influences on Memory Consolidation in the Sleeping Human Brain.” Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Consolidation, 2017