Odor and Learning

     Most of us has encountered people with distinct scents and sometime in our lives as we go about our day, we may pass by someone who has a very familiar scent that brings us down memory lane. It could be the orchid garden reminding you of your granda stitching in her rocking chair, the smell of fresh wood that reminds you of your grandpa always sitting in the front porch, or that god-awful strong perfume that reminds you of how your ex left you. The point is odor is a powerful tool that bring back memories related to them. How may this Proust Phenomenon be important in our daily lives and how can we perhaps use it to our advantage?

In a research study Odor modulates the temporal dynamics of fear memory consolidation Grella et. al discovers that at the presentation of odor at the time of encoding and retrieval elicits a reaction within the hippocampus for more recent memories and the prefrontal cortex for memories more in the past. This study contributed to the increasing research in PTSD as the study chose to use fear memories.

On a more positive application of this Proust phenomenon, Neumman et al. in their research How odor cues help to optimize learning during sleep in a real-life setting, studied how learning vocabulary content in students is affected with the presentation of an odor during encoding (learning the vocabulary words), during sleep, and upon retrieval (testing). The research results found that there was a significant difference in test performance between the control group of students who not presented odor at all and the experimental group of students who were presented with the rose scent upon learning the vocabulary words, during sleep, and upon test taking. The experimental group performed better in the vocabulary test compared to the control group, supporting the increasing study on the contribution of odor on memory consolidation during sleep.

The highlight of the study by Neumman et al. is that it was conducted in a real-life setting, indicating that the benefits of this study can be experienced inexpensively and easily in a real-life setting. Odor continues to present many applications in the field of neuroscience and sleep study.

 

Grella, Stephanie L., et al. “Odor Modulates the Temporal Dynamics of Fear Memory Consolidation.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press , 2019, https://doi.org/10.1101/2019.12.19.881615.

Neumann, F., Oberhauser, V. & Kornmeier, J. How odor cues help to optimize learning during sleep in a real life-setting. Sci Rep 10, 1227 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-57613-7