Sweet Smell of Success: Simple Fragrance Method Produces Major Memory Boost When a fragrance wafted through the bedrooms of older adults for two hours every night for six months, memories skyrocketed. In fact, participants in this study by neuroscientists from the University of California, Irvine (
Study paid for by the owners of Febreeze. Unreasonably large effect size. Very suspicious.
To be fair, the effect of smell on memory is pretty well documented.
Certainly. Add to that n=43 and you’ve got very low significance.
Y’know, I had an idea about this back when I was in college: scented highlighters. Use a few different scents for different categories of information, and test whether it improved recall over using regular highlighters. I never tried to follow through on it.
Had the same thought. Got sidetracked sniffing pens.
Jokes aside, any of y’all remember the scented markers for kids? Holy shit talk about grooming children for addictions. Whole classrooms of kids just sniffing chemical markers. The gas station rose vial of the kindergarten.
Of course! One of the only things I actually did do on that project was get a box of Mr. Sketch markers and look at which ones might be usable as highlighters. The main reason it fell apart was that I didn’t really know enough people who did highlighting as a study technique. I knew they existed because I kept buying used textbooks that turned out to be covered in highlighting, but it must be a relatively niche group that does it.
It needs marketing for education for it to take off. Currently the type of people that use highlighters are the same using it because it’s effective for remembering information, but since it’s already effective something “more” effective doesn’t mean much.
What you need is to market your scentminders as a tool for new memory making and recall abilities! Lol
Yeah. Honestly I was more interested on whether it could actually work, rather than whether I could sell it. It’d be easier to sell than to actually evaluate :P
