ROSE SCENTED SLEEP IMPROVES MEMORY

Bursts of scent during the night can help solidify learning Its often said that optimistic people look at the world through rose-tinted spectacles. Now it seems that rose-tinted smells can have benefits too. Taking a whiff of rose scent while learning a task and then being exposed to the same smell during sleep helps memories to set, researchers have found. Jan Barn of the University of Lubeck and his colleagues exposed people to the smell of roses one evening while they learning the location of various picture cards laid in a square. Half of them were then given the same odour to smell as they slept, while the other half had an odour free night. When they tested the next day, those who had a rosy sleep remembered 97% of the locations, without the roses this figure was 86%. The teams findings support theories about how memories are solidified in the brain sleep. Researchers think that a part of brain called the hippocampus is like the scratch-pad of memory, where we store new things that have been experienced or learned until they can be filed for long term storage. During sleep, these memories are reactivated and transferred to the cortex. Odours are known to have a potent effect on the hippocampus part and his team speculated that an odour thus help to trigger the reactivation process during sleep, making permanent memory storage more efficient. But simply sleeping in a rose-scented room could not necessarily do the trick, because the timing of odour exposure is crucial. Volunteers in the study had to be exposed during slow wave sleep; it is time when hippocampus is trigged into replaying memories. Passing roses under the nose during lighter, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, had no effect in memory. But because people get used to odours very quickly, the odour had to be turned on and off at the right times to get the memory effect. We might think that a whiff of roses the following day, while being tested would help the volunteer remember the card locations. But the researchers found that this didnt improve the volunteers score,

through Born doesnt rule it out. The same mechanisms are involved in securing memory during sleep and when awake, the difference is that the hippocampus is more sensitive when its owner is sleeping. Philippe Peigneux, a researcher at the Brussels Free University in Belgium said that its difficult to imagine that we can create a machine that can improve memory during sleep. For students, simply revising what you have to learn and then getting a good nights shut-eye might prove infinitely more practical.