“According to a new study, wearing the right kind of perfume or cologne can enlarge your brain’s gray matter,” writes ScienceAlert
Researchers from Kyoto University and the University of Tsukuba in Japan asked 28 women to wear a specific rose scent oil on their clothing for a month, with another 22 volunteers enlisted as controls who put on plain water instead. Magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) scans showed boosts in the gray matter volume of the rose scent participants.
While an increase in brain volume doesn’t necessarily translate into more thinking power, the findings could have implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia. “This study is the first to show that continuous scent inhalation changes brain structure,” write the researchers in their published paper. We’ve seen scents like this improve memory and cognitive performance, but here the team wanted to try a longer-term experiment to see how triggering our sense of smell might lead to measurable changes in brain structure…
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what’s causing this boost in gray matter. Another possibility raised by the researchers is that the rose scent is actually labeled as unpleasant by the brain, with the subsequent emotional regulation responsible for the PCC working harder and increasing in size. The researchers hope that the findings could be useful in the development of aromatherapies that boost mental health and brain plasticity…
The research was published in the Brain Research Bulletin.