#110: Perfumemory

It seems that if you study in a scent-filled room, and then get exposed to that particular scent during the subsequent night’s session of slow-wave sleep, your recall of the material is significantly better next day (See this article).

Today’s invention is a system to promote learning via this mechanism. Users, when asleep, would have their entry to slow-wave sleep detected by a cap wired with an array of electrodes attached to a millivoltmeter. This would in turn be connected an electrical socket scent dispenser (the same one as activated during the previous day’s study period.

bluebrain230.jpg

Slow-wave sleep would switch the scent on again and reinforce the lesson from the previous day.

It’s not clear if a different smell is required every day in order not to conflate memories. If this turns out to be the case, then it might be enough to create a stably stratified mixture of different oils in the socket reservoir (using scented oils with different smells and densities).

As time passes, and the reservoir level falls, so the relative concentrations of these oils would vary -gradually changing the scent in the room (a duplicate reservoir would be needed to create the right smell during the slow-wave sleep periods).

Comments are closed.