Lovely smells can keep the brain sharp.
Lavender keeps the brain healthy
A new study has found that going to sleep with the scents of lavender, peppermint and rosemary keeps the brain healthy as people grow older.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that those aged between 65 and 80 who were exposed to pleasant odours each night for several months usually increased their scores in tests that required learning and recalling lists of words.
The control group who did not experience the scents were a lot less likely to improve their results.
Previous studies have linked a poor sense of smell to an increased risk of dementia and the experts want to do a large-scale test after the study only involved 43 participants.
They wrote in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience: "We have shown that even minimal olfactory enrichment, delivered at night, is sufficient to induce an improvement in cognition and neural function.
"Our findings should stimulate larger scale clinical trials systematically testing the therapeutic efficacy of olfactory enrichment in treating memory loss in older adults."