# It’s good for your brain to smell the roses.

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** MedCram - Medical Lectures Explained CLEARLY
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCwWPH2qV7o
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41280

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 02:00) []

Maybe it's time to smell the roses. Guys, do you know that the scent on your clothes may actually change your brain structure? So, a new study out of Japan is showing that wearing a scent of roses on your clothes for a month can actually increase the amount of gray matter in your brain. And we already know that smell has direct access to your brain. It's one of the few senses that goes right past the phalamus which regulates a lot of the senses and goes directly onto the cerebral cortex. Smell has direct access to portions of your brain that are actually regulated in emotion, memory, salience, and behavioral responses. Now, there's different parts of the brain that we're going to talk about. There's the amygdala, which has to do with anger. There's the orbital frontal cortex which has to do with thoughts and smells. And then there's the posterior singulate cortex or the PCC which is important because we've seen that is actually involved with Alzheimer's disease. So these researchers in Japan didn't just ask whether smell can actually change your brain in the instant, but whether or not repeated smelling of this over time would actually change the structure of your brain. So they took 50 healthy women. 28 of them actually put the rose oil on their clothes and 22 of them did not. They put water. And what they did was they measured at the end of a month to see what would happen on MRI. Now you can imagine that if you're putting water versus rose, it's not going to be a blinded study. And that's one of the drawbacks of this study is that it was not blinded. So what they found was at the end of a month on the MRI the posterior singulate cortex the PCC actually increased in volume and the total brain increased in gray matter. Gray matter is where actually the processes of the brain actually occur. But there were other parts of the brain that did not increase in size like the orbital frontal cortex and the amydala. So this is important because the PCC the part that actually grew is involved with memory retrieval and odor memory associations and also semantic processing. So the real question here is could this smelling over a long period of time actually reduce the effects of Alzheimer's disease on the brain? We don't have any information about that. Those studies still need to be done. There is some limitations with this study. First of all, only women were studied in this study. It was a small sample size and they didn't control as I mentioned for the blinding and the unblinding and there's really no clinical outcomes but there was a surrogate marker and it was actually meeting the end point. So maybe we should be slowing down and actually smelling the roses.