Smell may shape human memories

Scents and smells can form the basis of some of the most significant memories humans form in their lives, a new study suggests.

The discovery may provide a means to detect early problems with memory formation and memory retrieval in the brain, researchers said.

An international team led by University of Queensland has boosted understanding of the smell-memory connection, showing that olfactory memory in honeybees regulates receptors in their antennae.

Bees' antennae function like a human nose, said Queensland Brain Institute scientists Dr Judith Reinhard and Associate Professor Charles Claudianos.

"French novelist Marcel Proust in his novel Remembrance of Things Past (also known as In Search of Lost Time) described how his childhood memories started to flow when he tasted a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea, as he had been given as a child," Reinhard said.

"Our team found that odour memories trigger recall of associated events, and that long-term odour memory formation in the brain regulates the sense of smell in the 'nose' via regulating the receptor molecules," Reinhard said.

"Preferences for different foods and beverages are linked to our sense of smell, and our research shows that long-term scent memories modify how odours are perceived," said Reinhard.

"In a nutshell: our smell experiences shape our preferences," she added.

"The study demonstrates for the first time that the ability to smell different things is experience-dependent and modulated by scent conditioning," said Reinhard.

Claudianos said the findings could help explain the wide variability of smell perception in humans and the neurological mechanism underlying the common phenomenon of "acquired taste", where repeated sensory experience with a flavour or aroma leads to perceptual changes.

"This knowledge will provide an enormous insight for understanding food and aroma perception," he said.

"The discovery may also provide a means to detect early problems with memory formation and memory retrieval in the brain," said Claudianos.

Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia or neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease often have an altered sense of smell perception, researchers said.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

SUMMARYDiscovery may provide a means to detect early problems with memory formation, memory retrieval in brain.

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'Brain training' boosts working memory, but not intelligence

Brain training games, apps and websites may strengthen your ability to hold information in mind, but they do not benefit the kind of intelligence that helps you reason and solve problems, according to a new study.

"It is hard to spend any time on the web and not see an ad for a website that promises to train your brain, fix your attention, and increase your IQ," said psychological scientist and lead researcher.
   

"These claims are particularly attractive to parents of children who are struggling in school," he said.
   

According to him, the claims are based on evidence that shows a strong correlation between working memory capacity (WMC) and general fluid intelligence.
   

Working memory capacity refers to our ability to keep information either in mind or quickly retrievable, particularly in the presence of distraction.
   

General fluid intelligence is the ability to infer relationships, do complex reasoning, and solve novel problems.
   

The correlation between WMC and fluid intelligence has led some to surmise that increasing WMC should lead to an increase in both fluid intelligence, but "this assumes that the two constructs are the same thing, or that WMC is the basis for fluid intelligence," he noted.
   

The team asked 55 undergraduate students to complete 20 days of training on certain cognitive tasks. The students were paid extra for improving their performance each day to ensure that they were engaged in the training.
   

Students in the two experimental conditions trained on either complex span tasks, which have been consistently shown to be good measures of WMC, or simple span tasks.
   

With the simple span tasks, the students were asked to recall items in the order they were presented; for complex span tasks, the students had to remember items while performing another task in between item presentations.
   

A control group trained on a visual search task that, like the other tasks, became progressively harder each day.
   

The results showed that only students who trained on complex span tasks showed transfer to other WMC tasks. None of the groups showed any training benefit on measures of fluid intelligence.
   

"For over 100 years, psychologists have argued that general memory ability cannot be improved, that there is little or no generalisation of 'trained' tasks to 'untrained' tasks," said the lead author of the paper.
   

"So we were surprised to see evidence that new and untrained measures of working memory capacity may be improved with training on complex span tasks," he said.

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