Does Sniffing Rosemary Increase Memory by 75 Percent?

Rosemary has long been associated with memory enhancement in classical literature and in folklore. The herb makes a notable cameo in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , for instance, when Ophelia describes the rosemary as “for remembrance.” More recently, the internet has been littered with a specific claim about rosemary and memory that purports to be scientific evidence in favor of this classically held notion: “Sniffing the herb can increase memory by 75%.” This assertion — that a scientific study demonstrated that sniffing rosemary can “increase” one’s memory “by 75 percent” (whatever that means practically) — can be found on all the usual pseudoscientific natural health websites. “The results were remarkable: people had 60 to 75% chances of remembering things, compared with people who were not given rosemary essential oil!” Natural News exclaimed . “Study: Smelling Rosemary Increases Memory by 75%” proclaimed a David “Avocado” Wolfe headline. All of these claims have their origins in Daily Mail coverage of a 9 April academic presentation at the 2013 British Psychology Society annual meeting, given by a student working in the lab of professor Mark Moss, a psychologist at Northumbria University in Newcastle, U.K. Academic presentations are not peer-reviewed studies (despite Wolfe’s headline), and even when they are reported on in good faith (a stretch for the Daily Mail ’s science desk), they need to be taken with grains of salt. The talk at the 2013 meeting centered on a small-scale experiment in which a mere 66 participants were placed either in a rosemary-scented room or a non-scented room and asked to perform specific memory recall tasks, as described by the Daily Mail : A team of psychologists at Northumbria University, Newcastle, tested the effects of essential oils from rosemary. Dr Mark Moss, who will present the findings today at the British Psychology Society […]

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