“These are for you,” he says as he presents roses at the door during a first date.
“How sweet,” she says as she smells the bouquet of roses. And then she thinks, “This might be the guy.”
But what’s he thinking? Especially since he just read that the red flowers’ scent can improve learning. Is he thinking, “I heard she wasn’t very smart, so these roses should take care of that.”
I can see the trend and its repercussions. As soon as word about a study linking the smell of roses with increased learning power gets out, there will be a blossoming (sorry, couldn’t resist) of sales at florists’ shops, sales of room sprays, and sales of scent atomizers, all to acquire the brain-enhancing power of the flowers. No doubt there will be a book or two. And the repercussions? “What? You’re giving me roses! You think I’m dumb?”
Remember the Mozart Effect? Now it will be the Rose Effect. Babies will have to fall asleep listening to Mozart while breathing the scent of roses wafting about their rooms. Makes me wonder about all those people who got us to this point in civilization without such advantages. Really! How’d they do what they did, breathing, for example, the smell of sulfur from coal fired furnaces that their parents used to heat the homes during the nineteenth and continuing into the first half of the twentieth century? Did no one think to do a study on how soot and sulfur enhanced brainpower.* Sulfur is, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, an element essential for life as we know it (Roses, however, don't seem to contain much, if any, sulfur).
Roses. Now we know. Air Wick and other companies in the scent business will soon put the products in their atomizers: The Scent of Roses—Ideal for Your Child’s Bedroom. And someone will patent a nightlight that plays Mozart while releasing the scent.
You might experiment on yourself to see whether or not you become smarter. It seemed to have worked for 54 six-graders in a study conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier and Franziska Neumann in southern Germany. Now, you’ll add roses or their extracted scents to the ambience of places of rest and study. Of course, studying how roses affect learning doesn’t rule out that other scents might also enhance learning. There’s room to experiment, of course. So, here are my suggestions: Study in a bar, next to a hamburger joint, in a locker room, on a ship, in a slum, next to a factory, or in a library. You might demonstrate that regardless of place, those who concentrate on what they study and those whose native abilities make learning easy will seem to be smarter after studying, regardless of background sounds and scents. That our olfactory sense deadens with prolonged exposure to a scent might mean that no reliance on scents makes sense without a concerted effort to learn.
A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, and a scent of any other kind might make learning easier with some hard work.
*University of Freiburg. 31 Jan 2020. The scent of rose improves learning during sleep. Medical press. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-scent-rose.html Accessed February 1, 2020. The study was conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier, head of the Perception and Cognition Research Group at the Freiburg-based IGPP and scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center in Germany.
“How sweet,” she says as she smells the bouquet of roses. And then she thinks, “This might be the guy.”
But what’s he thinking? Especially since he just read that the red flowers’ scent can improve learning. Is he thinking, “I heard she wasn’t very smart, so these roses should take care of that.”
I can see the trend and its repercussions. As soon as word about a study linking the smell of roses with increased learning power gets out, there will be a blossoming (sorry, couldn’t resist) of sales at florists’ shops, sales of room sprays, and sales of scent atomizers, all to acquire the brain-enhancing power of the flowers. No doubt there will be a book or two. And the repercussions? “What? You’re giving me roses! You think I’m dumb?”
Remember the Mozart Effect? Now it will be the Rose Effect. Babies will have to fall asleep listening to Mozart while breathing the scent of roses wafting about their rooms. Makes me wonder about all those people who got us to this point in civilization without such advantages. Really! How’d they do what they did, breathing, for example, the smell of sulfur from coal fired furnaces that their parents used to heat the homes during the nineteenth and continuing into the first half of the twentieth century? Did no one think to do a study on how soot and sulfur enhanced brainpower.* Sulfur is, with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, an element essential for life as we know it (Roses, however, don't seem to contain much, if any, sulfur).
Roses. Now we know. Air Wick and other companies in the scent business will soon put the products in their atomizers: The Scent of Roses—Ideal for Your Child’s Bedroom. And someone will patent a nightlight that plays Mozart while releasing the scent.
You might experiment on yourself to see whether or not you become smarter. It seemed to have worked for 54 six-graders in a study conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier and Franziska Neumann in southern Germany. Now, you’ll add roses or their extracted scents to the ambience of places of rest and study. Of course, studying how roses affect learning doesn’t rule out that other scents might also enhance learning. There’s room to experiment, of course. So, here are my suggestions: Study in a bar, next to a hamburger joint, in a locker room, on a ship, in a slum, next to a factory, or in a library. You might demonstrate that regardless of place, those who concentrate on what they study and those whose native abilities make learning easy will seem to be smarter after studying, regardless of background sounds and scents. That our olfactory sense deadens with prolonged exposure to a scent might mean that no reliance on scents makes sense without a concerted effort to learn.
A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, and a scent of any other kind might make learning easier with some hard work.
*University of Freiburg. 31 Jan 2020. The scent of rose improves learning during sleep. Medical press. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-01-scent-rose.html Accessed February 1, 2020. The study was conducted by Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier, head of the Perception and Cognition Research Group at the Freiburg-based IGPP and scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center in Germany.
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