New ‘smell therapy for dementia’ research proves promising
For more than 15 years, Associate Professor Alex Bahar-Fuchs – a clinical neuropsychologist in Deakin’s SEED Lifespan – and his colleagues have studied memory training and other thinking skills through vision and hearing.
But it wasn’t until recently that they’ve become increasingly interested in training memory through the sense of smell.
In the Mind Your Nose Study, funded by the Alzheimer’s Association, Assoc. Prof. Bahar-Fuchs and his colleagues developed game-like tasks designed to train memory. In one version of the task, participants were required to remember the locations of pairs of smells. In the other version, they were asked to remember the location of pairs of visual stimuli.
The challenge? Participants needed to recall the location of these paired stimuli and remove them from the board in as few steps as possible. Picture something like the childhood card game ‘Memory’, but with sensory objects.
‘We were very interested in seeing whether people can not only improve on their memory for smells, but also whether that improvement will generalise to memory beyond the sense of smell,’ says Assoc. Prof. Bahar-Fuchs.