

What does rosemary do to your brain? - discardorama
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33519453

======
hspak
Hmm, not sure how this reaches 1 on HN. It's a pretty clickbait article with
lackluster content.

tl;dr Rosemary might improve your ability to remember reminders. They say the
results were 'measurable but modest' and was enough to continue researching.

------
discardorama
"The volunteers in the room with the rosemary infusion did statistically
significantly better than those in the control room" ... [ in 'future memory',
or 'remembering to remember' tests ]

~~~
tunnuz
Thanks.

------
davidbanham
Impossible to eliminate the effect of the tester being aware of the
environment they were testing in. This was only single-blind, not double-
blind.

~~~
phkahler
>> This was only single-blind, not double-blind.

So what? I was reading about some of the "alternative" practices on Wikipedia
and one thing really jumped out at me. The page on massage therapy pointed out
the impossibility of doing double blind tests because you can't perform a
placebo massage. While double blind tests are the gold standard in research,
that does not and _must not_ invalidate other tests. IMHO we must also stop
disregarding individual reports as "anecdotes" when they are firsthand
accounts. An individual result is a datum and not automatically a bullshit
anecdote.

~~~
jdmichal
> IMHO we must also stop disregarding individual reports as "anecdotes" when
> they are firsthand accounts. An individual result is a datum and not
> automatically a bullshit anecdote.

Completely correct. The only thing is that a lot of people like to extrapolate
their one datum, and that should still be called out.

------
pshc
does anyone just vape fresh rosemary?

