Literally sponsored by the makers of Febreze™. When the LK99 mania has subsided, I'm looking forward to this being replicated by disinterested parties.
A bit confused, sorry. Second sentence was a joke. But if the effect is real, it is a very strong claim and it does indeed deserve replication by people not financially vested in a positive result. And if it's cobblers, that also tells us something, but perhaps more about how science is funded, and how experiments are registered, and how result are communicated.
Why not critique the methodology instead of washing your hands of the paper?
Corporations and industry are the only ones willing to sponsor all sorts of studies. Can you at least show us some sort of historical convergence rate of industry vs non-industry funded studies? Is it 10%? 90%? If you have such a fatal knee-jerk response just seeing the funding, you must be able to do that, surely.
Frankly, I'd expect industry to simply discard studies that don't support their product (null or negative result) and publish the studies that do promote their products. Either way, I'm left reading the methodology no matter who publishes a study.
The problem is, reading the methodology can only give you a negative signal or a null signal. If the methodology looks good, that still doesn't speak to the correctness of the study's conclusion, for exactly this reason:
> Frankly, I'd expect industry to simply discard studies that don't support their product (null or negative result) and publish the studies that do promote their products.
There could have been a hundred attempts at this study before, all with a negative result, and none of them got published because they didn't have the result industry wanted. We simply don't know. But theoretically, this is something peer review should be able to fix: Researchers without industry support should be able to get the same results if they run the same methodology. Until then, being skeptical of the result seen, even if the methodology is sound, is completely reasonable.
All of the responses to my comment just explain the issue with having a single study available on a topic. You have the same exact issues with independent grants and researchers who want to uncover some real results and not just waste their time with null results, or they want continued funding.
You could level this criticism at any study much simpler. "Oh, the researchers just wanted this to be true." Why even bother singling out industry interest?
It's why meta-analyses are at the top of the evidence hierarchy: they look at multiple studies from varied sources.
But I'd still like to know how much industry funded research converges with non-industry-funded findings. Else you're doing the equivalent of dismissing, say, observational research even though it converges with RCTs 60%+ of the time which I think definitely takes some wind out of the sails of the "observational research is BS" knee-jerk.
The issue other than the one of visibility that you pointed out (meaning the study you requested can’t exist) is not just the paper but the potential for continuation of funding.
As you said, corporations have lots of money, and people who find results that support the corporation’s desired outcomes often get relationships and additional funding. Those who don’t, don’t get relationships and additional funding.
This has at least two consequences:
1) There is a strong and ongoing financial incentive to fudge results in these studies.
2) Those who refuse to do so may not get funds that would allow them to continue in their field at all.
Most of such funded studies would have been better to not have been done at all. They don't just add noise, they add negative signal.
And the methodology means very little. There are tons of ways to cheat and skew the results, while the description of the methodology used remains the same.
> I would have upvoted you if it weren't for your second sentence.
Who cares?
What's the point of your comment? Verytrivial's comment had a purpose and utility. Not that it's required. I also would have upvoted your comment if it added anything of value to the discussion.
You may be interested in heat-recovery ventilation (recuperation). For example, you can buy this one from Ukraine: https://prana.ua/en/products/prana150ee/ (not affiliated with them, just bough one similar unit for my own house).
Cool! I never heard of this, so I had to look it up:
Heat recovery ventilation, also known as HRV or mechanical ventilation heat recovery (MVHR), is a system that works by transferring heat from outgoing exhaust air to incoming fresh air. Here's a simple step-by-step process:
1. Stale air from the inside of a building is expelled through the system.
2. As the stale, warm air leaves, it passes over a heat exchanger.
3. Fresh, cool air from the outside is drawn into the system, passing over the same heat exchanger.
4. The heat from the outgoing air is transferred to the incoming air without the two air streams mixing.
5. The pre-warmed fresh air is then distributed throughout the building.
This process ensures a constant, controlled supply of fresh air, maintains indoor air quality, and conserves energy that would otherwise be lost in the ventilation process.
Weak science. They ran a battery of 12 tests and looked for one with a statistically significant difference at the 5% level. If there were no actual differences, how many tests would you need to run to find at least one that by chance shows significance? If you run 20, you’d expect 5% to do so, on average, which is 1. Running 12 and finding 1 is not a significant finding.
Then suspiciously, they found one significant result on trial 5 of the verbal learning test but little to no improvement on the other trials. That makes no sense.
Finally the brain changes had a p-value of 0.046, which is barely significant by even the weak 5% threshold, and the changes weren’t correlated with the test result improvements.
the only way to get replicated is by posting the poorly funded weak science version and having people talk about it
maybe this could be a job for AI, the LLM reads studies and highlights ones worth replicating and funding, sparing the rest of us from every seeing them at all
would probably be better than the politics involved with getting recognized
Have you ever tried to use LLMs to navigate around papers in academic research areas? They are not good in tasks like that, eg finding what is important, often they cannot even summarise papers properly, getting confused with causal directions and relationships between different parts.
This study purports an over 200% increase in cognitive function due to smelling oils at night. Either this is the dumbest scam ever or deserves the Nobel prize.
8.5% better at reproducing German-Japanese word pairs, but ok. And not during sleeping, really. It's during learning, sleeping and testing that effect occurs. Ikd why the headline only mentions sleeping. Am I reading figure 4 wrong?
It is known for a longer time that reproducing knowledge is somewhat better when it occurs in the same environment as learning took place. This might capitalize on that, but not really, as odor in learning and testing doesn't score well. But I agree, it might also be a fluke, bad design, drawer effect, etc.
The statistics are not convincing. When I look at the difference between LS and LST on the last day, LST has a lump in the middle, which would mean most learners didn't benefit. LS is on average lower, but one or two bad learners in that group would account for the whole difference. So I'm not convinced.
And then there's the "no significant differences in sleeptime" spiel, which is 100% bollocks.
In seriousness though, I've come across decently plausible information in the past that suggests that the volatile chemicals given off by natural wood has calming effects.
> In seriousness though, I've come across decently plausible information in the past that suggests that the volatile chemicals given off by natural wood has calming effects.
That could be true, def can't be harmful. So I hoped people would lean towards natural aromas after reading. Like opening the window to the garden, more flowers in the garden, etc.
To that end I’ve experimented with cypress oil in a diffuser while sleeping. I can easily believe there is a real positive effect. Would be nice to see it proven, if true.
Frankly, if true it would be a great product opportunity for P&G, as well as a social good, so I don’t begrudge the study.
Interesting but I guess the key here is that they sprayed something stretched with water. I'm not an essential oils person but I'd guess a pure oil would kill all bacteria.
So I'd suggest better not to buy sprays, rather buy pure stuff and use a diffuser.
I live in a studio, so I usually smell whatever I had for dinner while I'm sleeping.
It probably couldn't hurt to get a diffuser and some oils. If it doesn't work, oh well. It's not going to hurt anything, and it's probably nicer than smelling onions. If it works by placebo, great! I'll take improved cognitive performance even if I'm tricked into it. And if it actually works, all the better!
It reminds me of another study I read years ago that claimed people who were full-time caregivers could reduce their cortisol levels back to the level of non-full-time-caregivers by stopping every three hours to take three slow, deep breaths. Even if the study was flawed, and it very well may have been, there's no risk to breaking for 60 seconds every 3 hours to take 3 deep breaths. Might as well try it!
> It probably couldn't hurt to get a diffuser and some oils.
How did you come to the conclusion that this couldn't hurt? If you believe it could help, that means you believe it has a psychoactive effect and therefore you should also believe that it could hurt.
The last time I had some perfume bottles just standing around in the same room I woke up with the worst headache in years. I'll pass on this cognitive blessing.
I'm surprised you could even fall asleep. Smells keep me awake, and I keep anything scented in my bedroom in a tupperware to keep it from waking me up.
Maybe it’s not the aroma itself that improves memory, but a compound that comes with the aroma that improves nasal airflow, eg by reducing swelling or mild sleep apnea.
More probably it's neither, this is a low effort, industry funded, sales-tailored research, of the kind that assured that cigarettes don't cause cancer because the tobacco industry funded them...
> Individuals assigned to the olfactory enrichment group were provided with an odorant diffuser (Diffuser World) and 7 essential oil odorants (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender; from The Essential Oil Company, Portland, OR) in identical glass vials that each fit into the diffuser.
it's because the graveyards and charnel houses were overflowing with rotting bodies, and there were people were walking around with weeping, infected sores (buboes) -- it really stank!
They also believed miasma (bad smells) spread disease. They weren't a million miles away from the idea of airborne pathogens, but they were obviously incorrect about sweet smells having protective properties.
That said, I've wondered if the flowers thing selected in favour of people with hayfever - if you're producing more mucus and expelling it, that might lower your exposure. I've never seen a study on it, though.
> that might lower your exposure. I've never seen a study on it, though.
You wont, the scientific community perfectly represent the Thomas Pynchon saying
"'If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers"
Besides (UK) Govt water quality legislation creates a massive health and cancer industry!
Makes a mockery of the so called intelligence of the law!
However serotonin does have a positive effect on the immune system, so is there an indirect effect smelling and seeing a nice bunch of flowers?
It would be interesting to have a collection of aromas which one purposefully uses on different occasions.
For example a tree-like aroma which you use only in the night after you've spent the day hiking, a lemon-like aroma the night after you've deep-cleaned the house, or a "fresh-air"-like aroma after you've had an extremely productive day.
So you start to "Pavlov" yourself with aromas and then if one night you want to get productive dreams you use the "fresh-air" aroma, or the tree-like aroma if you want to dream of traveling.
This is not that surprising. Sensory enrichment stimulates hippocampal growth and staves off cognitive decline. Long term sensory deprivation has the opposite effect. Getting poor hearing at old age for example results in a large increase in the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
I took one of my older relatives to an audiologist recently, and the physician told us that the memory issues are often because your working memory is working overtime to decipher every input and you don't get to commit as much to long-term memory.
> When a fragrance wafted through the bedrooms of older adults for two hours every night for six months, memories skyrocketed. Participants in this study by University of California, Irvine neuroscientists reaped a 226% increase in cognitive capacity compared to the control group.
Sounds straight from the Dept. of Things Too Good to be True. Also - "The study was supported by Procter & Gamble."
