How to Hack Your Smell for Memory and Longevity WHILE YOU SLEEEP!

Michael Leon (0:00)

So by the time you reach middle age, your all-cause mortality, whether you die for any reason, can be reliably and accurately predicted by how well you smell. Even a chronically stuffed nose will cause memory loss. Not only that, but a chronically stuffed nose will also increase your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. Anorexia, autism, depression, stroke, heart disease, cancer, lung disease, kidney disease, liver disease, the list goes on and on. Now we're seeing that surge in Alzheimer's cases. Not only the number of cases, but what we're seeing also is that the age at which people are succumbing to the disorder gets younger. So rather than in the early 70s, you're seeing in the early 60s. So, is a device that sits on your nightstand and blows 40 pleasant scents at you twice a night. There's a retired Marine who did two tours of duty in Iraq. Every night, he had these awful, recurrent dreams that were nightmares, woke him up, couldn't get back to sleep. Basically, it ruined his life.

After the first night using, he no longer had these nightmares. Even in healthy older adults, we've been able to show a 226 percent improvement in memory.

Dave Asprey (1:16)

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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This episode is going to be so cool because we're going to talk about smell.

Not necessarily about how you smell, because that's a personal hygiene problem, you should probably deal with that. But we're going to talk about what smell does to the brain.

You might say, what does that do with biohacking? Well, everything, because biohacking is the art in science of changing the environment around you and inside you. You have control of your state and of your biology, and smells a primordial sense. It's one of the things that we don't think about enough in the world of biohacking, unless maybe you talk about perfume, endocrine disruption, or essential oils that have all kinds of effects. What would happen if we talked with Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology and Behavior from UC Irvine, who's got a PhD from the University of Chicago, who became a professor at age 24 He knows more about how your nose and your brain work together than probably any other person alive. I say that because he's ranked in the top 2 percent of scientists worldwide by Stanford. Dr. Michael Leon, welcome to the show.

Michael Leon (4:38)

Hi, Dave. Nice to be here.

Dave Asprey (4:39)

You ranked in the top 2 percent of scientists in the world for the impact of your research. Why is smell the thing that you want people to talk about now?

Michael Leon (4:49)

When you ask people what's their least important sense, they almost invariably say it's their sense of smell. They think it's a luxury. If you want to discriminate between fine wines, you can use your sense of smell. But it turns out that the human brain evolved at a time when there was a lot of smells around.