Andrew Huberman· PhD
And indeed sniffing as an action, inhaling as an action has a powerful effect on your ability to be alert, your ability to attend, to focus, and your ability to remember information.
Loading…
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
And indeed sniffing as an action, inhaling as an action has a powerful effect on your ability to be alert, your ability to attend, to focus, and your ability to remember information.
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
As we inhale, what this paper shows is that the level of alertness goes up in the brain, and this makes sense because as the most primitive and primordial sense by which we interact with our environment and bring chemicals into our system and detect our environment, inhaling is a cue for the rest of the brain to essentially to pay attention to what's happening, not just to the odors as the name of this paper suggests, Human Non-Olfactory Cognition Phase-Locked with Inhalation.
What that means is that the act of inhaling itself wakes up the brain, it's not about what you're perceiving or what you're smelling.
I like to think that you now know a lot about how your smell system works and why inhaling is a really good thing to do in general for waking up your brain and for cognitive function and for enhancing your sense of smell.