In folk medicine, rosemary has been associated for centuries with having a good memory. But is it worth investigating whether it really has any powers, asks Dr Chris Van Tulleken.
There's past memory - your experiences and what you learned at school. There's present memory, which is your working minute-to-minute memory. And there's future memory or 'remembering to remember'. This is for many of us the trickiest one. When it fails bad things happen - we forget to take our vital heart medicine or worse still to buy our spouse's birthday presents.
Medicine has little to offer. There are some drugs for treating the memory loss that happens with dementia but they are not hugely effective. They give some measurable benefits but whether they are 'clinically significant' is controversial. Certainly they are no miracle cure for people with dementia, nor do they improve the memory of anyone else.
So I was not that hopeful travelling up to Newcastle to see Prof Mark Moss at Northumbria University. His team is running an experiment to test whether rosemary essential oil could benefit future memory. Rosemary has been linked to memory for hundreds of years. Ophelia in Hamlet says to her brother Laertes: 'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.'
Here's how the experiment worked. The team at Northumbria recruited 60 older volunteers to test the effects of not only rosemary oil but also lavender oil. They then tested these volunteers in a room infused with either rosemary essential oil, lavender essential oil or no aroma. The volunteers then took a test designed to test their prospective memory.
What Mark's team found was remarkable. The volunteers in the room with the rosemary infusion did statistically significantly better than those in the control room but lavender caused a significant decrease in performance. Lavender is traditionally associated with sleep and sedation.
