SMELL WITH EXTRAVAGANCE, THINK DIVERGENTLY, LEAN INTO THE TOUGH STUFF…

You may remember that last year I reported – with great excitement – on a study that found sleeping in a room infused with scented oils resulted in a 226% improvement in various sorts of cognition. In this experiment involving people aged 60+, those whose bedrooms were infused with a different oil for two hours each night, performed much better in cognitive tests the following day, than a control group who slept in an unscented room.

Needless to say, I’ve been diligently diffusing delightful aromas into my boudoir each night.  And I feel great, although whether my brain is performing any better, I don’t know.  I’ve listened to interviews with the lead researcher who explains that he selected oils that smelled ‘pleasant’ – nothing more scientific than that.  So I’ve done the same, and I now have an arsenal of gorgeous oils from cedarwood to tangerine, from rose to rosemary.

So you can imagine my joy when a new report was published earlier this year, seeming to confirm last year’s study. OK, this was mice.  But after exposing mice to long-term ‘olfactory enrichment’ (the technical term for lots of lovely smells), researchers noticed that the mice improved their spatial memory and displayed signs of greater cognitive flexibility. The researchers concluded that being exposed to abundant smells had ‘an overall positive effect on cognition,’ and speculated that we humans might benefit too.

Evolutionary biologists argue that our sense of smell was once crucially important.  It was our olfactory bulb that woke us in the event of fire, or that alerted us to rancid food.  Our ancestors would have been constantly sniffing – to seek out food, to avoid danger, to find a pheromonally matched mate.  Today our smell cells languish. And yet they appear to be tightly bound up with parts of our brain – brain-parts that may now be languishing in the absence of an olfactorily stimulating environment.

The easiest way to get these brain-parts working might lie in making our environment a little smellier.  And the easiest and nicest way to do this is to have a diffuser in the house alongside a variety of aromatherapy oils.  But we can also pay more attention to the smells already around us – rub at rosemary or lavender leaves as you pass them, press your nose into the roses and jasmine that are currently flowering, take a moment to enjoy a lemon as you zest it. Honestly, I can’t think of a nicer way to age well!

Our noses also work on a circadian clock, as I discovered when I was researching my book, Sleepless.  On my evening and night jaunts I noticed that my nose seemed more sensitive. Grass smelled greener.  Trees smelled woodier.  When I dug into the research I found that this is indeed the case.  We smell more acutely after nightfall, with an olfactory peak at 9pm.  Another reason to take an evening amble while the evenings are so deliciously long and light-filled (yes, tonight is the solstice, the perfect night for a smell-walk!).

It’s not just those exposed to diverse smells that have better cognition and greater cognitive reserve. Over my last decade of researching, I’ve been struck by the long healthy lives enjoyed by a disproportionate number of artists. Christopher Wren died at 92, at a time when few people made it past midlife. More recently, my lengthy list includes: Sonia Delaunay (94), Louise Bourgeois (98), Georgia O’Keeffe (98), Laura Knight (92), Grandma Moses (101), Picasso (91), Edna Clarke Hall (100). I could go on, but I don’t need to: Wikipedia now has an ever lengthening list of artist and sculptor centenarians.

Writers don’t do too badly either, and they also have a centenarian Wiki page.   Likewise scientists, mathematicians and engineers who can be found here . There are some obvious reasons for this longevity connection, including the fact that all three groups typically have considerable agency over their lives, and that all three groups have usually avoided (through birth, luck or prodigious talent) the grinding poverty that we now know to be insidiously associated with poor health. To boot, these are not dangerous jobs  and nor do they involve  high exposure to chemicals, unlike firefighters, factory workers or hairdressers, for example.  They are also jobs or hobbies that can be done well into old age, unlike (perhaps) sky-diving or rubbish collection.

But is something else at play?  Something all of us can incorporate into our lives? A study  published earlier this year suggests that there is.

The researchers who investigated the link between creativity and longevity among Italian adults aged 60+ believe that divergent thinking can protect our brains, keeping us sharp to the very end and helping us live longer, happier lives.  Those involved in creating or making things typically think more laterally and for extended periods of time.  The researchers define this way of thinking as an ‘ability to think freely in multiple directions.’ In other words, to think through multiple imaginative solutions.

I find myself having to think in ‘multiple directions’ when I plot out and write memoir, fiction or poetry (even, occasionally, when I write a blog post!). The simplest of ‘writerly’ things – the dialogue and words a character uses, when best to switch from memoir to statistics  – requires my brain to switch gear and swiftly riffle through dozens of different scenarios.  Scientists have to think like this when they’re trying to understand how something works or why an experiment has failed. Likewise an artist as they consider form, line and colour. Indeed, we all have to think like this at times, whether we’re planning a party, reading a book, planting a flowerbed or devising a recipe.

The researchers also defined ‘divergent thinking’ according to:

• fluency (the number of ideas we have),
• flexibility (our ability to shift into different modes of thinking),
• originality (the number of unusual ideas we generate),
• elaboration (the number of details we use to enrich an idea).

Although we all  think like this on occasion, the researchers found that the more readily we do it, the more cognitive reserve we build. They also note that, unlike our ageing bodies, our ability to think divergently doesn’t have to diminish with age. It is vital, they point out, that we ‘keep an open mind’ and that we work hard to ‘establish new and unusual relationships’, and ‘to change perspective.’

How to think more divergently? How to spend more time in this mode of thought? The researchers suggest an active life and lifestyle – either via work or via hobbies and interests. Here at the Age-Well Project, we like to keep trying new things and meeting new people. I’ve just enrolled on a stone-carving course which will require learning a new skill while in the company of new people. I’ll probably be using a little muscle power to boot.

Interestingly, the researchers also noted that those who thought more divergently had both better cognitive reserve and reported feeling happier.

Recently I’ve become fascinated by the currently circulating ideas of what happens to our brain when we lean into really difficult things, when we do things we don’t necessarily want to do. Neuroimaging shows that some brain regions (specifically the ventral striatum) become more strongly activated when we achieve something through great effort. Psychologists call this the willpower paradox.  Buying something we saved long and hard for often brings us more satisfaction than something donated to us.  Reading a difficult and challenging novel leaves us more satisfied than flicking through a dozen magazines, thanks to our more active ventral striatum.  I’ve been reminding myself of this as I start writing a new book that feels overly ambitious and rather daunting – and very much out of my comfort zone.  But we can remind ourselves of it whenever we step reluctantly into a cold shower or as we pick up a difficult book while our hand itches for the remote control. Do the hard thing! Weirdly, our brain might thank us.

Please use the comment box to tell us what you’ve been doing to keep your brain suitably and happily divergent and creative, or how you keep your ventral striatum active by engaging in challenging things.

My next events are at the Edinburgh Festival where I’ll be talking on the morning of 17^th August and part-leading a night walk on Sunday 18^th August. If you’re in Edinburgh do come and say hello!

Annabel