What does rosemary do to your brain? | Hacker News Reader

What does rosemary do to your brain?

bbc.com

33 pointsdiscardorama9 comments

Hmm, not sure how this reaches 1 on HN. It's a pretty clickbait article with lackluster content.

tl;dr Rosemary might improve your ability to remember reminders. They say the results were 'measurable but modest' and was enough to continue researching.

"The volunteers in the room with the rosemary infusion did statistically significantly better than those in the control room" ... [ in 'future memory', or 'remembering to remember' tests ]

Thanks.

Impossible to eliminate the effect of the tester being aware of the environment they were testing in. This was only single-blind, not double-blind.

>> This was only single-blind, not double-blind.

So what? I was reading about some of the "alternative" practices on Wikipedia and one thing really jumped out at me. The page on massage therapy pointed out the impossibility of doing double blind tests because you can't perform a placebo massage. While double blind tests are the gold standard in research, that does not and must not invalidate other tests. IMHO we must also stop disregarding individual reports as "anecdotes" when they are firsthand accounts. An individual result is a datum and not automatically a bullshit anecdote.

> IMHO we must also stop disregarding individual reports as "anecdotes" when they are firsthand accounts. An individual result is a datum and not automatically a bullshit anecdote.

Completely correct. The only thing is that a lot of people like to extrapolate their one datum, and that should still be called out.

You could have experimenters wearing gas mask. You could do the testing over the phone or similar. You could have experimenters that don't know the true nature of the experiment (professor telling PhD to go into this room and do this test procedure without telling why).

From the article:

They then tested these volunteers in a room infused with either rosemary essential oil, lavender essential oil or no aroma. Participants were told they were there to test a vitamin water drink. Any comments about the aromas were passed off as irrelevant and "left over from the previous group to use the room". ... The volunteers (and I [author]) then took a test which was designed to test their prospective memory. It's a clever test with many layers so you never quite know what's being tested.

does anyone just vape fresh rosemary?

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