How often have we heard the old joke that memory is the first thing to go with age and you forget what the second thing is?

There are many things that diminish as we age and unfortunately, our memories are one of those things that tend to suffer with the ravages of age.

But what if I told you that how you breathe and your ability to distinguish odors may have something to do with retaining or losing your memory and the risk of developing forms of dementia?

According to a study conducted a year ago:

“In a study that followed almost 3,000 older people with normal cognition, researchers found that a simple smell test was able to identify those at higher risk of dementia…”

“They found that participants who could not identify at least 4 out of 5 odors in the simple smell test were twice as likely to have dementia 5 years later.”

In another study:

“…people with a good spatial memory may be better at identifying smells. Information related to time and space is present in the anterior olfactory nucleus, studies have shown. This is a brain area that is involved in the development of Alzheimer’s.”

Now, with those two studies under your belt, would you believe that how you breathe can also have an impact on your memory?

I know, you breathe in and then out, but that’s not what I mean. Believe it or not, breathing through your nose or mouth is proving to have an impact on your memory.

According to another new study, conducted by Artin Arshamian, a researcher at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience with the Karolinska Institutet in Solna, Sweden, and his team:

“Arshamian and team asked male and female participants to learn 12 new smells on two occasions. After each ‘sniffing session,’ they asked the participants to breathe either through their noses or through their mouths for 1 hour.”

“When the hour was up, the participants smelled the old 12 scents along with the dozen new ones. The participants then decided which smells were old and which were new.”

“Overall, when the people breathed through their noses, they memorized the smells better than when they breathed through their mouths.”

Archamian commented:

“Our study shows that we remember smells better if we breathe through the nose when the memory is being consolidated — the process that takes place between learning and memory retrieval […] This is the first time someone has demonstrated this.”

Believe it or not, the concept of how you breathe in relation to your memory and overall general health is not new, but it has been around for centuries. If you have ever done any meditation or yoga or anything similar, you will have used this technique of breathing through our nose instead of your mouth.

However, this is one of the first experiments to prove that the concept is true. Therefore, when you are trying to remember anything, breathe through your nose, not your mouth.