Memory Air was developed from over 50 years of research on the nose-to-brain connection. It’s designed to stimulate the brain's only direct connection to memory and emotion while you sleep.
The Beginning of Memory Air
Dr. Michael Leon, the creator of Memory Air, has been studying olfaction since 1970, and he’s ranked in the top 1% of scientists worldwide by Stanford.
Dr. Leon owns a sommelier training kit, the set of small scent vials that wine professionals use to learn to recognize dozens of smells. But he doesn’t use it to get better at wine; before he had Memory Air, he used it to exercise his brain.
He is also the first to admit that probably nobody else does this (unless you are a wine connoisseur). “It’s hard to imagine anybody doing it except for me,” he says. “Very few people are that committed.”
After decades of studying the nose-to-brain connection, he realized the research had a practical problem. Most people don't have hours a day to train their sense of smell, and the people who need it most, like those with memory loss, may not remember to do it. So he designed Memory Air to do the work automatically, while you sleep.
Improvement In Dementia
For people living with dementia, improving memory has been one of the hardest goals in medicine. As Dr. Leon puts it, “the best treatments have only managed to slightly slow the decline or hold it steady.”
Then a team at Korea University tried something different. Patients with moderate dementia smelled 40 different odors, twice a day, for 15 days. By the end, the group improved on memory, attention, verbal fluency, language by up to 300% relative, and it also improved symptoms of depression by 325% compared with patients who didn’t get the scents.
“This is the first time that anyone has ever shown not only an improvement, but a dramatic improvement,” Dr. Leon says.
There was one problem. That’s 80 separate scents a day, every day. “Nobody’s going to do that,” he says, “particularly if they have memory loss.”
Why One Scent Isn’t Enough
Aromatherapy is built on the idea that a single scent does a specific job, like lavender to help you relax. Olfactory enrichment works differently; it requires variety and novelty.
“What we think happens with single scents is that people just become habituated to them. It’s like reading the same word over and over again,” says Dr. Leon.
You have probably felt this. If you walk into a bakery, the smell of freshly baked pastries is everywhere. Ten minutes later, you barely notice it. Your brain has decided that smell is old news and stopped paying attention.
Keeping Your Brain Healthy with Novelty
“Every molecule has a different shape, with different things sticking out of it,” Dr. Leon says. “Every one of your olfactory neurons produces a specific olfactory receptor, and there are hundreds of them.” Humans have roughly 400 types. Each one responds to a different part of a molecule, and your brain adds up which receptors fired to decide what you are smelling. One combination is violet, while another is eucalyptus. The discovery of this code earned Linda Buck and Richard Axel the 2004 Nobel Prize.
So every new smell asks your brain to do new work. “Taking in all of these different kinds of stimuli makes your brain active and keeps it healthy,” Dr. Leon says. “If you don’t get enough olfactory stimulation, those parts of the brain deteriorate.”
That is why Memory Air uses 40 scents, twice a night. “You can’t remember all of these odors,” Dr. Leon says, “and so these odors keep on feeling like they’re novel.”
Why You Can’t Mix the Scents
If variety is the goal, the obvious shortcut would be to blend a lot of oils in one diffuser, right? This doesn’t work, and there is research that shows why.
At the Weizmann Institute in Israel, scientists mixed pure scents together at similar strengths and asked people to compare the blends. Once a mixture had around 30 or more ingredients, the blends started to smell the same, no matter which scents went into them. The researchers called it “olfactory white,” the smell version of white noise.
In other words, 40 scents at once is not 40 smells to your brain. It is closer to one.
Building The Device
In 2017, Dr. Leon co-founded Science Lab 3 with CEO Alan Bernstein to turn the research into something people could use. UC Irvine patented the approach in 2020 under the name “Cognition and Memory Enhancement via Multiple Odorant Stimulation” and gave Science Lab 3 an exclusive license.
“Our goal was to take the latest research in neuroscience and make it effortless to use,” Bernstein said at the launch.
The hard part was controlling the scents. Product designer Christian Garnett of Spanner Product Development spent three years on the device, and as he told Fast Company, “It was probably the biggest challenge to figure out how to turn on and off scents at will.” A scent that lingers runs into the next one, and the brain is back to smelling a blend. The team tested other approaches, including “white odor” technology and enzymes that clear scent from the air, before landing on the final design.
Here is how it works now:
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A belt holds 40 small pouches of natural essential oil.
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One pouch at a time is gently warmed to release its scent. There is no flame, smoke, or spray.
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A slow, silent fan carries the scent to you for about 20 to 30 seconds, then stops so the air clears before the next one.
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The first night that you have the device, you press a button before you go to sleep, and you never have to press that button again. The scents start to flow about 40 minutes after you press the button, once you are asleep, and run through all 40 scents twice.
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A new belt arrives each month.
“The same moment you feel air from the fan hit you, you get the scent,” Garnett said. “The moment the fan cuts off, you don’t smell anything.”
Because smell doesn’t wake you up (link to sleep article here), all of this happens while you sleep. The scents are kept at a low concentration and a low flow rate. “There’s no irritation,” Dr. Leon says.
From the Lab to the Nightstand
Memory Air was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 and launched to the public that November. It is also being used in memory care communities. According to Dr. Leon, Silverado Memory Care has placed a device on each of the nightstands in its communities.
In Conclusion
The science showed that the brain responds to many different smells, one at a time, every day. Almost nobody can keep that up on their own, and mixing scents cancels out the variety that makes it work.
Memory Air was built to solve both problems: it keeps each scent separate, and it does the work while you sleep.