Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains that hearing loss forces your brain to work harder decoding speech, leaving fewer resources for memory. Hearing aids help protect against dementia. He also discusses smell training and the Memory Air device, which releases 40 scents during sleep to strengthen memory pathways.
If people have hearing impairment, it's one of the biggest risk factors for developing dementia, because to your point, you're forced to use more of your brainpower to just try to understand the words coming in, let alone process and remember stuff, right? So getting something to help your hearing becomes really critical. And it turns out that sommeliers, or people that spend a lot of time smelling things and tasting things, also have better memories and lower risks of dementia. Because they're stimulating those olfactory passages, neural passages, basically pathways that enhance memory. So there's interesting things around that. There's been some really interesting research on doing smell training to actually enhance the brain and its memory function also. There's several devices out there that you can get, one called Memory Air that actually plays 40 different scents for you while you're sleeping as a way to kind of stimulate the brain.
