The Science of Smell: How this New Consumer Device Uses Nighttime Scents to Dramatically Improve Memory and Brain Health

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Hello—welcome to our podcast. And today I have one of my longest-standing friends…

Michael—how long have we known each other? Like 30 years almost?

Dr. Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Probably 30. Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Something like that.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): 25 anyway, for sure.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah. We met each other when we were 10 years old.

So I met Michael in another life, another world. But Michael and I became friends. We’ve done some fun things together. We worked together trying to help a very interesting device and system for eating disorders. We worked in autism treatment…

Michael’s impact on my life has been both professional and personal. He helped my daughter when she turned out to be on the autism spectrum.

So, Michael—you’re one of my dear friends. Welcome to my podcast. I’m so happy to have you.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Thanks for having me. Good to see you online.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I know. You’re not that far away—what, 20 minutes? We should have done this face-to-face. Next time.

So, Michael—you know your background better than me. We talked about your traveling from being a lifeguard to cleaning rat cages… So I know you all the way back. And then to professor—it was probably linear, right? Lifeguard, rat cleaning, professor at UCI?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): It went exactly like that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): But your life’s work is in sensory… I just put it as sensory stimulation. I think you call it environmental enrichment.

By the way—this episode is special, so I highly recommend you stay to the end of it. All of them are good, but this one’s going to be really good.

So Michael, give us a hint of what we’re talking about today. What is environmental enrichment or sensory stimulation, as I call it? What are we talking about here?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): So it turns out that your brain needs a great deal of stimulation from the outside world in order to stay healthy. And most of us think we get plenty of stimulation—you know, we have television, we’ve got music, we’re talking to people.

But the one sense that we are deprived chronically in our affluent modern world is our odor-sensing system—also called the olfactory system. And if you don’t get enough olfactory stimulation, the memory and cognitive parts of your brain start to deteriorate, as does the emotional part of your brain. So you’re more vulnerable to depression and more vulnerable to losing your memory.

Any time you don’t get enough olfactory stimulation, your memory goes. And you can see that when people get older: their olfactory ability decreases. By the time you hit 60, it starts to fall off the table. And hand-in-hand with that, your ability to remember things also falls.
So your ability to smell is closely tied to your ability to remember things. Even a chronically stuffed nose will cause both a loss of the ability to smell things and a loss of memory.

And everything else that causes loss of olfaction—sense of smell—also has that problem. People who’ve had COVID-19… pretty much everybody had olfactory loss. And they’ve had memory loss.

When researchers from Oxford University imaged their brains, what they found is that the olfactory system was deteriorated months after people had recovered from mild COVID. And their memory was also deteriorating. So people with long COVID have this prolonged problem: olfactory loss and memory loss.

And pretty much every medical problem that you have—we’ve counted 157 of them—from schizophrenia to cancer to heart disease to depression—all of them have olfactory loss and increased inflammation. And we think this is a critical part of what’s going on now.
And everybody is chronically deprived of olfactory stimulation in their daily lives. If everybody takes a deep breath now, my guess is that nobody will smell anything.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah—I just tried and nothing happened.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): And the human brain evolved at a time when there were plenty of odors. In fact, nobody ever took a shower—ever. So the human brain evolved to have association with a great deal of olfactory stimulation. And now we’re not getting very much at all—coupled with a large number of medications that interfere with olfaction. Stress—even stress when you’re a child—can affect your ability to smell when you’re an adult.

There are many problems associated with olfactory loss and increased inflammation. And we’re starting to treat that in a very effective way. So when people lose their memory as they get older… and if you ask anybody over 60, they’ll talk about problems with memory. Their ability to smell declines, but if you give them olfactory enrichment—a lot of olfactory stimulation—you can get a dramatic increase in their ability to remember things.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): There’s so much to unpack there. I’ll try to come back to what you just said a minute ago—because I’d like to talk more about reversal versus just slowing, which is exciting.

But before I get there: when I first met you, we talked about other kinds of sensory stimulation—visual, auditory, tactile, as well as olfactory and taste. We didn’t talk about taste much, but I’m sure that’s part of it too.

But I think over time—even since I’ve known you—the focus on smell seems to be more and more primary. Is that a good summary of your life’s work?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah. I think most people find it surprising because they consider the olfactory system their least important sense. If you ask people which sense they’d be willing to give up, almost everybody says the olfactory system. They think it’s just a nice thing to determine whether the wine you’re drinking is good.

But the central importance of olfactory stimulation to the health of your brain is really not generally appreciated. And because of that, people are going through their lives without much olfactory stimulation, and their brain starts deteriorating—making it much more vulnerable to all sorts of other neurological and somatic disorders.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Before I get back to the questions we planned: I remember talking about—do I remember this correctly?—that back in your earlier days, you would give rats stimulation, cut them up, and look at their brains more deeply. And the ones that had much more stimulation had bigger brains.

Is that true? Or was it more synapses—what was it that you found in the earlier phases?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): So what we were looking at is early learning. It turns out that human infants learn to be attracted to the odor of their mother—or any other odor you put in contact with them—on the first day of life. When they just come out, this is the first thing they learn about the world. And it’s a very powerful kind of learning.

And it does change their brain. There are anatomical changes, neurophysiological (electric) changes, neurotransmitter changes, and behavioral changes. So on the second day of life, you can test them—these human newborns—and they remember the odor of their mother and they’re attracted to it. And this is, we think, the first basis for the maternal-infant bond.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow. Amazing. So our environment has changed radically. Has the brain changed too over time—evolutionarily? Is there any evidence to that?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): In our modern affluent world, we just don’t get much olfactory stimulation. And because of that, we are very vulnerable to neurological disorders and somatic disorders as well.

We think this is a complicated interaction between an increase in inflammation that occurs in the brain and the body without olfactory stimulation. One of the things that we found—and others, hundreds of others, have found—is that pleasant odors actually decrease inflammation.

Inflammation, as you know, underlies many of the destructive forces in the brain and body. And so we think everybody needs it. And what we’re finding is that not only older adults, but middle-aged and younger adults are really interested in this—because everybody wants to have a sharp mind. And it turns out this will help people, we think, throughout their lives.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That’s amazing.

We’ve talked about people being sensory-deprived. I have to give a personal comment here—and I don’t think I’ve ever told you this part, Michael. I have both a deviated septum and chronic allergies. I’ve taken Claritin, I’ve taken Zyrtec… and I finally started using the nasal steroid with the allergy spray, with the pill, and now I can breathe and smell better. It took that much firepower—which stinks—but I can smell things now.

My wife is laughing at me because she’ll tell me, “You smell everything.” I’m like, “I have to—Michael says…”

But I am experiencing the world different because I was chronically congested in one form or another for years. I wasn’t completely congested, but my sense of smell has finally changed. The neti pot helped a little, but when I found out I could do the steroid and the antihistamine at the same time without, you know, dying—it’s been life-changing for me. It really has.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): That’s good to know. And it may preserve your brain as you get older.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah. So I have to share something with our audience here. I still have my little vials—and Michael may recognize some of these.

When I had COVID, I called Michael because I know about this. I said, “Michael—they say wait six months before you get sensory stimulation. How long should I wait?” I’m assuming not at all.

He’s like, “Go to Amazon now and buy…” Was it rose, lemon, sage, and something else? I forget. But anyway, I bought them—and I still have them. It’s amazing—there’s something calming about it. It’s not psychotropic, I don’t think, but it’s such an immediate rush of… I don’t know, emotion.

What’s behind this? People confuse this with aromatherapy, which is kind of related, but not the same thing.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Over the course of evolution, the brain needs a great deal of olfactory stimulation. And in order to make sure people get enough, it made us attracted to pleasant odors. So we get a real rush and a feeling of relaxation and pleasantness—and we’re attracted to these pleasant odors.

In fact, you have a reflex: when you smell pleasant odors, you automatically start to sniff it without thinking. It’s a real reflex. And when you’re exposed to unpleasant odors, the brain stops you from breathing immediately.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow—that’s cool.

So we’re going to talk about two things today. I’d like to talk about autism in a little bit because I think that’s really important—and that’s also some new stuff coming up. But the device is called Memory Air, so let’s start there.

Michael and I, by the way, pitched a show to Hollywood. We had an agent and an attorney. We actually got to meet with 20th Television—and we were close, Michael. We were really close. Someday we’ll do that again.

But let’s talk about the evidence about olfactory… You’ve talked about some broad things, but talk about some of the clinical evidence about olfactory enrichment. Let’s start with brain health overall and then talk about memory.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Okay. I’ll start with the fact that lab animals are kept in a standard box cage alone, with not much to do and very little stimulation. These animals look okay—they can learn, remember, have motor skills, social interactions are normal.

But if you take these rats or mice from a standard box cage and put them in a much bigger enclosure with plenty of friends and plenty of things to do, their brains become much more complex and much more capable. They learn better, remember better, have better motor skills—everything about their behavior improves.

Even more impressive: scientists have made animal models of every human neurological disorder you can think of. They express human-type symptoms when they’re in the standard box cage—very little stimulation. But when you put them in an enriched environment—bigger place, more friends, more things to do—they lose many or all of their neurological symptoms.

It’s so powerful that a rat injected with a neurotoxin like lead has better cognitive ability than a rat who hasn’t been injected with any toxin, but is living in a standard cage.

So we thought maybe this would benefit children with autism. There’s also a situation in Romania with human infants that prompted our interest. During Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, he banned contraceptives and ruined the economy. People had a lot of children but no money, so they brought them to state orphanages.

In the orphanages, children were put in cages—alone, isolated—just like rats in laboratories. When they came out, rather than 1%–2% having autism, about a third had autism symptoms. We think because they were living under restricted sensory stimuli.

When some children were placed into full-time foster care—an enriched environment—they lost many or all of their autism symptoms.

So we tried to duplicate this with children with autism in Irvine. We gave parents a kit with many odors—plus visual stimulation, auditory stimulation, motor stimulation, and tactile stimulation. We had a control group.

After six months, 42% had a major improvement in symptoms compared to 7% with standard care. We also found an eight-point increase in IQ compared to almost nothing with standard care, increased receptive language, significant improvement in abnormal responses to sensory stimuli. After six months, 21% of seriously affected children were no longer considered to have classic autism compared to 0% on standard care.

We went on to do other studies. One parent was so impressed that he formed a company and developed it for people around the world. It’s called Mendability, and people are using it all over the world with nice benefits.

We think this can be improved further by giving olfactory enrichment. And we now have a device where we think we can do this without any effort.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Before I move away from that and start talking about memory loss: Michael’s been a very big part of my personal life.

My daughter—when she was a few years old—began showing signs of autism spectrum, and our world just collapsed. It was awful. She hadn’t been that way at first and started showing signs around two, which I think is pretty classic.

Michael introduced me to the therapist who innovated this. The amazing thing… I’ll condense a two- or three-year story: scents like strawberry, and then touching her face—there was something about doing that. The first time we did it, her eyes rolled in the back of her head. She was the happiest she’d been in months. It was amazing.

So we did that with her for years—as long as she allowed us to. She stopped allowing us when she got older.

She’s a senior in college. She’s about to graduate. She still has challenges, but her life trajectory is wildly better than it would have been without this. And you could offer me $10 million, Michael, but not expose her to this—and I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t go back and roll the dice and hope it turns out okay. We hear these stories over and over again.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): It really revolutionizes the way these children develop and alters the course of their life. It’s really important that people know about this because standard care takes months—maybe a year, I’ve heard two years—before you can get a diagnosis. Then you fight with school systems and insurance companies to get it funded.

And data from standard care comes from universities, but most people don’t get it from universities—they get it from private companies hiring people who may or may not be particularly good. Outcomes aren’t particularly good.

Standard care is also focused just on social interactions, whereas the enrichment strategy deals with all their auxiliary symptoms, which can be as serious as the social interaction problems.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah. I’ll give the amateur viewpoint on this, Michael.

We decided to do all kinds of sensory stimulations. We did vision therapy, learning classes… I took her ice skating when she hated it. Bike riding, swimming… But I still feel like the olfactory stimulation with the tactile touch—that was the core of all of it.

We skipped the school program entirely because they wanted to put her in special ed… another story. She was sort of the star kid of her class, and I insisted on regular school. We put her in a private school. Two years later one of the same teachers said, “Oh my God, you made the right decision.”

So that’s worth exploring. And if you’re listening to this on the streaming service, you can go to HealthcareSuccess.com, search for this podcast. Michael—at the end of this, you need to give me links to science for both autism and memory that I can put in the show notes. It’s really important. I like to make these episodes meaningful and meaty—not just listening to us talk, but getting some proof would be awesome.

So I shared a very personal story there. But like I said, for millions of dollars I wouldn’t spin the bottle and avoid doing this. It was immediately impactful. I highly recommend it. I’ve recommended multiple people to do this.
And this little bottle of strawberry is one of those leftovers from those days. I still have it—maybe 25% left. It goes slowly.

So anyway—let’s talk about memory. The show today is really about memory, and we’ve got another half hour, so I’m going to spend time on this.

In theory, you could take this little bottle and smell it multiple times a day and get presumably the same result—it’s just nobody does that, right?

So the device—which we’ll talk about in a moment—is a way of doing that passively. Humans—even motivated ones—are horrible at following through, Michael.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah. A wonderful development is a study out of South Korea that used olfactory stimulation to increase the memory of people with dementia—Alzheimer’s disease. People have tried all kinds of things; billions of dollars spent; hundreds of clinical trials. The latest anti-Alzheimer’s drugs are really ineffective—tiny slowing of decline, nothing you would notice. Very expensive, unsafe—brain bleeds, brain shrinkage, death. Hard to get; you have to go to the hospital for infusions. Worst of all worlds.

Here you have something highly effective. On five tests of memory, improvements were up to 300% better than controls. Depression symptoms were relieved by 325%. People had these improvements within 15 days.

The problem is: to get those improvements, they had to give them 40 odors twice a day—and nobody will do that. People won’t even take low-dose aspirin after a heart attack.
So we devised a device—we call it Memory Air. It sits on your nightstand and puts out 40 pleasant odors twice a night. We think this will revolutionize the way Alzheimer’s disease is treated.

We’re also finding people in their 40s and 50s are interested—they want to keep their minds sharp. We think people are chronically deprived of olfactory stimulation throughout their lives, and olfactory enrichment—40 odors twice a night—will keep the brain healthy, not just for memory but for emotion and depression symptoms.

The olfactory system has the only dedicated superhighway access to the memory centers and emotional centers of the brain. All other senses have to go through side streets and consequently don’t have as much impact.
So throughout life, we think everybody needs much more olfactory stimulation, and our device can provide that.

And a couple weeks ago, Time magazine named us as an invention of the year in health and wellness for 2025. We’ve also received an award from the American Psychological Association for our work with autism.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That’s amazing. I’d love all those links—give me as many as you want. I’ll put them on there.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Okay.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Let’s talk—data you’ve seen, or anecdotes so far. The device has gone through alpha, beta… lots of development. It turns out building a device from scratch is harder than most people think.

Full disclosure: I’m a minority investor in this product. After working with Michael for all these years, I couldn’t let it go by. So we’ve been talking about this for three or four years, right? Various stages of engineering. It takes a lot to build a device that actually works.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah. Devices are complicated. And it’s not just a device—it has a disposable. Every month you get a new odorant belt with 40 odors, and you put it in because it uses up the odors over the course of the month.

All these things have to be developed individually. Every little part matters. You’re building a real thing. It’s not one molecule—it’s complicated in a dozen ways, maybe several dozen ways.

So it’s taken years to get to the point where we can manufacture it. Manufacturing is a whole other thing. We tried America—that didn’t work. China—that didn’t work. We finally found three groups in Malaysia, and they’re doing an outstanding job.

We had to search to find people who would take it seriously and were competent enough to do it exactly right—because if you’re off by a little bit, it’s useless.

We finally hired a group of engineers—former senior Apple designers and engineers—so they made a beautiful, functional, manufacturable device. We’re really happy with how it came out.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That’s awesome. I’m really glad to hear that.

Back to the evidence: we talked broadly about olfactory. I don’t know if you want to share anything else—or just anecdotes—because we’re going to do clinical trials eventually, right? Any evidence you can talk about now about early returns or broadly with Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): One fellow has Parkinson’s disease—and about half of people with Parkinson’s develop dementia. After four to six months on the device, he took a memory test at the beginning and after six months. He used to be a geologist. He more than doubled his memory score within six months. That’s pretty amazing.

People with Parkinson’s have olfactory loss and increased inflammation—the whole song and dance.

Another person said her husband always had to complete her sentences because she couldn’t remember the word. After a month using Memory Air, he said, “You know, I haven’t been having to complete your sentences since you started using this thing.”

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I don’t know… that’s good.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): She also said she was very clumsy—she’d drop a vitamin pill or a spoon every day. Since using this, she said she hasn’t dropped anything.

There’s a direct connection between the olfactory system and the cerebellum, which controls motor coordination. We think what we’re doing is making that normalized and healthy again.

We’re getting very positive comments. People are sleeping much better—on average, 22 minutes extra sleep, which is enormous. We think this may turn out to be really important.
As people get older, deep sleep diminishes, and in many older adults there isn’t much deep sleep at all. During deep sleep, your brain washes out all the waste that’s accumulated—through the glymphatic system. It pushes it out to the front of the brain and through the holes in the skull where the olfactory system comes in.

If you have a strong system during deep sleep, you can get rid of toxins and waste. But when people get older, you don’t have this washout because the olfactory system is blocking the way. Unless you have a strong push, it doesn’t get out of the brain.

So you’re marinating the olfactory system in toxins and waste, which triggers inflammation. And inflammation accompanies more than 139 medical disorders, neurological and somatic.

We think many disorders impair the lymphatic system so it can’t push out waste, and the brain is marinating in its own waste. That may be why these disorders have olfactory dysfunction—because it increases inflammation that damages the olfactory system and prevents waste from being cleared. We think this could be an important mechanism to understand what’s going on.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow—that’s amazing.

And it’s funny because I remember times when you’ve said, “I’d like to believe that, but the scientist in me doesn’t,” right?

Some of our listeners are scientists, doctors, researchers. What would you say to them if they’re super skeptical? Where would you direct them? I’ll have research in the show notes—anything else?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): This is an enormous literature. There are now 11 major epidemiological studies showing that by midlife, your all-cause mortality—whether you die for any reason—can be accurately predicted by your ability to smell things.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow. I’m sure nobody knows that.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): And there are about 20 studies showing that if you increase olfactory stimulation—and not just one odor; it’s multiple odors that are critical—you improve either memory and/or the parts of the brain that control memory.

So it’s not one study or a couple studies—it’s a massive literature that all says the same thing: loss of olfaction damages the brain, and increased olfactory stimulation increases brain health.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So our podcast is really about innovation and marketing in healthcare. We’ve talked about innovation. I know you’re not handling the marketing, but you’re already selling these, right? There’s a lot of demand. Any comments on the marketing?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): It’s not my area of expertise, but we’ve sold out our first shipment. We’ve got another 10,000 coming on a boat. We sold out the first group without any advertisements.

There’s been massive interest—over 200 media stories around the world: podcasts, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, online—everything. People are really interested.

I’m fascinated that they’re fascinated. With new ideas, they often get ignored or people are so skeptical they won’t even consider them. But here, people are drawn to it. They’re not skeptical—something about it hits home.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Our experience together working on the device and program for eating disorders… we’d get positive science and nobody cared. Or the journalistic way is “balance”—one day a positive story, the next day 10 people saying the opposite.

There’s so much confusion and misinformation out there. Even with autism—really hard.
But with this, what’s the downside? You’re smelling pleasant smells at night. It’s passive.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah. And I think there are some ideas where people just go, “Yes—that makes sense.” This is one of them.

Other things you’ve described, people go, “Who knows—maybe yes, maybe no.”
We literally have the only effective treatment for anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and obesity—even obesity in children—and decades later it’s still not here.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah—decades later. We worked on that, right? Decades later, it’s still not here. That’s one of my most frustrating things professionally. But at least I got to invest in Memory Air.

So as we’re wrapping up: it’s about multiple odors. What does it cost? What’s the monthly thing? How do I buy it?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): You go to MemoryAir.com. That’s the only place you can get it at this point—only in the United States. We don’t have the ability to provide it elsewhere. You buy the device for $799, and every month you get a new odorant belt that is $39, shipped automatically. You don’t have to do anything.

When you get it, you put the odorant belt in, press a button when you go to sleep. After a delay, it will go on and will go on at that time forever. You just get a new belt every month because it uses up the odors. You put it in, close the door, and go to sleep. That’s it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That’s amazing. And I remember the trials and tribulations of getting to do it that easily. It’s not an easy road—don’t let anybody kid you.

And I’m sure availability will change, but right now it’s MemoryAir.com. I’m really excited about this. I get opportunities to invest in things reasonably frequently, and this is one of the very few where I did it versus just usual stock stuff.

But I’m emotionally involved. I believe in the idea. I believe in the science. And I did a terrible job setting this up—I didn’t even tell them about your background with UCI and your professorship and your years of science. But I’ll put that in the show. Make sure you give me a copy of your bio.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): So Alan will always introduce me by saying I’m one of the—according to a survey from Stanford University Medical School—ranked among the top 1% of scientists in the world.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That’s pretty good.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So you’re not just selling stuff. You’re not just selling stuff at the carnival .So that’s… that’s… Anything else we missed—data, evidence, breakthrough, application to other diseases—anything else you want to share as we wrap up?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): The thing that surprised me most is how many people who aren’t older adults are interested and have ordered one—people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Not quite biohackers—they just want extra help with their brain.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Assuming somebody’s got a spouse or partner—is the machine strong enough to benefit both, or do you buy two?

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): I recommend two because the throw is about four feet. Unless you sleep on a single bed, it probably won’t work for both. If you can afford it, two would be optimal—one on each side of the bed.

We have one of these California king beds where it’s miles between us—so we have two of them and that works out really well.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I’m going to switch to a twin so I can just buy one and be cheap. Not really.

All right, Michael—it’s been fun talking to you. Congratulations. It must be really exciting to have your life’s work come together into something people can actually use.

Dr. Michael Leon (Memory Air): Yeah. It’s a real pleasure to see it come together.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Awesome. Thank you.