Can Rosemary Really Improve Your Memory?
Join Dr. James Odell for Season 2 of the Science of Self-Healing Podcast! He's the medical and executive director for BRMI, as well as a practicing naturopathic doctor for over 35 years, and he's here to share with you his extensive knowledge of medicine from a different perspective.
Could the scent of rosemary actually sharpen your memory? Rosemary has been associated with remembrance since antiquity, and centuries later, herbalists were describing it as an herb that could strengthen memory and the senses. Today, modern researchers are uncovering intriguing biological reasons that this enduring connection may be more than symbolic.
In this episode of The Science of Self-Healing, Dr. James Odell explores how rosemary and its active compounds may influence memory, attention, alertness, brain energy, inflammation, oxidative stress, and the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. You’ll discover what researchers have learned from studies using rosemary aroma, rosemary water, and dried rosemary, why the compound 1,8-cineole is particularly intriguing, and how simply smelling rosemary may produce measurable effects in the body and brain.
Dr. Odell also looks at rosemary and the aging brain, practical ways to use this familiar herb, and why supporting memory involves much more than targeting a single pathway.
It’s a fascinating meeting of centuries-old tradition and modern science—and a closer look at what rosemary may actually be doing in the brain.
Transcript: Can Rosemary Really Improve Your Memory?
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Science of Self-Healing podcast. For health and wellness knowledge from a different perspective. Produced by the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute, also known as BRMI. We are your source for unparalleled information about how you can naturally support your body's ability to regulate, adapt, regenerate, and self-heal. I'm your host, Dr. James Odell, the medical and executive director for BRMI, as well as a practicing naturopathic doctor for over 35 years. And remember, this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for the direct care of a qualified health professional who oversees and provides unique and individual care. The information here is to broaden our different perspectives and should not be construed as medical advice or treatment. Let's get started.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Science of Self-Healing. We’ve all heard that we can improve memory through lifestyle interventions such as regular aerobic exercise, quality sleep, mindfulness practices, and activities such as working puzzles. There are also numerous food supplements that can help improve cognitive function—almost too many to mention. Lion’s Mane, Bacopa, Ginkgo, and Huperzine A are among the most popular. But one of my favorite memory enhancers is something much more familiar: the herb rosemary.
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at rosemary and its fascinating relationship with memory. We’ll explore what’s actually in rosemary, how some of its compounds may influence the brain, and what researchers have discovered about its effects on memory, attention, alertness, inflammation, oxidative stress, and brain energy. We’ll also look at studies involving both smelling rosemary and consuming it, and finally, we’ll talk about practical ways rosemary can be used to support cognitive function.
The Herb of Remembrance
For centuries, rosemary has been associated with remembrance. Long before researchers could measure neurotransmitter activity, blood flow in the brain, or reaction time, this aromatic herb appeared in traditions connected with memory and mental clarity. Today, modern research has begun to give that reputation a biological basis. Studies in healthy adults have reported measurable effects of rosemary aroma, as well as rosemary containing capsules and drinks, on selected aspects of memory, alertness, attention, and cognitive performance.
From a bioregulatory perspective, rosemary is particularly interesting because cognition isn’t controlled by one single pathway. Memory depends on many systems working together, including communication between neurons, energy production, circulation to the brain, regulation of inflammation and oxidative stress, sleep, mood, and synaptic plasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize the connections between nerve cells.
Rosemary contains multiple biologically active compounds that may interact with several of these systems at the same time. In fact, a 2024 review of preclinical and clinical research identified several possible mechanisms, including cholinesterase inhibition, changes in neurotransmitter systems, and regulation of proteins involved in oxidative stress and inflammation. At the same time, researchers emphasized that substantially more clinical research is needed.
Memory Isn’t Just One Thing
Before we get further into rosemary, though, it helps to understand that memory itself isn’t just one thing. Working memory temporarily holds information while we’re using it. Long-term memory requires information to be encoded, consolidated, stored, and eventually retrieved. Prospective memory allows us to remember something we intend to do in the future, while retrospective memory involves recalling information or events from the past.
And then there’s attention. If we aren’t paying attention to information in the first place, we may not encode it effectively enough to remember it later. So, something that changes alertness, neurotransmission, stress, or brain metabolism could affect memory performance without necessarily acting on one isolated “memory center” in the brain.
What’s Actually Inside a Sprig of Rosemary?
Now, with that background, let’s look at what’s actually in rosemary. Rosemary was historically known as Rosmarinus officinalis and is now generally classified as Salvia rosmarinus. It contains a complex mixture of plant compounds, or phytochemicals. Some of the most frequently studied include 1,8-cineole, carnosic acid, carnosol, rosmarinic acid, and ursolic acid. These compounds differ in their chemistry and biological activity.
Volatile compounds such as 1,8-cineole are especially relevant to rosemary aroma because they can evaporate into the air and be inhaled. Carnosic acid, on the other hand, has attracted attention for its antioxidant properties and potential role in neuroprotective signaling, meaning cellular processes that may help protect nerve cells. Phenols found in rosemary include caffeic, chlorogenic, labiatic, neochlorogenic, rosmarinic, and salicylic acids.
It’s also important to remember that rosemary comes in many different forms. Fresh rosemary used in cooking, dried rosemary, essential oil, extracts, supplements, and rosemary water can all contain different concentrations and combinations of active compounds. So, evidence obtained using one rosemary preparation cannot automatically be applied to every other form. That’s one reason botanical and nutritional research has to be interpreted more carefully than simply saying an herb or food “works.”
The Acetylcholine Connection
So, how might rosemary actually affect memory? One proposed mechanism involves acetylcholine, a chemical messenger in the brain that plays an important role in attention, learning, and memory. After acetylcholine delivers its signal, an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase breaks it down. If that enzyme is inhibited, acetylcholine can remain available for signaling longer. This is significant because acetylcholinesterase is also a therapeutic target of some medications used to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Experimental rosemary research has reported cholinesterase-inhibiting activity, and recent reviews identify changes in this cholinergic signaling system as one plausible pathway through which rosemary could affect cognition. Now, that does not mean rosemary is equivalent to a prescription cholinesterase inhibitor. Dose, pharmacology, clinical efficacy, and the available evidence are fundamentally different. What makes the finding important is that it provides a biologically plausible connection between compounds in rosemary and neural systems directly involved in memory. But acetylcholine is only one part of this.
Oxidative Stress: It’s About Balance, Not Elimination
Next, let’s talk about oxidative stress. The brain has unusually high energy requirements and consumes a substantial amount of oxygen relative to its size. As part of normal metabolism, our cells produce reactive oxygen species, sometimes described as free radicals. These molecules aren’t inherently bad. They participate in normal cellular signaling. Problems arise when they accumulate faster than the body’s antioxidant and repair systems can regulate them. That imbalance is what we call oxidative stress.
Persistent oxidative stress can damage fats, proteins, DNA, and mitochondria and is associated with aging and neurodegenerative disease.
But rosemary’s potential role here goes beyond the simple idea that antioxidants neutralize free radicals. Some rosemary constituents appear to influence the body’s own cellular defense pathways. Carnosic acid, for example, has been investigated for its effects on NRF2-related antioxidant signaling. NRF2 is part of a cellular defense system that helps regulate the body’s own protective and antioxidant proteins. From a bioregulatory perspective, that’s important because a plant compound may act partly as a signal that changes how cells organize their own protective response rather than simply acting as an outside antioxidant.
And the goal isn’t to eliminate oxidation altogether. Reactive molecules have normal signaling roles. Healthy regulation requires balance—enough oxidative signaling for normal physiology while preventing excessive damage.
When the Brain’s Immune Cells Won’t Switch Off
Now, oxidative stress is closely connected to another process that matters to the brain: inflammation. Microglia are specialized immune cells in the nervous system that help defend and repair nervous tissue. Inflammation is a normal part of that defense system, but when neuroinflammation becomes chronic or poorly regulated, it can interfere with communication between neurons and contribute to cellular injury.
Rosemary constituents have demonstrated anti-inflammatory activity in experimental models, and contemporary reviews describe the regulation of inflammatory proteins as another potential component of rosemary’s neuroprotective effects.
Every Thought Needs Energy: The Mitochondria Link
Next, we come to mitochondria—the tiny structures inside our cells that produce ATP, the usable energy cells need to function. Every thought and every signal between neurons requires energy. Neurons depend heavily on mitochondria, which also participate in calcium regulation, oxidative signaling, and programmed cell death.
If mitochondrial function deteriorates, neurons can become less capable of maintaining electrical signals, recycling neurotransmitters, repairing cellular components, and adapting to stress. This is where the bioregulatory interpretation becomes more useful than simply calling rosemary a “brain booster.” If its constituents influence oxidative regulation, inflammation, neurotransmission, and cellular metabolism at the same time, they may be supporting the broader biological environment in which cognition occurs.
Can Just Smelling Rosemary Sharpen Your Mind?
So far, we’ve talked about what rosemary contains and some of the mechanisms researchers are investigating. But now we get to a particularly interesting question. Can simply smelling rosemary affect cognition?
Some of the best-known human research on rosemary has involved its aroma.
In one randomized study, 144 healthy participants were exposed to rosemary aroma, lavender aroma, or no odor while completing computerized cognitive tests. The rosemary group showed significantly better overall quality of memory and secondary memory than the control group, although their speed of memory was impaired. Participants exposed to rosemary also remained more alert after testing than participants in the control and lavender groups.
Another study, conducted in 2017, involved 53 students between the ages of 13 and 15. Researchers found that the students’ memory of images and numbers improved when rosemary essential oil was sprayed in the room. Now, there may be more than one explanation for effects like these. Our sense of smell has close functional relationships with areas of the brain involved in memory and emotion, so an odor itself can act as a contextual signal.
Separate research on odor-dependent memory found that bringing back a rosemary odor that had been present during learning could influence memory performance later. In other words, some of rosemary’s effects may involve sensory and contextual mechanisms in addition to direct pharmacological effects from compounds being inhaled.
The Compound That Shows Up in Your Bloodstream
And that brings us to one particular compound: 1,8-cineole. A small human study involving 20 healthy volunteers provides some evidence that there may indeed be a pharmacological component to rosemary aroma. Participants completed cognitive tasks after being exposed to rosemary essential-oil aroma, and researchers measured the concentration of 1,8-cineole in their blood. Cognitive performance was significantly related to the amount of absorbed 1,8-cineole. Higher concentrations were associated with better performance on measures involving both speed and accuracy.
The study does not prove that 1,8-cineole alone caused those effects, and it was a small study. But it does show that a volatile compound from rosemary can be detected in the bloodstream after aroma exposure and that its concentration can correlate with cognitive performance. So, aromatherapy may be biologically more complex than simply whether or not someone enjoys a particular smell.
What Happens When You Drink It?
But smelling rosemary is only one way of using it. What happens when rosemary is consumed? In a randomized study published in 2018, 80 healthy adults consumed either 250 milliliters of commercially available rosemary water or plain mineral water before cognitive testing. The rosemary-water group showed a number of statistically significant, although small, beneficial effects on cognition. Researchers also used near-infrared spectroscopy, a noninvasive technique that can provide information about changes in blood oxygenation in the brain. They identified differences in deoxygenated hemoglobin during cognitive demand, which they suggested could reflect facilitated oxygen extraction.
Why might that matter? Because cognition is metabolically expensive. When neurons become more active, they require a coordinated supply and use of oxygen and nutrients.
If rosemary influences cerebrovascular responses—that means blood flow and blood-vessel activity in the brain—or metabolic responses during cognitive demand, that could represent another route through which it affects performance. However, the effects in this study were small, and a single acute trial cannot establish a long-term cognitive benefit.
What About the Aging Brain?
Now, whenever we talk about memory, another obvious question comes up: What about the aging brain? Here, the amount of preclinical research—meaning laboratory and animal research—is considerably larger than the amount of human research.
A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis examined animal studies involving rosemary extracts and active constituents. Twenty-three studies were included in the qualitative review and fifteen in the meta-analysis. Overall, rosemary interventions improved cognitive outcomes in both normal animals and animals with experimentally induced cognitive impairment, although there were substantial unexplained differences among the studies.
Animal and laboratory models have examined rosemary in settings involving oxidative stress, chemically induced amnesia, inflammatory injury, amyloid-beta toxicity, and other processes relevant to neurodegeneration. These studies have generated hypotheses involving cholinergic signaling, antioxidant defenses, inflammation, mitochondrial protection, and neuronal survival. But there’s an important limitation here. An effect in an animal model does not demonstrate that eating rosemary prevents Alzheimer’s disease in humans.
A 2024 review concluded that only a few clinical studies were available and specifically called for more placebo-controlled research and comparisons with approved treatments. Rosemary should therefore be viewed as a promising area of research, not as a demonstrated therapy for dementia.
Why Memory Can’t Be Pinned to a Single Cause
And when we step back and look at all of this together, we can see why studying memory is so complicated. Cognitive performance emerges from the interaction of multiple regulatory systems. Neurotransmission affects how information is encoded and retrieved. Mitochondria provide energy for neuronal signaling. Cerebral circulation supplies oxygen and nutrients. Oxidative and inflammatory systems help determine the cellular environment. Sleep affects memory consolidation, and stress and mood influence attention and retrieval.
These systems also influence one another. Chronic inflammation can impair mitochondrial function. Mitochondrial dysfunction can increase oxidative stress. Poor sleep can alter inflammatory and stress signaling. And anxiety can consume attentional resources, making memory appear worse even when the underlying storage mechanisms are intact.
So, trying to explain cognition with a single variable misses a great deal of the biology. Rosemary is interesting precisely because its constituents appear to interact experimentally with several different points within this network. That isn’t proof of a universal cognitive-enhancing effect. Rather, it provides an example of how phytochemicals—biologically active compounds produced by plants—can interact with regulatory biology at multiple levels.
More Isn’t Always Better: Getting the Dose Right
Now, there’s another practical point to keep in mind. Biological responses are rarely linear, meaning more of something does not necessarily produce more benefit. Dose, preparation, duration of use, metabolism, age, medications, and baseline health can all change the response. And culinary rosemary is fundamentally different from concentrated rosemary essential oil. An optimum dose is 750 milligrams of dried rosemary leaf powder. It appears that higher doses are not more effective and may even impair performance. Maximum dosage is recommended at 500 milligrams taken twice daily, or 1,000 milligrams total per day. This can be taken long term over several months.
Rosemary volatile oil can also be smelled to enhance cognition. Smelling rosemary essential oil releases compounds such as 1,8-cineole into the bloodstream, which helps increase alertness, mood, and short-term memory performance. Short sessions of three minutes of diffusion are commonly used in observational tests.
One Herb Within a Much Larger Picture
Of course, rosemary exists within a much larger picture of cognitive health. The strongest established strategies for supporting cognitive resilience remain broader lifestyle and medical factors: adequate sleep, regular physical activity, cardiovascular and metabolic health, sufficient nutrition, intellectual and social engagement, and appropriate treatment of underlying diseases. Rosemary, if beneficial, would be one small influence within this much larger regulatory system.
Taken together, the research we’ve discussed suggests that rosemary can influence several aspects of cognition and brain function, including memory, alertness, attention, mood, and even autonomic nervous system activity—the system that automatically regulates functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and digestion.
And these questions about supporting cognitive health have become increasingly important.
In today’s world, there are many factors that adversely affect mental health and memory. The number of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has increased, and among adults, cases of neurodegenerative disease and age-related dementia have become more frequent.
It is more desirable to use natural compounds such as rosemary with a decreased risk of side effects compared with synthetic components of drugs. The use of aromatherapy has also become highly popular and trustworthy among health professionals.
Putting Rosemary to Work for Your Memory
So, where does all of this leave us? Rosemary memory research is encouraging.
If you are concerned about memory decline, rosemary is certainly worth considering—either consuming it, smelling the volatile oil, or both. It is simple to carry a small bottle of rosemary oil and smell it throughout the day. Or you can use a diffuser to aromatize rosemary oil into a room. You may find it both refreshing and stimulating to the mind.
And perhaps the larger lesson here is that memory should never be thought of as an isolated function.
Memory emerges from the coordinated regulation of neurotransmission, metabolism, circulation, inflammation, oxidative balance, mood, sleep, and cellular resilience.
Rosemary is particularly fascinating because its many constituents appear to interact with several parts of this complex biological network. And an herb that has been associated with remembrance for centuries is now giving modern researchers some fascinating reasons to investigate why.
Well, that’s all for this episode. Tune in in two weeks for another Science of Self-Healing.
Till then, be well.
Bioregulatory medicine is a total body (and mind) approach to health and healing that aims to help facilitate and restore natural human biological processes. It is a proven, safe, gentle, highly effective, drugless, and side-effect-free medical model designed to naturally support the body to regulate, adapt, regenerate, and self-heal. BRMI is a non-commercial 501(c)(3) foundation and will expand and flourish with your support. Our goal is to make bioregulatory medicine a household term.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for the direct care of a qualified health practitioner who oversees and provides unique and individualized care. The information provided here is to broaden our different perspectives and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
