Single Malt Might Be the Ultimate Brain Food

I’ve reached the age where I’ve started peering suspiciously at the brain training apps on my phone, wondering if a daily dose of Sudoku is really all that’s standing between me and total cognitive fog. It turns out, however, that the most effective tool for keeping the mental gears grinding might actually be sitting right there in my drinks cabinet.

Now, I’m not suggesting that getting hammered is the best path to enlightenment. But the actual act of sitting down and properly nosing a complex single malt is starting to look like a genuine bit of preventative medicine. What we usually write off as a bit of pretentious connoisseurship is actually a high-intensity workout for the brain.

For a long time, we’ve been told that humans are rubbish at smelling. This idea actually dates back to a 19th-century neuroanatomist named Paul Broca, who decided we were anosmatiques (basically biological duds compared to dogs or pigs).

It’s a myth, but one that’s stuck around for over a century. Neuroscientist John McGann did a brilliant job of debunking this in his 2017 paper, Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth. The reality is that we’ve just become lazy. We spend our lives staring at screens rather than actually engaging with the physical world.

Researchers at Rockefeller University found that we can actually distinguish between roughly a trillion different odours. As psychologist Anna Oleszkiewicz points out, our sensitivity is actually right up there with super-smellers like dogs. We just have to start paying attention again.

There’s a reason why one whiff of a peated Islay dram can instantly teleport you back to a damp coastal path in Scotland. Most of our senses sight, touch, hearing have to go through a middleman in the brain called the thalamus, which sorts and processes the data before sending it to the cortex.

The sense of smell, however, has an all-access backstage pass. It bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus the parts of the brain that handle emotion and memory.

This direct wiring is incredibly important. When we stop using our sense of smell, the parts of the brain it feeds can actually start to atrophy. In fact, losing your sense of smell is often one of the first canaries in the coal mine for neurological issues. Michael Leon and his team have linked smell loss to over 139 different conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

If the olfactory system is a muscle, then a complex scotch is the equivalent of a heavy session at the gym. This is the sort of fitness I can get behind!

Standard smell training (yes, that’s a real thing) usually involves sniffing four specific scents: lemon, eucalyptus, rose, and clove. It’s a globally recognised therapy pioneered by Professor Thomas Hummel to help people recover their sense of smell.

If you look at a standard whisky flavour wheel, those exact notes citrus, medicinal greens, floral hits, and spice are the fundamental building blocks of most drams. By sitting there and trying to pick out the vanilla, the brine, or the dried fruit, you’re essentially performing a clinical neurological tune-up.

The data on olfactory enrichment is pretty wild. In one study (the Memory Air study), participants who were exposed to different scents while they slept allegedly saw a 226% improvement in verbal memory. Brain scans have shown the hippocampus physically growing in people who regularly practice smell awareness.

So, the next time I’m sitting with a glass of single malt, I’m not just being a gourmand or an epicure. I’m doing my homework. I’m protecting my hippocampus. I’m restructuring my brain for the better.

At least, that’s exactly what I’ll be telling my wife when she asks why I’ve bought another bottle of Lagavulin. For science, obviously.