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It looks like nothing more than a bedside fan. To program it, you hit the on button once. But what happens next could improve your memory by 226%. This is Memory Air, a new product born from decades of science charting the relationship between our nose and our brain. Each night, Memory Air cycles through 40 different, undisclosed scents, twice. As you sleepeven though you dont consciously smell these scentsresearch suggests that it can measurably improve your memory within weeks. [Photo: Memory Air] How is that possible? As the companys founderUC Davis professor emeritus Michael Leonexplains, We are functionally odor deprived. Whereas humans evolved in a scent-filled world, where we didnt even shower, he suggests that whatever room youre residing in now probably smells like nothing by design. Thats difficult, as our cognition and ability to smell are closely linked. “All memory loss precedes or is accompanied closely by olfactory loss,” notes Leon, who points out many of us experienced brain fog and loss of scent during COVID-19. “In most neurological diseases its the first symptom.” We don’t need to completely untangle the relationship between smell and memory to understand that they affect one another. Smell is a learnable behaviorand often a re-learnable behavior. And relearning that behavior can actually improve our memory. [Photo: Memory Air] Leon believes that smell has such a powerful effect on memory because the olfactory system has an anatomical advantage. It is the only sense that has a straight pathway to your hippocampal cluster, which manages memory and emotion. (Meanwhile, all other senses take a detour through your thalamus first.) By feeding this region of your brain new odors, research has found you can actually increase gray matter and neuroplasticitygenerating new connections in your brain. Smells appear to be a way to exercise and strengthen the very area of your brain that handles memory. In 2023, Leon published a study demonstrating that by routinely exposing people to smells, you could improve some of their mental faculties. A randomly assorted collection of people ages 60 to 85 were exposed to one of seven smells each night for two hours over six months. After that time, his team observed that the smelling group tested with a 226% improvement in memory over a control groupand fMRI scans exhibited positive shifts in brain structures supporting memory. But Leon is quick to point out that his findings are not special; rather, they are increasingly the norm. There are now about 20 studies that have used olfactory enrichment to improve memory, he says, noting that the methodologies vary wildly. I think the strength of literature as a whole is what we should look at. This is such a strong phenomenon. Who does it, and how they do it, is not as important as getting more odor to the brain. [Photo: Memory Air] Turning research into product To develop this science into a functional product, Leons team raised an undisclosed sum from a group of wealthy investors. They also tapped Christian Garnett, from Garnett Design Group, to spend three years transforming theory into intervention. For the final product, Leon wanted to mirror similar research out of South Korea, which subjected participants to a full 40 smells twice a day (and found similar gains around memory, while noting that it reduced depression and increased facilities with attention and language, too). But how do you fit 40 smells in a box? It was probably the biggest challenge, to figure out how to turn on and off scents at will, Garnett says. Memory Air needed to run through dozens of scents, twice, making each distinctive with no lingering odor that would blend them from one to another. That meant each had four minutes to appear and dissipate. Most of the scent industry is optimized to do the opposite: get the most scent out and have it last as long as possible, Garnett says with a laugh. Garnetts team tested all sorts of ideas. It tried developing a white odor technologythink white noise but for smellswith so many frequencies that everything cancels out into nothing, blinding your nose. It tested enzymes, as used by Febreze, to break scents down to clear them out of the room. But ultimately, it landed on an idea thats part Glade PlugIn, part machine gun. When setting up the device, you load it with a belt that looks like a bandolier. Instead of bullets, its filled with 40 individual essential oilsscents the team refuses to detail but insists are nothing unusual. (The order appears irrelevant, but the sheer number helps reduce habituation.) As the bandolier rotates through the night, it uses a bit of heat on the active oil pouch. With a phase-changing material, scent diffuses out when warmed while a large, low-speed fan quietly wafts the scent toward the sleeping person. The same moment you feel air from the fan hit you, you get the scent. The moment the fan cuts off, you don’t smell anything, Garnett says. This way you get 20 to 30 seconds of scent exposure before the fan tuns off, cools, and clears te room. This whole experience is designed to be automatic. Garnett pared back the product, removing lights and test modes to ensure anyone could use it perfectly. When you set up the Memory Air, all you do is slip in the scent belt and hit the on button right before bed. From there, it will know when to kick on. And while the scent belt will run out after a month, a subscription ships replacements to customers on a schedule. [Photo: Memory Air] A UX you dont experience The oddest part of Memory Air is that if it works as advertised, you wont actually even know its working. It runs in your sleep, leaving no olfactory footprint by design. And Leon notes that smells dont wake people up (smelling salts, incidentally, rouse people through irritation, not scent). In a way, its the opposite of sleep tracking. Memory Air isnt actively measuring anything. Its UX is largely imperceptible. But its value, if it works as research suggests, is that it could vastly impact someones mental capacity. Leon believes users could discover other effects too: In his 2023 study, he discovered people whod done the olfactory battery got 22 minutes more sleep per nightbut hes validating the idea before making any bold claims around Memory Air as a sleep aid. We think there are a number of other medical conditions that may be treatable with this same approach; weve identified 139 different medical conditions, all accompanied by olfactory loss, he says. Benefits of Memory Air could be significant, while the only real cost is the price itself. Memory Air is available now for $799, including the first months scent belt. Replacement belts cost $39 with a monthly subscription.
Category:
E-Commerce
For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGPT Atlas, Opera has Neon, and others are on the way. The pitch is that AI “agents” will soon be able to trudge through the web on your behalf, booking your flights, buying your groceries, and shopping on sites like Amazon. Both Perplexity and OpenAI view these browsers as imperative in their goals to build AI “operating systems” that can manage your life. Amazon, which has a lot to lose if people stop accessing its website directly, is suing to stop that from happening. It’s been trying to block Perplexity, but so far to no avail. Therein lies the irony: These AI browsers promise a future where you’ll never have to visit a website again, yet that promise depends on having viable websites to crawl through in the first place. Amazon’s lawsuit is a sign that these two goals may be incompatible. Feeding the beast For companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, web browsers are suddenly important because they open the door to content and data that would otherwise be inaccessible. Consider Amazon. If you’re just using ChatGPT’s website, you might ask it to recommend a few Amazon items or summarize a product’s user reviews, but its answers wouldn’t include any personal data from Amazon’s site. By contrast, ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet can access Amazon exactly as it appears in your own browser window. That means they can crawl through your order history or weigh in on Amazon’s personalized product recommendations. Perplexity says these “agentic” browsers make for a better shopping experience, which is why Amazon should embrace thembut Perplexity also stands to benefit in other ways. By understanding things like your order history, personalized recommendations, and all the questions you asked Perplexity’s AI to arrive at a particular product, the company can build a much richer user profile for things like targeted advertising. “You’ve gone from behavior tracking to psychological modeling,” says Eamonn Maguire, who leads the machine learning team at Proton. “Where you have traditional browsers tracking what you do, AI browsers infer why you do it.” This isn’t speculation. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on the TBPN podcast earlier this year that its browser will enable “hyper-personalized” ads by understanding more about users’ personal lives. “What are the things youre buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” Srinivas said. Amazon, meanwhile, has much to lose from AI shopping agents, even if they ultimately help make a purchase. The company has its own $56 billion advertising business, fueled in part by the ads it stuffs into its shopping pages. CEO Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI agents could disrupt that business. You may have little sympathy for Amazon in that scenario, but consider also the many smaller entities that stand to lose from an agentic web. Your favorite newsletter, for instanceone that paywalls content for its most loyal readersmay now have that content exposed within the tabs of an AI browser. Eamonn also gives the example of research papers that sit behind paywalls, or personal documents that wouldn’t exist on the web at all. The contents of emails, shopping lists, and productivity apps could all become fodder for AI to learn more about you. And while Perplexity and OpenAI have said they won’t train AI models on what people view in their web browsers, Eamonn says they could easily change that policy in the future. “Cynically speaking, it’s a smart way not only of building particularly good profiles of users but also getting more data,” Eamonn says. Why the web? Srinivas has acknowledged that AI companies need the openness of the web to provide them with all this context, because other platforms are too locked down. “The only reason we’re doing a browser is there’s no other way to build an agent with enough control over many applications simultaneously,” Srinivas said at the Upfront Summit in February. “Especially on iOS, you cannot even access another app. You don’t want to be bottlenecked by how Apple is building its ecosystem. You want to work around it, and the browser is a very good work-around in the short term for us.” OpenAI has similarly described the web browser as key to its broader ambitions. “Now that we have feedback and signals from hundreds of millions of people around the world, its clear ChatGPT needs to become so much more than the simple chatbot it started as,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a blog post announcing the Atlas browser. “Over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life: a fully connected hub that helps you manage your day and achieve your long-term goals.” While AI companies have clear ideas of what they can do on te open web, it’s less certain whether the open web will cooperate. Lots of websites already attempt to block AI crawlersReddit has even cut off search engines that don’t provide compensationbut AI browsers represent yet another way around those restrictions. Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity could be a sign of further fights to come when attempts to block AI fail. AI companies would have you believe that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. But that raises a bigger question of what the open web even looks like if it becomes entirely intermediated by AI. A common complaint against AI tools like ChatGPT is that they’ll erode the incentives to create new content, and that AI itself will ultimately suffer from having nothing new to train on. “Nothing really gets better unless you have content, but the content is getting worse because people are just using AI to generate this content, and then these models are getting worse because the content is getting worse,” Proton’s Maguire says. With the rise of agentic AI browsers, a similar argument could be applied to the web as a whole: What motivation will exist to design beautiful, unique websites for humans when there’s no one left to browse them?
Category:
E-Commerce
Tis the season for givingand that means tis the season for shopping. Maybe youll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, Ill just return it if they dont like it. But before you click purchase, its worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years. As a marketing professor, I study how retailers manage the flood of returns that follow big shopping events like these, and what it reveals about the hidden costs of convenience. Returns might seem like a routine part of doing business, but theyre anything but trivial. According to the National Retail Federation, returns cost U.S. retailers almost $890 billion each year. Part of that staggering figure comes from returns fraud, which includes everything from consumers buying and wearing items once before returning thema practice known as wardrobingto more deceptive acts such as falsely claiming an item never arrived. Returns also drain resources because they require reverse logistics: shipping, inspecting, restocking, and often repackaging items. Many returned products cant be resold at full price or must be liquidated, leading to lost revenue. Processing returns also adds labor and operational expenses that erode profit margins. How e-commerce transformed returns While retailers have offered return options for decades, their use has expanded dramatically in recent years, reflecting how much shopping habits have changed. Before the rise of e-commerce, shopping was a sensory experience: Consumers would touch fabrics, try on clothing, and see colors in natural light before buying. If something didnt work out, customers brought it back to the store, where an associate could quickly inspect and restock it. Online shopping changed all that. While e-commerce offers convenience and variety, it removes key sensory cues. You cant feel the material, test the fit, or see the true color. The result is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes higher rates of returns. One analysis by Capital One suggests that the rate for returns is almost three times higher for online purchases than for in-store purchases. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the move toward online shopping went into overdrive. Even hesitant online shoppers had to adapt. To encourage purchases, many retailers introduced or expanded generous return policies. The strategy worked to boost sales, but it also created a culture of returning. In 2020, returns accounted for 10.6% of total U.S. retail sales, nearly double the prior year, according to the National Retail Federation data. By 2021, that had climbed to 16.6%. Unable to try things on in stores, consumers began ordering multiple sizes or styles, keeping one and sending the rest back. The behavior was rational from a shoppers perspective but devastatingly expensive for retailers. The high cost of convenience Most supply chains are designed to move in one direction: from production to consumption. Returns reverse that flow. When merchandise moves backward, it adds layers of cost and complexity. In-store returns used to be simple: A customer would take an item back to the store, the retailer would inspect the product, and, if it was in good condition, it would go right back on the shelf. Online returns, however, are far more cumbersome. Products can spend weeks in transit and often cant be resoldby the time they arrive, they may be out of season, obsolete, or no longer in their original packaging. Logistics costs compound the problem. During the pandemic, consumers grew accustomed to free shipping. That means retailers now often pay twice: once to deliver the item and again to retrieve it. Now, in a post-pandemic world, retailers are trying to strike a balancemaintaining customer goodwill without sacrificing profitability. One solution is to raise prices, but especially today, with inflation in the headlines, shoppers are sensitive to price hikes. The other, more common approach is to tighten return policies. In practice, thats taken several forms. Some retailers have begun charging small flat fees for returns, even when a customer mails an item back at their own expense. For example, the direct-to-consumer retailer Curvy Sense offers customers unlimited returns and exchanges of an item for an initial $2.98 fee. Others have shortened their return windows. Over the summer, for example, beauty retailers Sephora and Ulta reduced their return window from 60 days to 30. Many brands now attach large, conspicuous do not remove tags to prevent consumers from wearing items and then sending them back. And increasingly, retailers are offering store credit rather than cash or credit card refunds, ensuring that returned sales at least stay within their company. Few retailers advertise these changes prominently. Instead, they appear quietly in the fine print of return policiespolicies that are now longer, more specific, and far less forgiving than they once were. As we head into the busiest shopping season of the year, its worth pausing before you click purchase. Ask yourself: Is this something I truly wantor am I planning to return it later? Whenever possible, shop in person and return in person. And if youre buying online, make sure you familiarize yourself with the return policy. Lauren Beitelspacher is a professor of marketing at Babson College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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