Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!

Even the smell of coffee alone is enough to improve your test performance!

Coffee makes you smarter. It’s a fact. Even the smell of coffee alone is enough to make you smarter and improve your scores in maths tests. The Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, USA has published a study showing that the scent of coffee alone is enough to boost people’s performance in the analytical element of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT) a standard test used by many business schools.

The research, which was led by Stevens School of Business professor Adriana Madzharov and which was published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology points to the cognitive boost provided by the coffee scent, and also to an increased confidence among the students, raising their own expectations about how well they were going to do.

In their work, Madzharov and her team administered a 10-question GMAT algebra test in a computer lab to about 100 undergraduate business students, divided into two groups. One group took the test in the presence of an ambient coffee-like scent, while a control group took the same test — but in an unscented room. They found that the group in the coffee-smelling room scored significantly higher on the test.