Lemon balm may beat out drugs for controlling the symptoms of severe dementia. Improving cognitive performance with aromatherapy in young healthy volunteers is one thing, but how about where it really matters? This group of Japanese researchers had this pie-in-the-sky notion that maybe certain smells could lead to “nerve rebirth” in Alzheimer’s patients. Twenty years ago, to even raise such a possibility as a hypothetical was heretical! Everybody knew that the loss of neurons is “irreversible.” In other words, “dead [nerve cells] are not replaced”—an important factor in neurodegenerative diseases. That’s what I was taught; that’s what everyone was taught, until 1998….