text: Peter: And so, the research is out there now. This is exactly why our sensory system is so powerful. The olfactory, for example, is the most powerful because, as far as memory and emotion, the olfactory system is so important because it goes directly to the hippocampus and the amygdala---your emotional center, your fear center---and it bypasses the need to go through the thalamus and do more complex things. So we get an immediate hit of an emotion. That's also evolutionary very powerful because that gives you the trigger to get out of the way.
  Peter: You know, as does your hearing and as does your sight. So a lot of these things are programmed to be immediate, right? But getting back to the idea of getting the sleep, when you have that REM sleep, and you enhance it with an aroma that you used earlier and was conditioned, the functional MRI will show that the cortical patterns, like that network we talked about wiring together, will start to fire that's consistent with what you were doing. But then when you add the oil to it, now it's enhanced. It gets more prolonged and higher levels of EEG.
  So this is information that's coming out, and it's so important for the world we're living in today to understand that aspect of our immune system, for example, are tied into that.
  Peter: The inflammation that's ravaging our bodies with arthritis and different things, when you're in your REM sleep, that's when your body's taken care of stimulating your immune response. That's when it's all going on, and also that's when you're battling the inflammatory processes that we're all subjected to.