“… [12a] Initially, we performed the β‐alkylation reaction with our optimized conditions but in the presence of 25 mol% 18‐crown‐6 and observed a yield of only 15 % suggesting that the potassium ion plays a large role in the mechanism in line with some of the previous literature reports (Scheme 2, a) [7b,12a] . On the other hand, when the N ‐alkylation reaction was performed with 25 mol% 18‐crown‐6, no significant effect on the yield was observed, which is in line with the report by Chaudhary and coworkers on NHC catalyzed N ‐alkylation (Scheme 2, b) and also with the recent report on imine synthesis by Kirchner [8b,24] . This difference between the two reactions possibly arises from the fact that in β‐alkylation, there is an intermediate aldol reaction where the K + metal ion is possibly acting as a Lewis acid whereas for N ‐alkylation, the intermediate reaction is imine formation between benzaldehyde and aniline which does not require the presence of the K + metal ion.…”