Evidence has arrived from the University of Northumbria in Newcastle that people who chew gum throughout tests of both long-term and short-term memory got much better scores than people who didn't!
75 adults were bombarded by 20 min of memory and attention tests. One third of them chewed gum throughout, another third mimicked the chewing action but with no gum and the final third were the control group and did no chewing at all.
The gum-chewers scored 24% higher than the control group on short-term memory tests and 36% higher on long-term memory tests. Spatial working memory was also more accurate.
Chewing gum in class was a definite no no when I was at school as a pupil and also in the schools I taught in over the 20 years I was a teacher. I remember blobs of used chewing gum on the undersides of chairs and desks, left in a hurry by class-mates on the verge of discovery by the teacher!
And there was that awful day I went home with chewing gum embedded in the fabric of my school skirt, having accidentally sat in someone's second-hand gum. Yeuch! You may recall the standard treatment for gum removal - leave in the deep freeze for an hour and then try to chip little bits of the now hard gum off the clothing. A long and tedious job if ever there was one!
Then there are the perennial circular discs of black on our newly power-washed pavements. They have to send out a specialist team to rid our walkways of the discarded contents of other people's mouths! I'm not paining a very pretty picture here, am I!
I can't imagine gum-chewing being wholly accepted even with all this compelling evidence to support its use!
It seems that Japanese researchers have demonstrated the link between chewing and increased activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for memory.
But no one seems to know why!
There's plenty of speculation though.
Recent research has shown that chewing causes the release of insulin by the body, in anticipation of digesting the food expected to arrive soon, and it is thought that insulin receptors in the hippocampus may be involved in memory.
But maybe there's an even simpler explanation. Chewing also increases the heart rate, which improves delivery of oxygen in the brain. So it seems, you really can chew gum to get better grades.
So! What you waiting for? Get chewing!
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