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Next time your teacher asks you to spit out your gum during a test or quiz, you might want to use this study in your defense.
A team of psychologists at St. Lawrence University have discovered that chewing gum actually has measurable cognitive benefits. Chewing gum during certain activities has proven (in this study) to be very effective at boosting a person’s mental performance.
The test group was 159 students, who were given a variety of difficult mental tasks to perform. Half of the students chewed gum, while half did not. The result was that the gum-chewing half did significantly better on the tasks, enough so to surprise the psychologists.
So, what causes this boost? No one knows. Since the gum-chewers used both sugared and sugar-free gum, that rules out the possibility that it was connected to glucose.
Perhaps having an oral fixation isn’t so bad after all.
