Chewing gun may help brainstorming sessions.
A new study shows that chewing gum helps people concentrate on tasks.
Past research indicates chewing gum increases the blood flow to the frontal-temporal lobe of people’s brains, which is known to improve certain aspects of cognition such as concentration. Other studies indicated chewing gum also increases alertness.
The recent study from Cardiff University had a group of subjects listen to auditory sequences of numbers.
They were rated on how fast and correctly they could identify a sequence of odd even odd numbers.
Half of the 38 study participants chewed gum, and this group was able to more accurately and more quickly identify the sequences of numbers.
Lead researcher Kate Morgan said: “Interestingly, participants who didn’t chew gum performed slightly better at the beginning of the task, but were overtaken by the end. This suggests that chewing gum helps us focus on tasks that require continuous monitoring over a longer amount of time.”
Another study from Saint Lawrence University on the cognitive benefits of gum chewing had the opposite results, saying that the subjects who chewed gum had an increase in performance for only the first twenty minutes.
But in the Saint Lawrence study, the gum chewers outperformed the subjects who weren’t chewing gum in five out of six tests.
