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It's funny. Laugh. Science

Gum Chewing Found to Boost Brainpower, Memory 29

Posted by timothy from the 9-out-of-10-neurologists dept.
rohis writes: "Reuters health has a story about effect of Chewing Gum on thinking, memory and other subjects here based on the research by University of Northumbria and the Cognitive Research Unit.The experiments involved 75 people split into groups of non-chewers, real chewers and "sham" chewers. Short term memory was tested and found to improve for real chewers."
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Gum Chewing Found to Boost Brainpower, Memory More

Gum Chewing Found to Boost Brainpower, Memory

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  • if she gnaws, she's smart?

  • editors not doing any research (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    check the time difference between when this story was posted by timothy and when the last story was posted, and you know exactly how much editors research before posting...
  • "The key is the repetitive chewing motion."

    I'm off the diet right now.
    Pass the pallet of Oreos, please.
  • The fact that insulin helps memory is old news, so is the fact that exercise help memory. (these are the two tentative conclusions of the article.)

    My only question is who the hell gave them a grant to do this, and what silly assed professor approved?

    THIS is why lay people ignore science: SO MUCH OF IT IS CRAP!

    • The fact that insulin helps memory is old news, so is the fact that exercise help memory. (these are the two tentative conclusions of the article.)

      Nicotine, as a stimulant, is also known to do these things. So, perhaps frantically chewing Nicorettes during a test ought to help even more. (Unless you're a non-smoker, in which case you're likely to simultaneously vomit and keel over, thus gaining a medical reason for which to take a test over. Either way, you win!)

      My only question is who the hell gave them a grant to do this, and what silly assed professor approved?

      Importantly, this is another Useless Fact (tm) that can be bandied about when one needs to convince an imbecile of that which is common sense.

      As for why the group wasn't bigger, more scientific, "pretend gum", etc., well, I'm sure the reason was that the study, being an exercise in proving common sense, wasn't going to attract the biggest grants, corporate sponsorships, etc.

      No worry. It has served its purpose. I have printed out the article and shall leave it on the desk of a co-worker who always complains about my minty-fresh breath.

      So, from like four feet away: "Jeeeee-zuz! Were you gargling pure methyl salicylate again?"

      Fine. My breath smells like laboratory-grade oil of wintergreen. I'm nice enough not to tell him that his smells remarkably similar to the inside of sewage treatment plant's slurry pump.

  • Are we really expected to pay any attention to a test involving only 3 groups of 25 test subjects? The odds of this being anyway accurate must be minute. A simple survey generally requires a little over 1000 people to get a 95/5 accuracy and yet these fools publish data where they claim from a group of 75 people that chewing gum makes you smarter. Could someone please teach these people about conducting proper scientific research (as if their premice wasnt ridiculous anyway).
    • A simple survey generally requires a little over 1000 people to get a 95/5 accuracy

      What kind of nonsense statistics are those? Random sampling doesn't require anywhere near that sample size to have a five percent margin of error. A sample size of 20 randoms samples yeilds a 5% margin of error in a large population. I recommend you read a book about statistics, because the methods employed are fairly straight forward and can give you good insight on making predictions.

      Links between sugar/starch consumption and memory have been demonstrated before in the past, so don't be so hasty to lambast their research. Thier sample size is quite sufficient to show these preliminary results and thier hypotheses seem quite rational to me.

      • Maybe you can use the sample size calculator linked here [surveysystem.com] to find the sample popluation required. With a large population that calculator suggests 384 people as a suitibla sample size to aim for a 95/5 accuracy. A sample size of 20 people is highly unlikely to give a 5% margin. Think about it, if you swap any one person in there for any one person outside the group you have immediately skewed your results by over 5%. The reason for large samples is to avoid these problems. It would seem that you are the one who needs to read a statistics book or two because if you for a second believe that a sample of 20 can represent accurately a large population you obviously have not had any exposure to statistics, or if you have it has been way over your head.
  • I wonder if this means we can start chewing gum in school legally... If not we can argue that they don't want us to learn.
  • interesting.

  • May not help memory, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sclatter ( 65697 ) on Friday March 15, 2002 @12:41AM (#3166813) Homepage
    Not long ago I found myself working two jobs. I had to get out of bed rather earlier than I was used to and tended to start the day pretty groggy. I don't drink coffee (upsets my stomach) so I needed another solution to perk me up in the AM. I found that chewing gum worked incredibly well. After chewing on a piece for about ten minutes I felt far more awake and alert, and the effect seemed to last long after the stuff went in the trash.

    So I started thinking. I'm a horse person, I have half a dozen of the beasts. Horses are programmed to chew. It's believed that the muscles involved in the chewing process actually help pump the blood through all the vessels in their head. Without the chewing action during grazing blood would tend to pool in the horse's head. After my gum chewing revelation I wondered if a similar principle might apply in humans. It seems logical that increased blood flow could lead to an increased feeling of alertness.

    Or maybe I was just high on minty freshness! ;-)
  • In a breakthrough today, scientists working for MacDonalds revealed that eating two Big Macs a day makes the human male appear "sexy" and "charming" to females of that species. While preliminary testing points to the special sauce as the active ingredient, some scientists still insist that it's the love put into each sandwich by a dedicated MacDonalds employee that transforms a regular man into a "hunk of burning love."
  • I don't see why caffeine won't do the same damn thing -- or typing, or tapping your foot, or twirling your pen, for that matter.
  • Heh, schools should learn about this, chewing gum helps make higher grades....if people try, heh.
  • *twirls hair in fingers*

  • I can't see why there could be any connection between gum-chewing and brainpower. Authors (well, one of them anyway) agree with this. Look at Roald Dahl's book, Charlie's Chocolate Factory. One of the characters is the world record holder for gum chewing, and she's portrayed in the book as being rather dim and annoying.

    Of course, there could be some connection, but if that's the case, I think a lot of my high school classmates should have been a bit smarter.

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