Regional
(2010-07-27)
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GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? It's a question that often connotes the inability to multi-task or even worse. But KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel says new research suggests that gum chewing may actually help a person in this arena.
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Chewing gum is illegal in Singapore. I don't know if being caught there with a piece in your mouth is considered a serious enough offense to merit caning, a form of corporal punishment practiced in that Asian city. I do know that, if they could have gotten away with it, at least a few of my grammar school teachers would have gladly flogged those of us whom they caught chewing gum in their classroom.
Every grownup has to be disgusted by the multiple wads of gum stuck under the edge of every desk in every class in every school. But my teachers' main complaint was that, as they gazed out at the faces of the children into whose heads they were endeavoring to pour education, they perceived in the gum chewers the dull look of cows working over their cud. Perhaps it was because the kids who were caught really were the dull ones, not smart enough to stop masticating when the teacher was looking.
Too bad. It turns out that chewing gum, rather than nudging alertness in a bovine direction, may actually improve mental performance. A study published this year in Nutritional Neuroscience reports that chewing gum heightens mood and cognitive function.
The researcher enlisted 133 volunteers who were students at Cardiff University in England. Each subject was tested two times, a week apart, once chewing gum and once not. The battery of verbal tests was impressively complete, including logical reasoning, language processing, and several measures of memory. There were also two reaction time tasks and two attention tasks. Heart rate and saliva levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, were measured. It took about an hour-and-a-half to perform each battery of tests.
As a side note, each of 133 subjects took the whole battery twice, which comes to 3 hours apiece. Which is why students, whose guinea pig services can be bought with extra credits or small amounts of money, come in so handy to psychology professors who are doing research. And I expect most of the estimated 399 hours of test administration was performed by graduate students, a type of indentured servant who also comes in very handy in the academic world.
So here's what one psychology professor found, with the help of an estimated dozen graduate students, and 133 undergraduates. Chewing gum was associated with greater alertness and more positive mood. Reaction times were quicker, especially with more challenging tasks. (This explains, I suppose, why you see so many baseball players furiously chomping when the TV camera focuses on them in the batter's box.) Heart rate and cortisol level were higher in chewers, physiologic markers of the state of arousal that working the jaw seems to induce.
Type of gum had no effect. Nor did it make a difference in the level of arousal if the subject was a regular chewer or not.
I sure wish I'd had the results of this study to show to a teacher or two back in the day. I always appreciated a good stick of gum (though might not have enjoyed it as much in class if it weren't contraband). These days, out of respect for my dentist, the gum I chew is always sugarless, which is what I'd recommend for everybody. Just don't stick your wad on the underside of the desk when you're done. And if it ticks the teacher off, don't chew when she's looking.
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