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Gum Chewing Found to Boost Brainpower, Memory
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."
if she gnaws, she's smart?
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!
I'm a concientious
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).
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Beer makes you cleverer!
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.
Check out some of the corps who give them money to carry out these "studies".
Science stories you hear on the press are getting bad. Just paid for propoganda, so that (inthis case) you'll want to go out and buy some gum.
Here's the whole list of their clients, who most certainly pay this company for the sole sake of forwarding the pursuiot of science and humanity!:
http://www.cdr.org.uk/clientlistframe.html
Now that you've had an introduction to corrupt science, here's bigger mouthful to choke down:
http://www.aspartame.org/science.html
These "scientific organizations" are what produce the vast majority of the little scientific medical tidbits you hear so often on the news.
As I science minded person from as long as I can remember, I am sick to my stomache. This is big. Another bit of garbage in our lives to watch out for I guess.
interesting.
------------------- "mafia_geek" ------------------- ©1902 Honest Abe's Candy Shop
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's just another lesson for all who read this that you need to check who did the research, and what they made of their conclusions. (AND also, who PAID for the research to be done.) The general public has too much trust in pseudoscience like this, where they make, figuratively speaking, too much stew from, in some cases, no oysters at all.
Bear in mind that they also said Mozart makes kids smarter, then when someone who actually understands science, logic, and reasoning looked at their results, told them they were full of it, they had to retract their "findings".
Obviously, we see yet again that there are people with way too much time on their hands, and more money than they know what to do with. How very different the world would be if people could specify what programs their tax-money went to pay for. This of course, is why they can't... but I can dream, can't I?
Dreemir
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.
the Political Inquirer
*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.