Chewing gum makes you smarter” or so claims the 1998 research in the article found at the website www.chewsmarter.com.The St. Lawrence University study titled “Cognitive ad-vantages of chewing gum: Now you see them, now you don’t” explains that the mechanical action of chewing produces a short-term increase in cognitive agility. Tests of memory, pattern recognition and rapid calcula-tion all showed statistically significant improvement for the subjects who chewed gum a few moments be-fore engaging in the testing activities. The benefits seem to have durational limits as subjects returned to their normal level of performance 15 to 20 minutes af-ter the initial gum chewing.

Other studies on gum chewing and performance in-clude “Effects of chewing gum and time-on-task on alertness and attention” “Effects of chewing gum on cognitive function, mood and physiology in stressed and non-stressed volunteers,” “Chewing gum benefits sustained attention in the absence of task degradation” in The Journal of Nutritional Neuroscience and “Gummed-up memory: Chewing gum impairs short-term recall” in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.