Chewing Gum Can Boost Mental Performance  Wired points out a
number of studies that show chewing gum can, in fact, boost your
memory, attention, cognitive reasoning skills, and other mental
abilities.  It's unclear why gum seems to have such a positive
effect on our mental state, but a number of studies have shown
it to be true:  Gum is an effective booster of mental
performance, conferring all sorts of benefits without any side
effects. The latest investigation of gum chewing comes from a
team of psychologists at St. Lawrence University. The experiment
went like this: 159 students were given a battery of demanding
cognitive tasks, such as repeating random numbers backward and
solving difficult logic puzzles. Half of the subjects chewed gum
(sugar-free and sugar-added) while the other half were given
nothing. Here's where things get peculiar: Those randomly
assigned to the gum-chewing condition significantly outperformed
those in the control condition on five out of six tests.
However, while these benefits h