Clenching Your Fist Can Improve Your Memory

We have good news for people who have difficulty memorizing and recalling. Now you can have a grip on your memory simply by clenching your fist.

A recent study conducted at the Montclair State University, in New Jersey, proved that clenching the right fist can help memorize and clenching the left fist can help recall important information. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE in April and was led by Dr. Ruth Propper, a neuropsychologist at the Montclair State University.

The research included 50 participants with an average age of 23 years; all of them were right handed and were further divided into 5 groups. Each participant was given a list of 72 words to memorize and a pink rubber ball for clenching.

Clenched Fist

  1. The first group was assigned to clench the ball with their right hand for 45 seconds before memorizing the list. Then again, they clenched the ball for 45 minutes with their left hand before recalling what they had memorized
  2. The second group clenched the ball with their right hands before memorizing and again clenched the ball with the same hand before recollecting
  3. The third group performed both the functions, i.e. memorizing and recalling by clenching their left hands
  4. The fourth group clenched the left hand before memorizing and used their right hand for clenching before recollecting
  5. The fifth group was the control group and wasn’t assigned to clench the fists

The results were astonishing. The first group, i.e. the group that clenched the right hand before memorizing and left hand before recalling scored highest points in the memory test, with an average score of 10.1 words. The third group showed the worst performance, where participants clenched their left hands before memorizing and recalling; their average score was 5.7 words.
The group that scored the second highest points was group number five that did not clench their fists at all. Their average score was 8.6 words. Now, according to the researchers the difference among the two highest scoring groups wasn’t significant enough as the overall difference between the two scores was up to 15%.

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