Why chewing gum can improve the learning effect!
Wen: Beijing University of Psychology
As the end of the term and the final DDL are approaching, I find that everyone has started running to the library again recently.
As the saying goes, if you often go to the library, you can't get your shoes wet. You must have encountered some behaviors you can't stand in the library, such as shaking your legs all the time, eating and chirping, singing loud enough to overflow your headphones, and losing your pen all the time
Maybe you've met that "gum maniac"? They can learn while chewing gum. They are frantically tapping the keyboard in their hands, and they have been chewing gum with a sense in their mouth, as if they have entered a selfless situation of "one sugar in the mouth, I have in the world".
Such behavior will indeed make the students around feel very distressed, but at the same time, there may be a little doubt: what is the magic of chewing gum that makes it so easy for him to ignore the students shaking their legs and concentrate on his study?
The question is, what impact will chewing gum have on learning, and should I chew chewing gum when learning? Let's see how psychologists explain -
Chewing gum contributes to learning
Recent research has found that chewing gum can improve the effect of learning.
In the study, the researchers randomly divided the participants of the experiment into two groups - chewing gum group and non chewing gum group. The participants of the two groups learned a physiological material together. Before learning, the researchers provided chewing gum to the participants of the chewing gum group and asked them to chew gum during learning. The non chewing gum group did not have this link. After learning, both groups of participants completed the same multiple-choice questions. The results showed that the test scores of participants in the chewing gum group were significantly higher than those in the other group. This shows that chewing gum during learning can improve learning outcomes.
Later, the researchers changed the learning content into mental arithmetic task, and changed the form of learning in the experiment, and got the same result. The researchers believe that chewing gum has a certain promoting effect on different contents and forms of learning.
Of course, researchers who like chewing gum and love academic research will not end their exploration here. After that, researchers also explored the internal mechanism of chewing gum affecting learning effect.
Why does gum contribute to learning?
Chewing gum mainly affects our learning effect by affecting our attention.
Continuous attention
Studies have shown that chewing gum can improve our ability of continuous attention, thus affecting the effect of learning. Continuous attention is a kind of attention. In short, when you keep staring at the mobile phone and waiting for the person you like to reply to the news, and you won't be distracted, you maintain continuous attention during this period of time. The individual who maintains continuous attention can be ready to detect some weak and unpredictable signals at all times.
In psychological research, researchers generally measure a participant's sustained attention by the speed of the participant's response to a random stimulus (accurate to milliseconds). In the experiment on chewing gum, the researchers found that the response time of participants who chewed gum to stimuli was significantly lower than that of participants who did not chew gum. In other words, chewing gum can improve our continuous attention in learning, let us focus more and longer on learning, reduce the interference of the outside world, and improve our learning effect.
Vigilance
Alertness refers to a mental state that we need to maintain our attention level. It can also be understood as the ability to maintain concentration. A large number of studies have shown that chewing gum can improve individual alertness and learning effect.
In the research on alertness, the researchers asked the experimental participants to carry out a cognitive task, and measured the alertness of the participants before and after the task. The results showed that the alertness of the participants decreased after completing the cognitive task, but the degree of alertness decline of the participants who chewed gum was significantly lower than that of the participants who did not chew gum. It can be seen that chewing gum helps us stay alert during learning, improve our ability to control our concentration, make us feel less difficult when focusing, and improve our learning effect.
Chewing gum can directly improve our continuous attention, or improve our ability to concentrate by improving our alertness. In addition to the factors related to attention, there are some relatively minor factors that are also the reasons why chewing gum affects the learning effect.
Relieve pressure
Studies have shown that chewing gum can reduce the production of stress-related hormones (such as cortisol), thus reducing mental stress. In addition, studies on the brain have found that chewing gum can reduce the brain's processing of external stressors and inhibit the transmission of information about stress in the brain, so as to reduce the pressure we feel and improve our psychological function and performance.
Ease anxiety
Chewing gum may also increase blood flow to the brain, the supply of brain nutrients such as glucose, and brain activity. At the same time, chewing gum can also help us alleviate anxiety and increase happiness. These factors will also make us have better results in learning.
It is undeniable that this study believes that chewing gum during learning can improve our learning effect to a certain extent. However, chewing gum itself is not the key factor to improve our learning performance. Factors such as attention and emotion are the more direct variables affecting our learning effect;
We should also remember that chewing too much gum also has certain negative effects on the body. For example, chewing gum may cause gastrointestinal diseases. Eating too much sugar will lead to tooth decay. Too much chewing will also make our jaw ache (if we don't have a good face, we will chew and get fat).
The positive effects of the above-mentioned chewing gum should be balanced with these negative effects. Therefore, it is up to everyone to weigh whether to chew chewing gum during learning~