Gerard Seenan Guardian
Mental performance
and agility can be considerably improved by inhaling pure oxygen
or by taking a high dose of glucose, scientists revealed yesterday.
Just as athletes
can increase their physical performance by eating the right foods,
students can better their performance by inhaling a shot of oxygen
or swallowing some glucose just before a test.
Andrew Scholey,
director of the Human Cognitive Neuroscience unit at the University
of Northumbria, discovered through tests that mental strength
could be improved by giving the brain the right fuel.
The brain
is one of the most energetic organs in the body. Though it accounts
for only 2% of our body weight, it uses between 20% and 30% of
the body's energy. Despite this need for energy, the brain has
what can be thought of as a design fault: it stores only a negligible
amount of glucose and needs the blood stream to deliver a constant
supply.
Dr Scholey
gave a group of students around 30g of glucose and asked to perform
a "serial seven" test, where they had to continually
subtract seven from an arbitrary starting figure. The students
who took the glucose could do between two and three more calculations
a minute than another group that did not receive the sugar.
Dr Scholey
said that a single dose of the herbal extract gingko - which is
thought to boost blood flow and increase glucose metabolism -
improved the attention of students for up to six hours.
In another
test students had a one-minute blast of oxygen immediately before
being given a list of words to remember. The students who took
the oxygen remembered two or three more words from a list of 15
than those who did not.
Students who
took oxygen while playing the Tetris computer game on its most
demanding level were also shown to play significantly better.
But oxygen had little effect on performance at lower difficulty
levels.
"It looks
like the types of cognitive function most affected by oxygen and
glucose are tasks with a high level of cognitive demand,"
said Dr Scholey at the British Psychological Society's centenary
meeting in Glasgow.
Blood samples
taken from people performing a demanding mental task show lower
glucose levels and Dr Scholey believes the body delivers oxygen
and glucose to the brain when it faces a difficult task.
"Even
the most esoteric brain functions obey biological rules. By tweaking
fuel availability to the brain, simply by throwing a bit more
fuel on to the fire, you can improve cognitive function to some
degree," he said.
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