CHEW ON.(The Talk of the Town)(chewing gum and education)

The truly great scientific discoveries--gravity, laughing gas, Velcro--always seem to happen by accident. Take the case of Dr. Kenneth Allen, whose latest findings indicate that we should perhaps overturn one of the most sacred laws of primary education: the prohibition on chewing gum in the classroom. Allen, a professor at N.Y.U.'s College of Dentistry, is an unlikely champion of Bazooka and Double Bubble, and yet he has recently shown, if inadvertently, that a pack-a-day chewing habit may help account for the difference between the honor roll and summer school.

Allen's claim to fame goes as follows: Like any conscientious teacher, he was interested in finding new and better ways of helping his students learn. Last year, he decided to see whether or not CD-roms could be as effective as traditional lectures in teaching dental anatomy. He devised a simple study involving two student groups. It was not exactly what you would call groundbreaking stuff. Then came his apple-falling-from-the-tree moment.

"I was looking at a way of funding the study," Allen explained last week, "and a colleague of mine came up to me and said that Wrigley's wanted to do a study about learning with chewing gum. And I thought, Dentistry--this is a great place to do it." Dentists, it turns out, are not nearly as opposed to gum--or, at least, to sugarless gum--as schoolteachers are. "I don't think dental schools have an official stance on chewing gum," Allen said. "Some people actually feel that chewing gum can stimulate your saliva, which can help keep the teeth clean."

The history of chewing gum is rich in lore but short on hard science. Does swallowed gum really remain in your stomach for seven years? Is it true, as Lyndon Johnson once said, that Gerald Ford couldn't chew gum and walk at the same time? Allen reviewed the literature, such as it was, and found most of it to be insufficiently rigorous. Some die-hard bubble blowers hold that chewing is helpful for maintaining mental focus. ("Why do baseball players chew gum?" Allen wondered. "Are they concentrating more?") Other enthusiasts argue that continual jaw motion is apt to increase one's heart rate ever so slightly, thus sending more oxygen to the brain. "Past research has shown an increase in hemoglobin in human brain tissue after mastication," Allen observed (he was referring to a paper in the Journal of the Stomatological Society), "but findings suggesting a direct correlation between chewing gum and increased learning have been anecdotal."

So Allen added a twist to ...