Ah, sweet memories

Sugar has been unfairly blamed for everything from hyperactivity to
cancer,but its sour reputation has been somewhat sweetened lately. Now
researchers say that the much-maligned confection may be a handy tool for
boosting your memory. Trouble is, it's a tool whose instruction manual is
missing some key pages.

Case in point: recent experiments by Ward Rodriguez, Ph.D., a
psychologist at California State University at Hayward. He reports that
glucose, a simple form of sugar, enhances a rat's ability to remember
what it learned up to seven days earlier but doesn't improve recall for
older memories. This finding jibes with current (though unproven)
theories that memory formation is a two-step process, with new memories
stashed in the brain's hippocampus for a week or so and then transferred
to the cortex for long-term storage. In any event, the implication seems
obvious: keep the sweet stuff coming as you prepare for a speech, for
example, and you'll wow the audience with your command of the
facts.

But here's where things get tricky. For starters, too much sugar
hinders memory. To further complicate matters, the optimal dose varies
from person to person. And while in humans older memories can be more
easily altered than recent ones, in animals the opposite is true. So do
Rodriguez's study and the many others that have been performed on rats
even apply to people? No one's sure. Other experiments do show that sugar
can improve memory in humans, particularly in the elderly, whose glucose
systems may be off-kilter. As for the rest of us, though, the
sugar-memory link still needs to be clarified.

PHOTO (COLOR): candies