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.
