Can eating ice cream for breakfast make you smarter? Kyorin University researcher Yoshihiko Koga thinks so after a recent series of clinical trials.
Koga, who specializes in psychophysiology at the Japanese university, is researching links between certain foods and stress reduction. For this experiment, some of his test subjects ate ice cream right after waking up, after which their mental faculties were tested on a computer. The group that ate ice cream showed better reaction times and information-processing than those who hadn’t. Scans of their brain activity showed increases in high-frequency alpha waves, as well.
Some of this was triggered by ice cream’s cold temperature—though, lesser gains were made among subjects who drank cold water right after waking up. But it would be irresponsible to champion ice cream as brain food after one study with unreported control methods. Still, between this and a 2005 study by the Institute of Psychiatry in London about ice cream’s specific activation of “pleasure spots” in the brain, ice cream may have more beneficial properties than we thought.
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