2. Lighting Up, Or Learning?
Researchers aimed to measure “real world” memory abilities.
They sent out 69 study participants on a tour of a university campus.
The participants were given a list of 15 locations around campus and an
action to perform at each location.
On average, the smokers performed 8.9 tasks correctly. The
participants who had quit smoking averaged 11 correctly performed
tasks, and those who had never smoked averaged 12.1
3.
4. How Does It Work??????
Although it is unclear exactly how smoking may
interfere with memory, research has shown that
chronic smoking is linked to a breakdown, or
atrophy, of parts of the brain.
The researchers hypothesized that smoking could
damage brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex,
hippocampus or thalamus; all of those regions have
been linked in brain imaging studies to prospective
memory,
