You might want to consider adding cinnamon to your breakfast tomorrow, as a new study reveals the spice can actually help your ability to learn.
The Rush University Medical Center in California has provided the best evidence to support our theory that a cinnamon roll is the only way to start your day, as it improves your learning.
The experiment, conducted on rodents, showed that mice who were determined to have poor learning ability were able to improve their level of learning to the level of smarter mice after consuming cinnamon.
Although, sadly for the smarter mice, it didn’t seem to have such an impact.
Neurological scientist Kalipada Pahan, lead researcher, said: “This would be one of the safest and the easiest approaches to convert poor learners to good learners.”
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Little is currently known about what causes people to be a poor learner and have low performance, but the household spice seems to be providing some answers.
Pahan says that the key to understanding performance lies in the hippocampus, the memory storage in the brain, an area that relies on a protein – CREB - to increase ability to learn.
When cinnamon enters the body it is metabolized into sodium benzoate and this chemical increases the presence of CREB, as well as stimulates the ability of neurons in the hippocampus to develop.
Pahan added: “We have successfully used cinnamon to reverse biochemical, cellular and anatomical changes that occur in the brains of mice with poor learning.”