Effect of Monday-Thursday Fasting on Working Memory of Adult Human

Abstract

Working memory is the ability in the brain to temporarily hold and process acquired information. To perform memory task, human brain needs sufficient glucose pertaining to its energy demand. Thus, fasting, as a temporary condition of no glucose intake into the body, would logically give negative effect on memory performance. This assumption is supported by the finding of untreated patients of hypoglicemia (low blood glucose) that has syndrome of confusion and may have trouble of concentrating. Previous study also showed that overnight and morning fasts produced slower memory recall on schoolchildren in United States and Peru and also for the college students in United Kingdom. It was proposed that metabolic stress and the importance of glucose in the making of acetylcholin were the reasons of the effects. To the contrary, previous study in Indonesia showed that daily fast did not influence the memory of college students but improve the memory performance of teenagers. Thus, following these adverse conclusions, this study aims to find out whether or not fasting influence memory performance of adult human. In this experiment, blood glucose concentration of each subject was electrochemically measured using glucometer while their visual working memory was tested using sequential Delayed Matching to Sample (DMS) task.