On September 11 just this week, the California Department of Education spoke out on the newsroom about how “Students were risking their academic careers and educational future by chewing gum during school hours.” We can all agree that the recent popularity in “gum chewing” has been getting out of hand.
Gum has been prohibited in most classrooms by public schools for almost a century, though attention is now on hallways and cafeterias. Teachers from local public schools in recent interviews stated that, “The more the students chew [gum], the less knowledge they carry within their minds when all they can think about is gum.” To prove this statement, a local anonymous neuroscientist spent 8 weeks testing and writing reports on this issue, using more than 1000 students as variables for this experiment. The statement was proven right by 43 applicants, and is now going viral due to the situation.
One reason as to why the country is only acknowledging this issue recently is because the society has realized that teenager IQ has started decreasing instead of increasing. For most of the 20th century, average IQ scores rose by about three points per decade (the Flynn effect). Recent large-scale analyses, including a study of nearly 400,000 individuals, showed that this trend has reversed, with noticeable declines in verbal, numerical, and matrix reasoning among young adults and teens. Then, reports compared this analysis to one with the opposite data. The graph for the popularity in gum-chewing for teens show similar data, though completely reversed. As the IQ of teens increases on the graph, the popularity in gum always decreased, though when the IQ scores started lowering, the popularity of the gum chewing began heavily increasing. Coincidence? “Maybe not,” says Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Convinced the two trend lines are directly connected, the California government called in a Special Session to recognize this issue more clearly. During August of 2026, the government was addressing public health crises for a measles exposure warning around the LA and Sacramento areas; government leaders discussed and concluded that the recent gum-chewing analysis showed that it was a much more important issue in the present and for the future. In the Special Session, reporter Jane Sterling, who was present at the White House announced publicly that “the session stated just how dangerous the issue was”, and “how much “gum chewing” was really affecting the young adults of our generation.” Especially in a state like California, where developing future technologies is a top priority, teens cannot start decreasing IQ now, and if they are, it will be the main focus for the government to prevent this from happening.