Cigarette Cravings Impair Concentration

Cigarette cravings increase the likelihood that a person will lose their train of thought while performing a cognitive task, UPI reported Dec. 15.

Craving interrupts meta-awareness, which is the ability to assess one’s own thoughts, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh.

Michael Sayette and colleagues studied 44 smokers, most of whom smoked about one pack a day. Subjects were asked to stop smoking for at least six hours prior the study. Some were then placed in a ’low-crave’ group and allowed to smoke during the study. The others were placed in a ’crave-condition’ group and were not allowed to smoke.

Both groups were asked to read more than 30 pages of Tolstoy’s book, “War and Peace” on a computer. The participants pressed a certain key every time they found themselves “zoning out.”

The study found that the people craving cigarettes reported three times as many mind-wandering episodes as the participants in the low-crave group.  They were also less likely to try to catch themselves zoning out.

The findings are slated to appear in the January 2010 issue of the journal Psychological Science.