With all the recent bad news about sleep-problems being more serious than we thought before, here’s a bit of Good News:
Coffee may be helping your brain in ways we didn’t previously know.
In this instance, a group of about 160 non-coffee-drinking adults were given pills while studying a series of images. One group got caffeine in those pills, and the other got placebos.
It turns out the caffeine group did noticeably-better on a certain type of deep-memory test 24 hours later. -One that showed they had really internalized that knowledge, because it tested for things like, but not exactly the same as, what they’d been shown.
So that magic go-go juice you use to keep yourself up after a bad night of sleep is making your brain better in at least one way.
-The caution was though, the Dosage and Timing of the caffeine were fairly-tricky.
The caffeine had to be administered just After the initial demonstration, and the effects were reduced if the subjects got either too-little or too-much caffeine.
There was no discussion of spreading out doses across a day, or pacing yourself. Perhaps there is a way of taking a certain amount of caffeine every-so-often that makes the memory-consolidation effects even greater.
Check out the rest of the details at the Links:
Photo Credits:
“Childhood Memories”, by martinak15, Martinakphotography.com
Links:
• Source: Yassalab
• via: Gizmodo
• More Coverage: NewScientist
• Source Study: Nature-Post-study caffeine administration enhances memory consolidation in humans
Leave a Reply