COLLECTING MORE EVIDENCE: COFFEE IS GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN

Like all of us, I gravitate toward news and information that support beliefs I already hold:

A new study, which was published online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, shows that caffeinated coffee may be good for our brains and may, in fact, help keep Alzheimer’s at bay. Caffeine has been sited in previous studies as having potentially positive effects on the brain. and specifically Alzheimer’s.

The study looked at mice whose DNA had been tweaked to contain a human Alzheimer’s gene. Just like humans with familial Alzheimer’s, these mice become increasingly forgetful as they age.  The equivalent of four to five cups of caffeinated coffee every few days led to much improved memories in these Alzheimer’s mice.

COFFEE EXPLAINED

FROM fooducate.com

COFFEE: GREATEST ADDICTION?

Too much coffee makes you hear voices, really?

Reported by MSNBC and filed by me under the category of--
"We're really using some pretty thin science to prove we hate coffee," a recent Australian study claims to show a link between heavy coffee consumption, stress -- and auditory hallucinations.

The volunteers listened to white noise played through a computer's headphones for three minutes. Every time they heard even a snippet of Bing Crosby's White Christmas, they were told to press a hand tally counter. (They weren't aware of the real point of the study -- they were told it was about auditory perception.)
The song was never played.

Let's just stop there for a minute.  

Is it truly a valid science experiment for hallunications if the subject is TOLD what they will hear?  It wasn't an 'auditory perception,' it was a study group thinking they better push the button at some point because they were told they were going to hear ole Bing crooning--whether they actually heard it or not.   

But the participants who said they were very stressed, and very caffeinated -- those who regularly drank five or more cups per day, at 200 milligrams of caffeine each -- were more likely to imagine they'd heard it.

Whoa!  If I drank five or more cups of anything, I'd be stressed and thinking: I gotta hurry up and press this buzzer so I can get out of this experiment and go pee!!!!

"We believe that high stress, in addition to taking high levels of caffeine, makes people yet more stressed and thus makes them more likely to 'overreact' to the environment -- i.e., to hear things that just aren’t there," explains Simon Crowe, the lead author of the study and a neuroscientist at Australia's La Trobe University, located in Bundoora, Victoria. The report was published in the April issue of the Journal Personality and Individual Differences.

It's worth noting here that there are some limitations to the study: The levels of stress and caffeine consumption were both self-reported by the 92 volunteers who participated in the experiment. And what if, somehow, the caffeine-stressball combo made participants more eager to try to please the researchers -- yes, of course we heard the song! It's lovely, isn't it?! 

sigh. . .