It has been said that coffee is the nectar of the gods. Look around any time, any place, and any day and you will see a plethora of people carrying this caffeinated goodness. I am almost positive that there is an unwritten law that no one is allowed to talk to me in the morning until I have had at least had one cup of coffee. What is it about this mysterious brown liquid that keeps us going and keeps us civilized in the morning? It is a little thing called caffeine. The Beatles once said, "All you need is love", but my mantra is "All you need is caffeine". Its true, nature's own stimulant makes the world go round. Well, perhaps I am being dramatic, but would it surprise you if I told you that caffeine was the most commonly-used drug. That's right, over 90% of Americans consume this drug on a daily basis, and most of it comes in the form of our favorite caffeinated beverage: Coffee.
You may be thinking, okay, I'll try and give it up. I don't really need coffee, I can function just fine without it. But before you subject yourself to a miserable caffeine-withdrawal headache in the morning, know that there are many positives to consuming caffeine. In fact, many studies are actually discovering that daily caffeine intake can actually be good for us.
According to a study performed by Lars Kuchinke and his colleges at Ruhr University in Germany, caffeine can actually improve the neural processing of positive words. I thought that this news article was very pertinent to our Cognitive Neuroscience class because it draws a connection between caffeine intake and language. Previous studies have shown that normal doses of caffeine uptake improve the performance of cognitive tasks, but no study has ever drawn a correlation to language. Kuchinke and his team of researchers administered normal amounts of caffeine via coffee to subjects. They found that these subjects readily identified positive words over negative or neutral words. It seems that there is a correlation between caffeine and the implicit recognition of positive words. Kuchinke and his team strongly believe that what is causing the positive association is that caffeine has strong dopaminergic effects in the language regions of the brain. These high levels of dopamine may possibly be the reason for the increased response to positive words.
There you have it. It is possible that caffeine can really make you be more positive. Being that this is the first study of its kind, I will be interested to see if more research develops out of this unique subject. Until then, I'm going to have a cup of joe.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121107200030.htm
In hindsight, caffeine causing an increase in positive word processing really doesn't create that great of a surprise. Anyone who drinks it knows that excited feeling you get, especially at the beginning, giving you that increase of confidence and making you feel like you can't get enough done fast enough. But I'd never considered caffeine as having an effect on language itself, I'd always just correlated it with feeling good. Perhaps the dopaminergic effects in the language regions are why I find that I can write papers with much greater language usage that give off more positive vibes. Now I know to always drink coffee when writing important papers, like my medical school personal statements!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this interesting study finding with us! Indeed, caffeinated beverages are commonly consumed in excessive amounts among college students but to what extend is coffee consumption considered beneficial to our brain health? Is it possible that someone may develop a caffeine dependency and suffer from withdrawal symptoms?
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