Is Coffee Making You Smart?
Coffee’s ability to boost alertness is commonly attributed to caffeine, but new research suggests there may be other underlying mechanisms that explain this effect.
“There is a widespread anticipation that coffee boosts alertness and psychomotor performance. By gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying this biological phenomenon, we pave the way for investigating the factors that can influence it and even exploring the potential advantages of those mechanisms,” study investigator Nuno Sousa, MD, PhD, with the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, said in a statement. The study was published online June 28 in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Caffeine Can’t Take All the Credit: Certain compounds in coffee, including caffeine and chlorogenic acids, have well-documented psychoactive effects, but the psychological impact of coffee/caffeine consumption as a whole remains a matter of debate. The researchers investigated the neurobiological impact of coffee drinking on brain connectivity using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Excerpted from Medscape
