Yet Another Reason We're Sticking with Espresso

Photo credit: Tumblr/all-the-ways-things-are

Remember that time you stayed up all night before a final exam, cramming facts and chugging Frappuccinos straight from the bottle? Yeah, us too. Turns out we may have been on to something; a new study from Johns Hopkins University suggests that drinking coffee might enhance your memory.

The double-blind study, published online by the journal Nature Neuroscience, enlisted the help of 160 subjects, none of whom regularly ate or drank caffeinated products. On the first day, participants were asked to study a series of images. Five minutes later, half of the group participants were told to take 200mg caffeine tablets (about the same as two espressos), and the rest were given a placebo. The following day, participants were tested on their ability to recognize images from the day before in addition to a few new images.

People who consumed the caffeine tablets were better at determining which images were new but similar to the ones they’d seen the day before, which researchers say indicates a more advanced level of retention.

“If we used a standard recognition memory task without these tricky similar items, we would have found no effect of caffeine,” said senior author Michael Yassa in a press release. “However, using these items requires the brain to make a more difficult discrimination—what we call pattern separation, which seems to be the process that is enhanced by caffeine in our case.”

Translation: Coffee is not always the answer. Just sometimes.

And don’t expect to ace a test just because you downed a double shot of espresso right before. Researchers conducted a second experiment in which participants consumed the caffeine tablet only one hour before their image quiz. The result? No effect.

So you’ve got to chug coffee and study around the same time. You’ve been doing it right; now science agrees.

[via EurekAlert]