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Coffee might make you forgetful
Now it's storm in a coffee cup. Though a cup of coffee might help you beat drowsiness, a new research suggests that caffeine might hinder your short term recall of certain words.
Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon, BBC News portal reported on Friday. Valerie Lesk, of the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, believes caffeine improves alertness by shutting down other brain pathways. This makes it harder to recall words, she says in Behavioural Psychology.
Caffeine is known to excite the brain and increase alertness. But Lesk and \ her colleague Stephen Womble, from Trinity College, Dublin, found it can hamper or boost short-term memory, depending on what you are trying to remember.
They divided 32 college students into two groups. One group was given
200mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to two strong cups of coffee, and the
other was given a dummy drug. The students were then asked to answer
100 general knowledge questions that had simple, one-word answers.
For example, one question was "Name the ancient Egyptian writing," with a target answer of "hieroglyphics". For each question the student was given 10 words to look at before answering. Between two and eight of the words were similar sounding to the answer.
The other words were completely unrelated to the answer. Caffeine aided word recall when the words the students looked at were similar to the answer. But when the words were unrelated to the answer, the students who had taken caffeine had more trouble recalling the answer than those who had taken the dummy pill.
Lesk said: "In some conditions caffeine helps short-term memory and in others it makes it worse. "It aids short-term memory when the information to be recalled is related to the current train of thought but hinders short-term when it is unrelated."
Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon, BBC News portal reported on Friday. Valerie Lesk, of the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, believes caffeine improves alertness by shutting down other brain pathways. This makes it harder to recall words, she says in Behavioural Psychology.
Caffeine is known to excite the brain and increase alertness. But Lesk and \ her colleague Stephen Womble, from Trinity College, Dublin, found it can hamper or boost short-term memory, depending on what you are trying to remember.
They divided 32 college students into two groups. One group was given
200mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to two strong cups of coffee, and the
other was given a dummy drug. The students were then asked to answer
100 general knowledge questions that had simple, one-word answers.
For example, one question was "Name the ancient Egyptian writing," with a target answer of "hieroglyphics". For each question the student was given 10 words to look at before answering. Between two and eight of the words were similar sounding to the answer.
The other words were completely unrelated to the answer. Caffeine aided word recall when the words the students looked at were similar to the answer. But when the words were unrelated to the answer, the students who had taken caffeine had more trouble recalling the answer than those who had taken the dummy pill.
Lesk said: "In some conditions caffeine helps short-term memory and in others it makes it worse. "It aids short-term memory when the information to be recalled is related to the current train of thought but hinders short-term when it is unrelated."
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