November 9, 2012 A couple of cups of coffee may help our brains
process some words faster, a small experiment suggests. But we
only get the message faster if the words are emotionally
positive. The study included 66 healthy young men. They were
told to consume no caffeine, nicotine or alcohol in the 12 hours
before the experiment. The men were randomly divided into 2
groups. One group took a tablet containing 200 milligrams of
coffee, about the amount in 2 to 3 cups of coffee. Each person
in the other group received a placebo (fake) pill. Half an hour
later, the men were given tests that involved being shown a
series of real and invented words. They had to press buttons to
indicate whether a word was real or not. Men who took the
caffeine pills did this faster and more accurately for words
with a positive emotional connotation. They did not perform
better than men who got the placebo pills for recognizing
neutral or negative words. The journal PLoS One published the
study online. HealthDay News wrote about it