Saturday, March 8, 2014

Individual Project: Have a break. Have a Coffee


Coffee has a lot of uses and purposes in our lives. We drink it when we want to stay awake and lively, especially when there is an exam the next day. Sometimes, we drink coffee just for the sake of it. And a lot of us drink coffee to collect enough stamps and redeem the limited edition and exclusive Starbucks planner.
But now, coffees are now famous for its newly discovered new feature: a memory enhancer. It’s not just coffees though; it can be a cup of tea or a can of soda- in short, anything with caffeine in it. This new finding is courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University.

The team was led by Daniel Borota, the lead author of the paper and an undergraduate student of Michael Yassa, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at the university. Yassa and his team found that caffeine has a positive effect on our long-term memory. Nature Neuroscience, the journal which published their research, states that caffeine enhances certain memories at least up to 24 hours after it is consumed.

"We've always known that caffeine has cognitive-enhancing effects, but its particular effects on strengthening memories and making them resistant to forgetting has never been examined in detail in humans," said Yassa, senior author of the paper. "We report for the first time a specific effect of caffeine on reducing forgetting over 24 hours."

A few of the studies conducted testing caffeine’s effect on our memory state that it has very little or has no effect at all to long-term memory retention, but the Johns Hopkins University Researchers found a reason for this.

All of these prior studies took a dose of caffeine before the experiment while this specific study took it after. "Almost all prior studies administered caffeine before the study session, so if there is an enhancement, it's not clear if it's due to caffeine's effects on attention, vigilance, focus, or other factors," Yassa said. "By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it's due to memory and nothing else."




A double-blind trial was conducted by these researchers with participants aged 18-30 years old. On the first day of the study, the participants were asked to identify different pictures as “indoors” or “outdoors” objects. Soon after this, who did not regularly eat or drink caffeinated products randomly received either a placebo or a 200-milligram. To measure the participants’ caffeine level before they took these tablets, salivary samples were taken. Samples were taken again one, three, and 24 hours afterwards.

The next day, the two groups were tested on how well they can recognize the pictures the day before. They were asked whether the pictures were “old”, “new”, or “similar to the original pictures”.  From this, the researchers found that those who took caffeine were better at identifying pictures which were a little bit similar than just erroneously saying that they were the same pictures.
Pattern separation is the phenomenon referring to the brain’s ability to differentiate two similar, but not identical items. And taking caffeine, based on the research, reflects a deeper level of memory retention according to the researchers.
Further research was conducted by this team using 100 mg and 300 mg and recommended that an average person must have at least 200-milligram dose of caffeine a day, or simply a cup of strong coffee. From this, they found that performance of the 100 mg group was relatively lower compared with the 200 mg dose, but there was no improvement after the 300 mg of caffeine.
"Thus, we conclude that a dose of at least 200 mg is required to observe the enhancing effect of caffeine on consolidation of memory," the study authors write.
The researchers also discovered that memory was not improved if participants were given caffeine an hour before proceeding with the test.
The team concludes that there is a wide array of possibilities regarding to the mechanisms in which caffeine enhances our long-term memory and noted that further research should be done to have a better understanding of the process by which caffeine affects long-term memory.
So for all you coffee-lovers out there, including me, isn't it wonderful news to know that you benefit from coffee, while enjoying it at the same time? (Not only coffee, but also tea and anything that has caffeine in it!) Now we know what to do when we have those brain-wrecking exams for tomorrow!

'
Sources:

Gatlin, Latarsha, Jan. 12, 2014. Caffeine has positive effect on memory, Johns Hopkins researchers say. Johns Hopkins University Hub. http://hub.jhu.edu/2014/01/12/caffeine-enhances-memory. February 28, 2014.

Sanders, Laura, Jan. 12, 2014. Caffeine may improve memory. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/caffeine-may-improve-memory. February, 28, 2014.

Whiteman, Honor, Jan. 13, 2014. Caffeine may boost long-term memory.  Medical News Today. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/270963.php. February 28, 2014.



Palaroan, Graciel M.
2013-60784

No comments:

Post a Comment