You Snooze, You Lose? Not True

You Snooze, You Lose? Not True

Tired after lunch or by mid-afternoon? You might think that you should go buy yourself some coffee. But according to UCSD researcher Sara Mednick, you’re better off taking a nap.

Mednick, a faculty member in the department of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, has been researching napping since graduate school and recently published a book, titled “Take a Nap! Change Your Life.”

I like it. This is really "news you can use."

Some of her most striking research looks at napping compared to drinking caffeine. In one study, Mednick had one group of subjects nap for 90 minutes, while another drank 200 mg of caffeine. She also set up a control group, who took a placebo. Then she tested her subjects on several tasks, including typing and spatial skills, such as remembering the layout of a room or a map. On both tasks, coffee drinkers performed much worse than the placebo group, Mednick said. “Of course, this is a bummer for Starbucks,” she added.

Think about it. What would you really prefer – being well-rested, or being a caffeine zombie?

Caffeine

We just mentioned caffeine here, in relation to the mood-enhancing effects of fast thinking.

So along comes a little more information about the connections.

Probing Question: Is caffeine harmful to your health?

The basic answer seems to be "no", when the stuff is used in moderation. Just as interesting are the details of how it works:

How does caffeine achieve its most sought-after effect of counteracting fatigue? To understand that, we first have to understand the chemistry of fatigue itself. Like all cells in the body, brain cells access fuel through an energy-storage nucleotide called ATP. ATP -- adenosine triphosphate -- loses one of its three phosphate molecules with each burst of energy it releases, eventually becoming a single adenosine molecule. The longer a person is awake, the more adenosine will accumulate on special adenosine receptors in the brain, signaling it to slow its activity.

Enter caffeine. Acting as a wolf in sheep's clothing, caffeine is molecularly similar enough to adenosine to fit into its receptors, blocking adenosine from getting through -- yet it is distinct enough not to be "read" by the brain as instructions to take a nap.

Without adenosine's calming effect, the brain's neurons fire more rapidly and the body reads this increased activity as an emergency requiring the release of the "flight or fight" chemical: adrenalin [AKA: epinephrine]. The result? You feel excited, alert, mentally quick, ready for anything.

Of course, if there actually is a lot of adenosine in the brain, that's a sign it may be running on a nearly empty tank. Probably not a good idea to continue this too long without replenishing the fuel supply.

Another thing to watch out for: If you take caffeine while pulling an all-nighter to finish that important assignment, you may not be able to come back and have a good nap after the work is turned in:

Negative Effects Of Caffeine Are Stronger On Daytime Sleep Than On Nocturnal Sleep

A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that people drinking coffee to get through a night shift or a night of studying will strongly hurt their recovery sleep the next day.

Tags: caffeine

How fast thinking makes us happy, energized and self-confident

Recent psychological research claims to have found evidence for what the title of this piece says: merely speeding up our thought processes is enough to make us feel better mentally.

I don't know about you, but I don't find this very surprising. I feel a lot more like a tortise than a hare before I've had my first dose of caffeine for the day. But I generally get into a higher gear right after that, and my mood becomes a whole lot better too.

It's hard to deny the mood-enhancing effects of caffeine when you look at the stock price of a company like Starbucks. According to Wikipedia,

By the time of its initial public offering on the stock market in 1992, Starbucks had grown to 165 outlets. In April 2003, Starbucks added nearly that many new outlets in a single day by completing the purchase of Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia from AFC Enterprises, bringing the total number of Starbucks-operated locations worldwide to more than 6,400.

The company probably wouldn't have enjoyed such success, even at the prices they charge, if they didn't make a whole lot of people feel good.

But psychologists can reproduce the effect in the lab, without any chemical additives:

Study explores 'manic' thinking
How fast thinking makes us happy, energized and self-confident

Fast thinking, or "racing thoughts," is most commonly known as a symptom of the clinical psychiatric disorder of mania (and of the manic part of bipolar disorder or "manic-depression"). But, according to Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin, most healthy people also have experienced racing thoughts at some point in time--perhaps when they are excited about a new idea they have just learned, or when they are brainstorming with a group of people, or even when they lie in bed unable to fall asleep. Pronin and her Harvard colleague Daniel Wegner decided to explore whether inducing people to think fast might lead them to feel some of the other experiences also associated with the manic experience.

It would be most intresting to know a lot more about the neurochemistry involved here. No doubt it's related to "runner's high", endorphins, higher levels of epinephrine (which is closely related to the neurotransmitter norepinephrine), and that sort of thing.

Wheeeeee!

At all events, in times like these, it's always good to have some happy news.

Tags: happiness

Why caffeine works

Coffee's effects revealed in brain scans

Coffee improves short-term memory and speeds up reaction times by acting on the brain’s prefrontal cortex, according to a new study.

Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine how coffee activates different areas of the brain in 15 volunteers.

“Caffeine modulates a higher brain function through its effects on distinct areas of the brain,” explains Florian Koppelstätter, who carried out the research with colleagues at the Medical University at Innsbruck, Austria.

What areas specifically?

“The group all showed activation of the working memory part of the brain," Koppelstätter explains. "But those who received caffeine had significantly greater activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe, known as the anterior cingulate and the anterior cingulate gyrus. These areas are involved in 'executive memory', attention, concentration, planning and monitoring."

There must be more to the effect of caffeine than that. Most of us know, for instance, that a common symptom of withdrawal from caffeine is headaches. What's with that? Adenosine recoptors?

Caffeine is known to influence adenosine receptors which are found throughout the brain on nerve cells and blood vessels. It is thought that the drug inhibits these receptors and that this excites the nerve cells in the brain. “This may be the mechanism involved,” suggests Koppelstätter.

Another story on this: The tall and the short of why caffeine works
Press release: Coffee Jump-starts Short-term Memory

Tags: caffeine, health, neuroscience