Brain scans have shown that the wake-up jolt we get from coffee comes not from the caffeine, but from the entire "experience of having a coffee," researchers say. — Photo: Christin Klose/dpa
It is an industry worth over half a billion dollars, the crema-topped elixir of choice for hundreds of millions of people and the centrepiece of as many sepia-filtered social media posts.
But the mild buzz from a morning coffee, it turns out, is not just down to the caffeine, but the general "experience of having a coffee," researchers now say.
A team of scientists in Portugal and Spain conducted MRI scans on volunteers before poring over the impact of coffee versus that of a dose of caffeine. What they found was that "caffeine alone won’t do - you need to experience that cup of coffee."
Caffeine alone does not have the same effect as a coffee with the same amount of caffeine in it, researchers say. Photo: Andreas Drouve/dpaIn other words, the routine or trappings that go with drinking coffee appear to be key to the eye-opening alertness it is said to bring - even more so than caffeine, coffee's de facto active ingredient.
"Taking into account that some of the effects that we found were reproduced by caffeine, we could expect other caffeinated drinks to share some of the effects," said Maria Picó-Pérez of Jaume I University.
"However, others were specific for coffee drinking, driven by factors such as the particular smell and taste of the drink, or the psychological expectation associated with consuming that drink," she added.
Writing up the of their tests for the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, the Iberian team said the MRI scans showed "consuming either caffeine or coffee made people more prepared to move from resting to working on tasks."
However, the tests, published June 28, showed that drinking coffee "also increased the connectivity in the higher visual network and the right executive control network - parts of the brain which are involved in working memory, cognitive control and goal-directed behaviour," which they added "didn't happen when participants only took caffeine." – dpa
