New Study Shows How Even Looking At Coffee Affects The Brain

Everyone needs their coffee.

That's just a way of life, right?

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According to a a series of four studies involving hundreds of people across Western and Eastern cultures published in Consciousness and Cognition even looking at coffee affects the brain, sparking it to life.

That probably has to do with a common belief in the West that coffee is necessary to get up and get going in the mornings.

Researcher Sam Maglio, an associate professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough's Department of Management and the Rotman School of Management, said:

"We have this image of a prototypical executive rushing off to an important meeting with a triple espresso in their hand. There's this connection between drinking caffeine and arousal that may not exist in other cultures."

Sure enough, the effect was weaker on those who grew up in Eastern cultures, where coffee consumption is not as prevalent.

The findings show that participants who were shown coffee-or tea-related cues before receiving tasks perceived time as shorter and thought more concisely and precisely:

"Coffee and tea are two beverages commonly-consumed around the world. Therefore, there is much research regarding their physiological effects. However, less is known about their psychological meanings."

"Derived from a predicted lay association between coffee and arousal, we posit that exposure to coffee-related cues should increase arousal, even in the absence of actual ingestion, relative to exposure to tea-related cues."

"We further suggest that higher arousal levels should facilitate a concrete level of mental construal as conceptualized by Construal Level Theory."

"In four experiments, we find that coffee cues prompted participants to see temporal distances as shorter and to think in more concrete, precise terms. Both subjective and physiological arousal explain the effects."

According to Maglio:

"We wanted to see if there was an association between coffee and arousal, such that if we simply exposed people to coffee-related cues, their physiological arousal would increase, as it would if they had actually [drunk] coffee."

We're pretty sure coffee drinkers would the real thing over thinking about it, however.

What do you think, coffee drinkers?

Would just thinking about coffee help your brain become more brain and attentive?

Think pf the money you'd save each morning!