Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion.
Caffeine could limit damage of chronic stress
A cup of joe wards off depression following chronic stress.
Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime
Research on naps, meditation, nature walks and the habits of exceptional artists and athletes reveals how mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories and encourage creativity
Coffitivity - Boost Your Creativity with Coffee Shop Sounds
Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better. Try it now!
Caffeine dosing strategies to optimize alertness during sleep loss
Summary Sleep loss, which affects about one‐third of the US population, can severely impair physical and neurobehavioural performance. Although caffeine, the most widely used stimulant in the world, can mitigate these effects, currently there are no tools to guide the timing and amount of caffeine consumption to optimize its benefits. In this work, we provide an optimization algorithm, suited for mobile computing platforms, to determine when and how much caffeine to consume, so as to safely maximize neurobehavioural performance at the desired time of the day, under any sleep‐loss condition. The algorithm is based on our previously validated Unified Model of Performance, which predicts the effect of caffeine consumption on a psychomotor vigilance task. We assessed the algorithm by comparing the caffeine‐dosing strategies (timing and amount) it identified with the dosing strategies used in four experimental studies, involving total and partial sleep loss. Through computer simulations, we showed that the algorithm yielded caffeine‐dosing strategies that enhanced performance of the predicted psychomotor vigilance task by up to 64% while using the same total amount of caffeine as in the original studies. In addition, the algorithm identified strategies that resulted in equivalent performance to that in the experimental studies while reducing caffeine consumption by up to 65%. Our work provides the first quantitative caffeine optimization tool for designing effective strategies to maximize neurobehavioural performance and to avoid excessive caffeine consumption during any arbitrary sleep‐loss condition.
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
Research has shed light on the power of focus and its role as a hidden driver of success. Yet as helpful as focus can be, research also shows there’s a downside to it: excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy, make you lose self-control, impair your decision-making, and make you less collaborative. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus. When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the default mode network (DMN). The DMN activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, and more. There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day, such as positive constructive daydreaming, napping, and consciously thinking from another person’s perspective.
Acute Effects of Coffee Consumption on Health among Ambulatory Adults
Coffee is one of the most commonly consumed beverages in the world, but the acute health effects of coffee consumption remain uncertain. We conducted a prospective, randomized, case-crossover trial...
How to reclaim your attention from the distraction economy | Psyche Videos
Could you watch this video on full screen, 1x speed, with no distractions? Here are five steps to rebuild your attention span
Coffee in crisis: The bitter end of our favourite drink?
Drought, flooding, disease - climate change is already threatening the source of our caffeine fix. Are we facing the end of coffee as we know it, asks David Robson.
What Makes Us Smart?
Human creativity does not solely rely on our individual cognitive abilities, but instead emerges from the recombination of ideas, practices, and approaches that result from social interactions and id...
It's getting harder to focus every day
I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.
Caffeine may counter age-related inflammation
A chronic inflammatory process that occurs in some, but not all, older people may trigger cardiovascular problems, a new Stanford study shows. Part of the solution might be found in a cup of coffee.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
Beyond the Artifact: Power as a Lens for Creativity Support Tools
Enhancing Human Cognition with Cocoa Flavonoids
Enhancing cognitive abilities has become a fascinating scientific challenge, recently driven by the interest in preventing age-related cognitive decline and sustaining normal cognitive performance in response to cognitively demanding environments. In recent years cocoa and cocoa-derived products, as a rich source of flavonoids, mainly the flavanols sub-class, have been clearly shown to exert cardiovascular benefits. More recently, neuromodulation and neuroprotective actions have been also suggested. Here, we discuss human studies specifically aimed at investigating the effects of acute and chronic administration of cocoa flavanols on different cognitive domains, such as executive functions, attention and memory. Through a variety of direct and indirect biological actions, in part still speculative, cocoa and cocoa-derived food have been suggested to possess the potential to counteract cognitive decline and sustain cognitive abilities, particularly among patients at risk. Although still at a preliminary stage, research investigating the relations between cocoa and cognition shows dose-dependent improvements in general cognition, attention, processing speed and working memory. Moreover, cocoa flavanols administration could also enhance normal cognitive functioning and exert a protective role on cognitive performance and cardiovascular function specifically impaired by sleep loss, in healthy subjects. Together, these findings converge at pointing to cocoa as a new interesting nutraceutical tool to protect human cognition and counteract different types of cognitive decline, thus encouraging further investigations. Future research should include complex experimental designs combining neuroimaging techniques with physiological and behavioral measures to better elucidate cocoa neuromodulatory properties and directly compare immediate versus long-lasting cognitive effects.
Peet’s Coffee x SPIN Sessions: Where Coffee Culture Meets Music Culture - SPIN
Music-loving coffee drinkers have long known the importance of shifting a sluggish moment into a second wind. There’s always been a need for
