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3 Cups of Coffee Increases Hallucinations
PearsSoap writes "The Telegraph and other sources are pointing out a study on 200 students which has found that a high caffeine intake can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and can make people think that others are 'out to get them.' The abstract (and full version if you have access) is available.
'The volunteers were questioned about their caffeine intake from products including coffee, tea, energy drinks, chocolate bars and caffeine tablets.'"
The study consisted of watching every episode of South Park featuring Tweak.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Sooooo...The results of this study show that excessive intake of caffeine makes you high-strung? Fascinating.
This guy's the limit!
It was 7 cups of coffee on the news this morning, mind you I might have hallucinated that.
You are not paranoid if they really are out to get you, which lets face it they are..
..come to mind.
So now it's one man and three cups? I thought the hallucination was about two girls!
I love the correlationisnotcausation tag. It gets applied to any story like this, and while it often seems to be accurate, I imagine someone would stick it on a story titled 'Study shows stabbing yourself may increase blood loss'.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I remember reading somewhere that 60 cups of coffee would supposedly yield the same level of hallucinations as 1 dose of LSD...
Hmmm, where was that study from ?
60 cups of US coffee are like 3 cups of coffee elsewhere. And while I confess to not having tried LSD, I've already had way more than 3 large cups of real coffee in a day. And nothing much happened.
So unless you give more data I'm not convinced. If it's a European (preferably southern) study, then maybe there's something to it.
(granted, there now are ways to get coffee in the US instead of just warm water with a brown crayon dipped in but us Euro people used to be fairly puzzled over there for quite a while)
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I enjoy a lovely Mountain Dew high every morning at work, and never suffer any ill effects... other than the giant spiders. Those can be a bit off putting. The glowing, telepathic ferrets usually keep them at bay, though. Hallucinations! Pfft! As if! Now excuse me. I must kiss teh sky.
"That's 14 litres of water"
;) ... although I admit, it may get a bit chewy by the 60th cup full. 8)
They said, "cups of coffee", no mention of adding water
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
What's this "posting on slashdot" thing you keep mumbling about? And what's an "internet"?
Dude, you gotta snap out of it. We've a big stack of betamax tapes over here for you to watch, if you'd just come back to us.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Great now I have to figure out which are my real friends and which ones I'm making up.
I find being offended by me offensive.
During Uni I once crushed up some coffee granules and snorted a couple of fat lines.
I was fucked beyond words for a few days.
Then I tried it with Pro Plus.
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
I dont work for UnitedNuclear.com : Im just a happy purchaser.
Well, now after posting on Slashdot that you can buy a big jar of pure caffeine from them, they're probably going to wish you did work for them, so they could fire you for making them get slashdotted.
Insomnia....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Back in college, when I was still super driven to be the best at everything, I used to down several cups of coffee and tea at night in order to remain awake and focused while doing my homework. It got to the point where after drinking the tea, I would suck on the teabag (keep your wiseass comments to yourself, thanks) because I'd read that saliva could extract even more caffiene.
This all ended one night when I woke up at about 3AM (after staying up until 1 doing some Physics III homework) with what sounded like a couple of dozen people having a rally in my head. I couldn't make out individual voices, words, or sentences, but the sound was distinct: lots of people were talking over one another, LOUDLY, and there was no way to get away from it or make it quieter. It was, frankly, extremely frightening, even though it only took a minute to realize what was going on and why. I wound up lying on a couch in the common area with a pillow over my head for about an hour, wishing the noise would stop so I could actually get some sleep. Eventually, it quieted enough that I could crawl back into bed and catch another four or so hours before needing to get up for class.
Anyway, caffiene: it's a drug, and now I limit myself to one cup in the AM and occasionally another in the afternoon, or a very small cup with dessert. Auditory hallucinations are no fun, and I found that I value the quality of a healthy life much more than the rewards of intense focused work these days.
The voices inside my head are telling me that this study is severely flawed, and I should just relax and have another cup of coffee...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You mean Spock in that Star Trek episode...
Kids today, I tell ya...
Obligatory Futurama.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
is there really isn't a Gnome sitting on top of my monitor. I really don't drink that much coffee it's just the little fucker keeps stealing it.
*whoosh*
WHY!?!?!
Actually it makes more of a guggling sound when it brews.
Oh. OH! Nevermind.
http://www.mhall119.com
... why coffee makes this seem like a great place to work. The only problem is the one, terrifying side effect:
The coffee wears off.
Have gnu, will travel.
Second study finds that after two cups of coffee you may mistake your first cup of shroom tea for your third of coffee.
3 cups might cause hallucinations, but 300 cups causes you to slow time down and save all of your friends from a raging fire. (Obligatory Futurama Reference)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
> I have done so for more than 25 years with no hallucinations (as far as I can tell) or baseless paranoia.
He's right. We haven't noticed any such behavior as we secretly watch him through his window.
Bark less. Wag more.
If I ingest less caffeine, does this mean fewer people will be out to get me?
Squirrel!
M'self, I drink 2 3-liters of Dr. Pepper a day... and have yet to have seen a darn thing...
Must be doin' it wrong.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Suppository.
I would tend to agree - I drink more coffee than that before 9am. I drink coffee all day long, even into the night. I have done so for more than 25 years with no...baseless paranoia
So what kind of paranoia did you experience?
I drink three cups of coffee so I can fight off the people I think are trying to get me.
The reason you haven't seen a darn thing is because the diabetes has destroyed your retinas.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I need TP for my bunghole.
I hate suppositories! They cling to my teeth, they taste like shit and usually they don't work at all, they just upset my stomach.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have you ever tried sugar? .... or PCP?
Don't try to recycle them
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
1. How are you going to know if you're hallucinating? Unless you are always asking someone, you'll never know for sure.
You also have to figure out if you are not hallucinating the person you are asking.
For the most part, LSD doesn't cause true hallucinations -- it distorts things. You'll see the wood grain on your desk flowing, or the tree waving at you... but you won't see a pink unicorn in the room
That's because she's invisible!
(https link for the paranoid)
I used to drink at least a 12 pack of some sort of caffeinated soda plus several 20oz bottles daily. In my mid-20s I started to notice that I'd wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing. I gave up all caffeine (I eat M&Ms sometimes) in December of 2005 and refuse to go back.
On the tequila side, I went to a party with my wife back in 2003. I brought an entire bottle of 1800 Jose Cuervo and OJ as a chaster with me with the full intention of sharing it with many other party-goers. Unfortunately being that the party was on a Wednesday, they weren't quite as interested in drinking tequila shots as I was. I drank the entire bottle (minus three shots) and an entire bowl of Doritoes.
The next part I am not proud of on any level but explains why people should not drink tequila:
I don't remember anything until noon the next day when I awoke on the couch and said, "holy fuck I didn't go to work!" I called in to work to apologize. My coworker just laughed and laughed and laughed. Apparently I had been in that morning and was sent, by her, to Burger King to get a Whopper to sober up. It didn't help and it was suggested I go home.
After getting off the phone with her I went to take a shower to find that the bed sheets were all in there covered in puke, causing me to throw up again all over them. After finally cleaning myself up I went and looked at the bare mattress, now stained bright orange from the Doritoes and decided never to drink tequila again.
For the next week I had huge, itchy rashes all over my body. My doctor asked if I had been drinking heavily and I recounted parts of the above story. He said that my body was leeching alcohol back out through my pores and suggested I get help with my problem. If you're a drunk (or one who abuses caffeine for that matter), stop. You'll be glad you did.
Not true. I put worms in my tequila...helps with the flavor.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
But THC ain't patentable, so it stays illegal.
And corn makes growers a lot of money, even though hemp is a better source for biofuel.
And the wood-pulp based paper industry is happy with its methods, even though canvas lasts hundreds of years and doesn't go yellow.
And who needs natural fibres when they're making money from artificial fibres made from oil.
I think we have our corroborating evidence for the paranoia part of this article.
Reading all the responses here, it sure looks like different folks have widely different reactions to caffeine -- no big surprise, but big medical in the media has yet to understand that everyone's a bit different, and no, one size definitely does not fit all.
Anyway, the one time in my life that I *have* hallucinated was after drinking far too much of the witches' brew coffee at a local greasy spoon, the dregs of the pot that had been sitting on the burner all afternoon and had simmered down to sludge by just before closing time when we usually showed up. I had maybe half a dozen cups of that, and my friend and I were having a ball talking about all sorts of wackiness. Once the diner kicked us out to close, we went driving on back country roads like usual to catch some air in some places and continue talking.
Aside from general perceptual distortions, every time we passed a Mobil gas station, I felt like I was getting sucked into the red "O" in the signs.
All the winding roads soon made me carsick though, and we pulled over. By that point it was around 2AM or so. The local sherriff pulled over a few minutes later -- "All right boys, whaddya been drinking?"
Both of us: "Coffee! Coffeecoffeecoffeesir, toomuchcoffee!" ... It's 2AM. Go home."
Sherriff: "Huh... well, I'm'a have to give you a breathalyzer test."
(given the look on the sherriff's face, we must have scored negative values)
"Boys,
But yeah, the next day was unpleasant, even without the M&Ms. :-P
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
My typical day started with a visit to the clown for a #2 with a large coke.
I presume this has some other meaning than my immediate interpretation :)
Well, let's break this down. It fits my morning perfectly if the following assumptions are true:
"clown" = "can"
"#2" = "#2"
"with a large coke" = "and vacating the previous night's beverage"
This guy's the limit!
Sorry to add to the tide of "I remember this one time" posts but I had to share this one.
A buddy of mine decided to experiment with a dose of LSD against pretty much everyone who told him he was being an idiot. He dropped it, and awhile later we all went out to grab dinner at a local diner in Chicago. Almost as if on queue, a group of 20 people from a country/western place came in in full costume (poofy dresses, cowboy hats, chaps, etc) and sat at a bunch of tables across from us. One of them had apparently won a cardboard cutout of a life-size Elvis. They'd propped it up against the wall and kept joking to it during their meal.
There was a silent agreement at the table to pretend everything was normal and to not make any mention of this to our LSD-tripping buddy, who spent the entire time checking and rechecking to see if Elvis was really in the building with a bunch of cowboys.
It could also be the weed...
All soft drinks are evil. They cause insulin spikes, which contribute to obesity. They cause insulin resistance long term. And the phosphoric acid leaches calcium from your bones causing brittle bones in old age. Diet soft drinks are no better. Stop drinking them before it's too late.
Sorry, it's not the "insulin spikes" that contribute to obesity. It's when your body is so used to sugar that you build up an insulin resistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_resistance. Believe me, I rely on insulin spikes after my workouts. It allows me to ingest a bunch of protein immediately after and use the insulin spike (from eating fruit) as a quick way to pump the protein into my muscles.
I haven't drank a soft drink in years, haven't touched a fast food joint in over a year, and keep sweets to a minimum. It's really sad to see the same guys at the vending machines every day, drinking a coke, eating a bag of chips and a chocolate bar for their lunch. It's really sad seeing so many people uneducated that eating 6-8 meals per day can actually LOWER your body fat.