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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.'"
I remember reading somewhere that 60 cups of coffee would supposedly yield the same level of hallucinations as 1 dose of LSD....I don't know about anyone else, but I think 60 cups of coffee would mess me up a lot more than 1 dose of LSD...
Who is actually surprised that consuming large amounts of a brain stimulant can cause hallucinations and paranoia? It should be no shocker that when you are over stimulated, your brain starts finding new outlets.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
"Triples your risk" - well, what are the risks WITHOUT coffee? I drink coffee all day long, yet I haven't had a hallucination since 1982 (the last time I did acid).
lack of sleep will case hallucinations.
And exactly what do they mean by "hallucinations?" Water swilrling down a drain may make you think you heard a female voice; "floaters" in your eyeballs (you'll get 'em when you're older) can make you momentarily think you saw something that wasn't there. I wouldn't count those as hallucinations.
"The new study also showed that people who had a high caffeine intake were not more likely to think that others were out to get them, a so-called "persecution complex".
That one little word omitted (that I bolded that WAS in TFA but not in the summary) changes the meaning completely, doesn't it? Taco, you need to cut down on the Jolt! get some sleep, dude!
Free Martian Whores!
I've had 4 cups this morning, and I feel fine. Maybe I have a high caffeine tolerance.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
And I bought a jar of Caffeine off of Unitednucler.com for 10$.
ACS/reagent grade, so great to use... I use mine with DMSO if I want the caf without bitterness. In my job, if I take a .5g hit, I feel it after about 10 minutes where I consistently get more lively and awake.
Just watch for the downs after about 6 hours after first hit. You'll get hit with extreme tiredness and apathy... You wont be close enough to a bed.
*I dont work for UnitedNuclear.com : Im just a happy purchaser.
Why must we tag EVERYTHING correlationisnotcausation. Does /. suddenly have a patent disregard for statistics in it entirety? Seriously, what is the alternative here? People about to have a hallucination have a sudden caffeine urge before their episode? Looking at the study from both sides is good. Ignoring statistics entirely is cowardly. I see too many people ignoring them because they are offensive (religion correlates with violent crime, homocide, stds, abortion). And i mean blanket ignoring, not trying to deduce anything from the stats. I never used to think of /.ers as the types to plug their ears and go lalalala. But this meme is childish.
Thank you! I'm glad someone else saw that. I'm pretty sure an overdose of caffeine is causation for paranoia and hallucinations. I think a better argumentative tag would have been "obviousscience."
...200 students...
They clearly just haven't built up adequate resistance yet.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I've always been turned off from so called "Energy Drinks". I see too many people pound down these combinations of corn syrup and caffeine. The boost is very brief and all that sugar can't be good for the waistline or for insulin levels. The appeal seems to be mostly marketing. If you need lots of caffeine to function you'd be better off getting a decent night's sleep regularly.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Well, the people who add the tags don't read the actual article...tags only show what the majority of people who saw the headline think! The authors themselves say:"we cannot eliminate the possibility that hallucination-proneness could be a cause rather than a result of increased caffeine intake. This would be consistent with the finding that caffeine intake can act as a coping mechanism to bring relief from problems". Yeah, I'd be drinking something stronger than coffee if I was hallucinating.
I had given up caffeine for about 6 months, and then needed to pull an all-nighter at work. I went to the 7-11 and got a Double Gulp of Coca-Cola, and drank it all pretty quickly. Within about an hour, I started seeing "movement" out of the corner of my eye - just little flashes, but enough to startle me and make me turn and look. I also got paranoid; I was on a construction site (only one there) and even though my car was right outside my window, and a diesel to boot, I became convinced someone was trying to steal the car silently. I would check every 15 minutes to see if it was still there.
These symptoms are also seen in recreational users of amphetamines, so I assumed (afterward) that it was an overdose of stimulants per se, not that it was caffeine.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I got fr1st p0st!
course I have had twenty nine cups of coffee, and my screen looks like a bad knockoff Picaso painting.
Keep drinking until it looks like a Dali.
http://www.mhall119.com
This isn't news at all. We've known high doses of stimulants cause hallucinations for decades. I fail to see what is new about this study.
Dude, if you think you got first post and it was a REPLY to another post, then that isn't coffee you're drinking. :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This study CORRELATES high intake of caffeine to auditory/visual hallucinations--and ASSUMES caffeine came first. What if people who are already prone to having these hallucinations tend to consume more caffeine?
Another correlation of this nature is that people with schizophrenia are ~75% likely to smoke and others with mental illness are prone to this trend as well. Source Here.
Also, this study was held at a university, and their test subjects are freshmen/sophomore level psych majors looking to get extra credit in their 300 level class. These students are already stressed about exams, relationships, money, and the fact they will probably have to work at Starbucks when they graduate because they got a Pysch degree--so to suggest that the sample is not bias in that way (and is indeed not anymore stressed than the regular adult population) is unscientific.
"Engineering. Where the noble, semi-skilled laborers execute the vision of those who think and dream." -Sheldon
...but it's often quite close.
The disregard for quantifiable relationships here is silly. Screaming correlationisnotcausation is exactly like screaming, "Just because there's smoke doesn't mean there's fire." That can be true, in a limited number of cases. In the vast majority of cases, smoke does correctly imply fire, and a strong correlation often correctly implies causation.
Can there be outliers? Sure. Can there be a third-party cause for the correlation? Sure. Is the most likely explanation often the most accurate one? You bet.
My old stats prof used to say that the causal link between smoking and lung cancer has never been proven - never run the double-blinds, etc. However, it is correlated beyond any reasonable doubt. Sometimes enough really is enough.
Sorry, sorry, for a moment I got a little worried, but then I saw in TFA that it was 200 students that were hallucinating. Well, given all the other drugs that the youth of today are doing it's no wonder that a cup of joe makes these wimpy, pimply faced teenagers think that the incredible hulk is fighting to get out of their nostrils and rip out their trachea!
Now, I bet if you got 200 sweet old ladies to drink three cups of coffee a day, there would be no phantoms or voices floating about in their heads.
Now, get of my porch you young whipper snappers!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
No hallucinations that I remember, but it was not fun.
My girlfriend at the time had a couple of caffeine pills, which for some reason I remembered from my youth as not having much of an effect on me. So I downed them both, then went home and proceeded to make and drink an entire pot of black coffee for my all-nighter.
By 4am I was shaking like a junkie. I was having hot flashes and cold sweats, alternately. I felt so nauseated that I went to the bathroom repeatedly and stuck my finger down my throat, praying that something would come up. Nothing did but a little bit of brown sludge. My head was spinning. My teeth were clenching. My eyes were darting around. I felt confused, like I couldn't really concentrate on anything.
Did I mention that I needed to be at the airport by 6am for a business trip?
On the cab ride to the airport, I was hanging my head out the window like a dog. The cabbie kept shooting me dirty looks, like I was going to puke in his cab. Sorry pal; believe me, I wish I could. First thing I did at the airport was make a beeline for the men's room and get down on my knees again. I felt really bad for the poor guy in the stall next to me who had to listen to my retching as I dry-heaved. Still, it didn't help. In the mirror I looked like a wax manikin soaked in sweat.
On the plane I started to feel better. "Oh thank god," I thought. "What I need now is water... maybe even a little orange juice." I had the flight attendant bring me a beverage. Mistake. Two sips in, and the barf bag was in my lap. Lucky for everyone on the flight, though -- I still couldn't puke.
Anyway, this went on for the entire day. When I got back home from my trip at about 9pm, I went straight to bed, still shaking, still pale, still sweaty. And I lay there. Probably it was about four hours before I could get to sleep.
The next day I told my girlfriend about my ordeal and she explained that she'd thought it was a little strange that I'd taken both of the caffeine pills at once. When she was driving cross-country from New Jersey, she said, she'd usually take half a pill with a little bit of water.
So I learned my lesson -- but the upshot was that I'm not sure I was ever the same again. An ounce or two into a strong cup of Pete's coffee would almost throw me into a panic attack, because I could feel all the effects coming on again. One time, the coffee machine at the office was broken so that it wasn't sending the full amount of water through the grounds -- in other words, you ended up with a strong pot. I didn't realize this, and I ended up having to go home early.
So, to the parent's point: Hell yeah it's a drug, and some people mess around with it too lightly.
Breakfast served all day!
A very reasonable post, right until you made the leap of faith about diet sodas being bad. Your whole previous post was about sugar content, so how does that reasoning go?
Well at least they layed down a rational reason and were 100% open and honest about it. Which is more then can be said for just about every other government in the world.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.