Slashdot Mirror
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!
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...
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.
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.
So now it's one man and three cups? I thought the hallucination was about two girls!
"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.
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
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.
...200 students...
They clearly just haven't built up adequate resistance yet.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
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
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.
First of all, I thought we knew this already? O.o
Second, it's more fun if you have a pre-existing psychiatric condition. Personally, it has some nice effects on my PTSD. On the one end, it can help with the numbness and similar symptoms, because I get amped up and happy if I drink enough of it. On the other end, holy shit does the hypervigilance, irritability, and other such symptoms get worse with enough caffeine. Of course, that's really noticeable when you're drinking 3-4 16oz energy drinks every single day, like I used to before I started to realise the extent of my problem. Even down to only one cup of coffee every day, I still don't get any more sleep though, so whatever.
Can't say I've experienced the hallucinations so much, though. But I can only imagine someone with schizophrenia or other disorders causing hallucinations (well, you could try to get away with saying PTSD has hallucinations as they are similar, but there's actually distinct differences between flashback type things of PTSD and hallucinations) drinking a lot of caffeine. Mix it with weed and it's even more fun! I could also say meth, cocaine, and some others, but that sounds like a heart attack waiting to happen, and they can cause hallucinations themselves anyway; and no I'm not kidding--working in an emergency room, I've seen my fair share of heart attacks where the only reasonable explanation was meth/cocaine use.
Nonetheless, I'd be more concerned about ulcers and other problems, like heart problems, that can come with heavy caffeine use. You can at least pass off a somewhat normal life, without ending up in the hospital for it, with the hallucinations, if you really try ;)
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.
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
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.
I can hallucinate using just a radio and a ping pong ball
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Some of the medical genetics studies I work on have measures for those, and having seen the questions and coded them, I can affirm that they're not quite as reliable as you may think.
Besides, every time I drink more than three cups of coffee, I get this visual hallucination that I'm being asked to work to hard and this auditory hallucination that my boss has an unreasonable deadline ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Obligatory Futurama.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to find it very easy to induce auditory hallucinations with a combination of sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation; e.g. stay up for 36 hours then put in earplugs and try to sleep. Since caffeine is known to interfere with sleep, is it possible that these hallucinations are not caused directly by the caffeine, but rather by a lack of sleep brought on by caffeine consumption on previous days?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... 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.
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
I drank enough energy drinks/coffee this morning to be equivalent to several hundred millgrams of caffeine, and it's sharpened my focus and calmed me down, though I've gotten a bit jangled. I suspect I have ADHD though, so the reverse stimulant effect is not surprising.
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.
If I ingest less caffeine, does this mean fewer people will be out to get me?
Squirrel!
...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.
Alot more people than you think have "hallucinations" and don't know it, mostly because they don't know what a hallucination actually is.
If we were going to believe Hollywood, visual hallucinations would be things like people who aren't there or ants or stuff from an acid trip. Auditory hallucinations would only be things like hearing voices.
But visual could be things like seeing shadows moving in the corners of your eyes, or a flash of color or movement. Auditory could be hearing music in your mind for just a second.
Wikipedia has a fairly decent overview of it.
Damnit... I got a french press for christmas and was lovin it.
Tina Fey was right: if you're feeling too good about yourself, the internet is always there to bring you back down.
growing up I used to put away a 12 pack of mt dew everyday, and now as an adult I easily drink 10 cups of coffee a day (I've got a 22 ounce coffee cup too!) I've never had hallucinations unless I specifically invoked them through other means. Anyone ever wonder if the college students were on any drug, other than caffeine?
Not to mention I'm not high stung, and I don't think anyone is out to get me, and yes I do sleep just fine at night.
Maybe for the general case this study is correct (and displays what everyone already knew) But in my case it's totally inaccurate. I'd like to see this study preformed on professional developers (such as myself) I bet the results would be totally different. Then again maybe I've built up such a tolerance to caffeine that it just doesn't phase me any more.
The telegraph is wrong once again... Nobody talked about 3 cups but 7 cups of instant coffee. Here is the study from a more reliable source
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."
You're being sarcastic, but several years ago I was living in Japan, and saw something awfully close to what you describe.
The government in the US at the time was trying to figure out what to do with the settlement of the Big Tobacco lawsuit, and many states were putting together anti-smoking campaigns. I don't know if you've ever been to Japan, but folks there are big smokers.
So some mid-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Health and Welfare was interviewed on the evening news, and asked if the government in Japan would also be engaging in anti-smoking efforts. With a level of candour unthinkable on the other side of the pond, this fellow plainly stated that no, Japan's government would not, because smoking would help reduce the aging population and thereby limit the ultimate public expenditures required to care for a large elderly population.
Japan. What else can I say. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
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?
Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine and his druggie friends decided that, since many other drugs have differing effects between the natural plant form, ingested refined powder, and smoked refined powder, it might be interesting to try smoking caffeine. So they crunched up some caffeine pills and smoked them.
Results: You do not want to do this. Do not try it at home, do not try it at work, do not try it with other trained professionals... He said that all the bad effects of regular caffeine abuse show up very quickly - shaking, jitters, nausea, headaches. It was interesting to have done it, but it was Not Fun. On the other hand, he was young enough at the time and had sufficient practice with other substances that are Not Good Ideas either that he didn't get a heart attack, and if there were any hallucinations added to the paranoia, they didn't lead to any additional dangerous behaviour, but YMMV.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As the anti-drunk-driving people say, coffee won't make you any less drunk, it'll just make you a wide-awake drunk. Mixing enough caffeine with your booze makes it easier to get far more drunk that you would if you weren't having the caffeine, or at least to not notice when you should have stopped, potentially leading to experiences like yours (though in your case the caffeine may have added to the hallucinations.) Red Bull and vodka seems to be a popular variant on that, but even rum and coke can do it. (Brain Wash and mixed drinks appear to be a bad combination as well, even if it's the red kind as opposed to the evil blue-dye version :-)
My favorite variant on that is Irish Coffee - since it's hot, I get hit with alcohol vapors right away, but it probably makes it something that I drink slowly and don't have too many of, so I haven't hit the bad-feedback-loop with it.
For some reason people attribute evil-don't-do-that-again-ness more to tequila than to other liquors; I don't know if it's something actually about the tequila, or that it's often mixed in smooth-tasting fruity drinks that are easy to overconsume, or if it's that many people first encounter tequila at parties in early adulthood, when they don't have much experience with drinking and haven't learned not to overindulge yet, as opposed to something like beer that fills you up if you're drinking a lot.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
The Japanese government, when it comes to tobacco control, has a severe conflict of interest. Japan Tobacco, the major (more than 60% of the market) supplier of cigarettes in Japan, is 50% owned by the government -- it used to be two-thirds government owned.
Given the degree of tobacco use in Japan, I'd wager that the profits earned through tobacco sales more than compensate for the consequent heath-care costs in the population. Further, the long incestuous relationship between government, public service bureaucracy and industry is most definitely expressed in the connections between the Ministry of Finance and JT: as far as I know, every president of JT has come from the top end of the Ministry of Finance, in the amakudari tradition.
The mid-level bureaucrat in question I doubt was expressing an honest opinion on the aging demographic, but rather was trying to justify a very cozy but entirely medically irresponsible government relationship.
I was young, had been up all night and was not used to drinking coffee. Before going to work, I drank a large cup of very strong coffee... All day long, I kept asking my co-worker "what did you say?" and always got "nothing" as an answer. Sometimes I had also the feeling that somebody tapped on my shoulder. That really freaked me out. I'm glad it never happened to me since.