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.
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!
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
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.
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! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Are you sure that's not a guy you're kissing?
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
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.
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.