The coffee illusion

Coffee is such big business globally that there is a lot of scientific interest in this lifestyle drug. Every now and then a study comes up saying how good coffee is for you, due to its antioxidant content for example, and then another comes warning of dire results from coffee drinking. Consistently in this service, we observe that in moderation (ie. two cups per day) coffee seems to be fine. Now a new study has reinforced this notion by saying that too much coffee can even have experiencing auditory hallucinations.

In the new study participants were either subjected to either a low or high stress condition, or to a low or high caffeine condition. The high caffeine condition was equivalent to five cups of coffee in a day.

The subjects were all asked to listen to white noise and report whenever they heard the song “White Christmas”, by Bing Crosby during the white noise. White noise is a background sound that contains every frequency within the range of human hearing so that humans hear it as a constant fuzzy sound.

In actual fact “White Christmas” was not played at any point during the experiment. However, significant numbers of those who had the equivalent of five cups of coffee reported hearing the song. The same applied to those under the high stress condition.

The researchers say that there is a link between high levels of stress and psychosis and that caffeine can make people prone to hallucinations. They make the point that caffeine should be used in moderation by people prone to psychosis such as schizophrenia.

For the average, not-yet-psychotic person, did the boss really offer you a 50 per cent raise late yesterday? Or was it the seventh cup of coffee talking?

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