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I’m an English Breakfast tea drinker myself, but I guess my Blenders are spacing out right now on the java here in the coffeehouse…
Heavy coffee drinkers are more likely to have hallucinations or feel “the presence of dead people,” according to new research.A UK-based study quizzed 200 students on their caffeine intake and found those with the highest consumption were also more prone to report seeing, or hearing, things that were not there.
Those who consumed a daily equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee or more – high caffeine users – were three times more likely to have extra-sensory experiences than low users, who had less than one cup daily.
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Correlation does not imply causationIt could just as easily be that people inclined to halucination are also compelled to drink a lot more coffee. Or it could be that be that they are tied to similar causes, but are unrelated to each other.
There was a well funded, accurately conducted study back in the 50′s or 60′s that showed definitively a very high correlation between smoking and cervical cancer. Researchers thought it was a slam dunk. Smoking is a carcinogen, women who smoke are much more at risk of cervical cancer, therefore smoking causes cervical cancer. Then years later, they found that cervical cancer was caused by a sexually transmitted virus and smoking had nothing to do with it. Yet the study was well done, followed all the proper procedures, and there was nothing in it that would cause anyone to question the results. When they looked into it further, they found that it was a lifestyle issue. Women who smoked were also much more likely to have multiple sex partners, leading to a higher risk of contracting the virus causing cervical cancer. Smoking and cervical cancer both flowed out of the same culture, but had nothing to do with each other.
There’s as much caffeinein tea as in coffee, so don’t be too smug about your English Breakfast.
On the other hand, it does explain all those tea partiers.
Correlation is not causation(ditto)
Lots of “scientists” seem to have forgotten that.
Pam, about this bigoted post, LOL…
As someone who drinks coffee even at night, I find this post to be highly bigoted and indicative of your tea-swilling privilege…
Having said that, English Breakfast Tea has 1/2 to 1/3 as much caffine in it as coffee.
So EBT can give you a buzz but not that much of a buzz.
Now Green Tea, on the other hand, has more caffine in it than coffee; I didtinctly remember drinking two sips of Green Tea that I bought in a shop down by the Argyle train stop and it stopped my caffine headache.
As far as hallucinations (and I drink more than the daily equivalent)… never had them.
Who can trust “SCIENCE” in a media/corporate-led world?Ditto-ditto to “correlation is not causation”.
I had a friend who worked very hard for 8 years to earn his PhD in Psychology, focusing on statistics and not clinical. His eventually quit his very first “well-paying job with a big company” because of their lack of ethics.
THEY WERE BASICALLY MESSING WITH THE NUMBERS, and this was in the late 80′s.
John, I was making this VERY point in the“gaytheist” thread.
That reason and science and numbers, while more reliable than religion, IMHO, has problems too.
Sleep?OK, the cohort is typically sans sleep which is why the coffee and No-Doze. Perhaps the number a hallucinations the control group had should be known too.
Add No-DozeThick black coffee fortified with No-Doze is very tasty. You don’t even notice how bad the jitters are after the first 24 hours awake.
Who wants to go ghost hunting???I say we each chug a pot of coffee and go hang out in a haunted house. I’m sure we will sense “the presence of dead people” then, if this is true.
Sorry, I’m just soooo amused by this.
I see dead people…if I don’t have my daily coffee fix!
DisillusionmentI can’t imagine what my friend thought initially, after working SO HARD to get an education (which he paid for), only to find out that THOSE WITH MONEY end up making all of the final decisions in life.
Evil Kings and Queens – they still exist.
after 7 cups of coffeeI am too busy running to the bathroom, to have hallucinations.
It’s a bit like speech.The best response to ugly speech is good speech; the best response to badly-misused data is good use of data. Unfortunately, the whole research “industry” seems at times to be going the way of the media; corporate priorities consider themselves as far above scientific concerns as they are above questions of journalistic integrity.
Back in my Santa Cruz days…I used to drink triple and quadruple hammerheads/red-eyes; that’s three or four shots of espresso in a cup of coffee. Somewhat later in my techie days, I moved on to dropping caffeinated Foosh! mints in Jolt. These days I’ve made a point of getting a coffee maker that makes very high-quality coffee one mug at a time to slow down my intake (and a hand-cranked grinder that helps with both the quality and the discouraging of over-consumption).
My experienceBack in the 70′s when I drank a lot more coffee than I do now, I would hallucinate more often, especially after chewing little squares of paper.
That’s not actually trueCoffee contains a lot more caffeine than tea does. An average-sized (i.e. 12-16 oz.) cup of coffee usually has anywhere between 100-300mg of caffeine, versus around 50-60mg for tea. That’s why for me, coffee is a necessity, while I only drink tea for the taste :b
Very true.The first thing I thought of when I read the post was, “Gee, maybe they are self-medicating”. Doesn’t have to be the caffeine causing the sensory misfires, but apparently it’s too much trouble to actually find the average threshold for caffeine-induced hallucinations and then measure the blood levels of heavy caffeine drinkers. Far easier to simply gather correlations especially if you get published regardless.
Have you ever tried to get a research grant?If you had, you wouldn’t be surprised that simpler, less-costly studies are done. At least initially, to see if there’s any point in doing something more in-depth, and almost by definition more expensive.
if you read carefullyyou will see that no causation is inferred. there is nothing unscientific about reporting a correlation.
I’ll have you knowthat tea-drinking is a god-ordained orientation whereas coffee drinking behavior is nothing more than a chosen, unholy lifestyle. What you need is some good java aversion therapy.
You wishWhat if you’re hallucinating the bathroom?
Black Friday Cell Phone DealsThat’s why for me, coffee is a necessity, while I only drink tea for the taste..
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Nope, was just part of the crew Didn’t have the stomach for living grant-to-grant like I saw some of my classmates doing, not to mention that I found I really, really disliked APA politics. And I do agree with you regarding simpler, cheaper studies being done first and then going after the more meaningful ones. I guess I was just expecting more than a simple, gross correlation of 200 students answering a questionnaire, something one of my old profs (who published continuously for decades and is still going strong) warned us about repeatedly. But that was a long time ago, and I didn’t mean to come off as a jerk just now. My apologies.
Techie DaysAh those were the days; 24 hour days. Pouring in heavy duty coffee fortified with No-Doze with Jolt Cola chasers.
At the time when I was working normal 10 hour days my coffee intake was 10 cups before breakfast, one quart between morning coffee break and lunch. Another quart between lunch and afternoon coffee break and a few extra cups just to get to dinner.
About 14 years after that era I was listening to someone who was talking about his heavy coffee drinking (he was 28)when he asked me about how much coffee I drank. I was down to about 6 cups in the morning before breakfast – which turned out to be 4 cups more than him. It all depends on what you are used to.
Feh. I see dead people at work every dayClearly, you do not have a cubicle job.
I do…I drink coffee but in limit…
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I do…I drink coffee but in limit…
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will clean that up, when I come downI couldn’t go to the toidy, it was an alligator trying to bite off me bum.