Coffee- the perfect companion to boring, repetitive tasks

Like teaching. Ha, ha.

This article from Cnn. com, posted January 11, 2006, with cutie Dr. Gupta reports that the caffeine in coffee is effective in helping people do tasks- particularly mental tasks that they otherwise wouldn't be able to perform after the equivalent of two cups of coffee. Some thought this made coffee drinkers smarter. Not so. But coffee does make you more cheerful, better able to perform at detail-oriented tasks that are associated with intelligence. Not to mention more tolerant of other people's crap. This is especially true of our chronically sleep-deprived nation. So we seem smarter after our morning espresso.

The downside is that it is addictive. As Dr. G points out "it is a drug."

Here is an interesting thing: One of the researchers in Dr. Gupta's report- Harris Lieberman- is funded by the Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Now why would the Army have a vested interest in whether or not caffeine made you smarter or helped you perform boring, repetitive tasks when you are sleep deprived? Probably because soliders are even more sleep-deprived than their civilian counter-parts yet they need to function at an extremely high level to protect themselves. For them, caffeine could be a performance enhancing drug.

But what about the side effects to getting soliders jacked up on high level of java? It is, as we all know, addictive? Will the VA soon have a decaf detox unit?