Coffee shrinks the brain
Coffee shrinks the brain
This doesn't mean that caffeine makes you dumb, though.
Gotta love my click-bait title. And if you are reading this, ha! it worked. FWIW, his is the real title:
Drinking coffee daily is associated with less gray matter in the brain
(tip: if you view that in Lynx there is no popup nag… hey, at least it’s not a Cloudflare site)
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
~ Paul Erdos
So it affects the gray matter when it impacts your ability to sleep, did I read that right?
Yeah, caffeine blocks the adenosine receptors in your brain. Adenosine is a chemical your body produces throughout the day to signal you getting tired. That’s why when you drink coffee, a few hours later you might feel a “crash”, because all of the tiredness comes rushing back into your brain at once
Like the article suggests, that blocking of adenosine receptors happening too late can mess with your sleep quality, because your body wants to sleep, but your brain can’t because it doesn’t feel tired. So you might end up getting poorer sleep. This could lead to poorer long term memory storage/encoding, because one of the functions of sleep is to take short term memories and store it in your long term memory.
So the secret is to never stop drinking caffeine, got it ☕
I drink a lot of coffee, but I usually stop around 4 or 5pm because even though I normally sleep well, I've definitely experienced caffeine-induced insomnia.