Coffee Helps Us Remember. Remember What?

It’s official, a cup of coffee can boost our memories, and it can do it for as long as 24 hours. HealthDay reports that researchers at Johns Hopkins asked 100 people to look at hundreds of common, everyday images on a computer screen: shoes, a chair, a rubber duck, etc. Five minutes later, they gave 200 milligrams of caffeine (a cup of coffee usually contains about 160 milligrams) to half of those people and a placebo to the others. About 24 hours later, when the caffeine was out of their system, the study subjects looked at more images and were asked to label the pictures as either old, new or similar to the original images they’d seen. The researchers found that people who had taken the caffeine were better at distinguishing the similar pictures from the original ones, and those who had received the placebo were more likely to incorrectly identify the similar images as the old images. Read more in HealthDay.