Can Caffeine Boost Memory?

It’s debatable, but there is some evidence that caffeine may sharpen memory. Researchers at London’s National Addic­tion Centre tested 9003 adult caffeine users. Those who drank the most caffeine in coffee, and to a lesser extent in tea, performed best on a number of cognitive tests, includ­ing reaction time, verbal memory, and visual-spatial rea­soning, than non-caffeine users. Older people got more of a mental boost from caffeine than younger people, con­cluded investigators.

Dutch researchers also found that caffeine can boost memory. Researchers at the University of Limburg in Maastricht had sixteen persons take a drug that impaired short-term and long-term memory.

Consuming caffeine dramatically reversed the drug-induced impairment. Sub­jects who drank two to three small cups of coffee (250 mil­ligrams caffeine) retrieved information from their long-term memory and recalled words from short-term and long-term memory tests normally; their reading speed and visual searches also improved almost to the non-drug level. Re­searchers attributed the memory enhancement to a stimu-

lation of “cholinergic activity,” or increases in activity of the “memory” neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which happens, they say, when caffeine blocks adenosine.

Italian investigators also showed that caffeine improves memory consolidation in experimental animals, as shown by their enhanced ability to remember how to find their way through mazes. But caffeine improved memory through mechanisms other than by blocking adenosine, researchers concluded.

Another reason caffeine might boost memory: It causes a slight adrenaline rush that clears up fuzzy brains. Adren­aline also triggers a rise in blood sugar (glucose) which in turn prods increased release of the memory enhancing neu­rotransmitter, acetylcholine.

Dr. Richard Restak, of George Washington University and an authority on the brain, recommends the “judicious use of caffeine” to help older people compensate for the slowing down of brain functioning.

On one test, caffeine flunks. You can’t count on massive amounts of caffeine to improve your ability to make com­plex managerial decisions, according to tests at Penn State University. Researchers had twenty-four highly paid man­agers who normally consumed four or more cups of coffee daily (400 to 1000 milligrams of caffeine) take a six-hour video-computerized test of scenarios designed to test their skill at making complex managerial decisions.

A week later, the managers were told to take an extra 400 milligrams a day of caffeine in capsules. Although this is a lot of caffeine (bringing everybody’s intake up to eight to fourteen cups of coffee a day), it’s not unusual for peo­ple under stress to consume that much, said researchers. The subjects were then put through another simulated video-computer test of their complex managerial skills to determine whether they did better or worse.

Interestingly, under the influence of excess caffeine, they were 20 percent speedier in making decisions. But their decisions were not necessarily better. Indeed, the managers’ capacity to take advantage of specific opportunities, a good predictor of real-world managerial success, deteriorated on the excessive doses of caffeine—perhaps because the man­agers jumped to action without taking enough time to remember and consider information relevant to the deci­sion. In general, though, the excess caffeine had no impact on most measures of managerial effectiveness, researchers concluded.

Coffee, brewed: About 20 milligrams of caffeine per ounce.

Tea: About 5 milligrams of caffeine per ounce.

Cola: About 4 milligrams of caffeine per ounce.

How Vitamins, Minerals and Other Supplements Can Boost Your Brain to the Max

Whether you are young, old, or in between, taking vit­amin-mineral supplements can improve brain func­tion, possibly boost performance on IQ tests, improve mood and memory, and slash the chances of brain deteri­oration as you get older. Indeed, the evidence is so com­pelling that it seems incredible everyone is not taking vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to keep their brains functioning at peak levels for a lifetime.

As Dr. Denham Harman, professor emeritus at the Uni­versity of Nebraska, and others demonstrated in animals or humans as long ago as the 1950s, your brain, general health, and longevity are initially shaped long before you are born by the vitamins and antioxidants your mother ingests during pregnancy and even before conception.

A string of studies, many done a decade ago and seemingly lost to public consciousness, have found that giving multi-vitamins and specific vitamin supplements to schoolchild­ren can dramatically increase IQ scores. Research among adults of all ages also finds that certain vitamin and min­eral supplements improve mood, learning ability, memory, attention span, eye-hand coordination, and reaction times, even in people who show no overt signs of deficiency.

Further, mountains of stunning evidence have piled up in the last few years, documenting that middle-aged and older people can stave off intellectual deterioration and even retrieve mental faculties thought lost forever by tak­ing vitamins, particularly antioxidant vitamins and B vita­mins. In one remarkable finding, vitamin E equaled a potent pharmaceutical drug in treating the most dreaded brain disease of all—Alzheimer’s. Vitamins also protect the brains of normal healthy people. A recent random survey of 880 elderly men and women by European researchers showed that those with high vitamin and antioxidant blood levels had stronger intellectual powers, less depression, and less risk of losing their brains to dementia.

Then why isn’t everyone downing vitamin supplements to maximize mental functioning? Since vitamins and min­erals are generally safe in required doses and relatively inexpensive compared with remedies needed to rectify the potential damage to society in health and educational costs of not taking vitamins, why isn’t the practice more wide­spread and medically encouraged?

One reason is conventional nutrition still maintains that the brain is not impaired unless the body is in a state of classic malnutrition, induced only after serious and pro­longed deficiencies. Such malnutrition, characterized by overt physical signs of wasting away and rock bottom blood levels of nutrients, is considered rare in Western countries.

However, more daring researchers argue that the brain is the target of subtle deficiencies that leave it secretly impoverished long before any physical signs of conven­tional malnutrition are noticeable. It’s well known that a wide range of vitamins and minerals are linked to psycho­logical functioning and that many such nutrients are miss­ing in typical high-fat, highly processed diets. “What is adequate to prevent physical signs and symptoms of mal­nutrition may not be adequate to prevent impaired mental function,” says researcher Steven J. Schoenthaler at Cali­fornia State University.

Even the tiniest deficiencies could cause subtle and undetected disruption in psychological functioning, con­tends David Benton, a world-renowned research psycholo­gist at University College in Swansea, Wales. “Cognitive activity,” says Dr. Benton, “involves the summated activity of many billions of neurones, and countless biochemical pathways and their associated enzymes. It may well be that relatively small dietary deficiences that are dismissed as causing only minor changes to the activity of a single enzyme, will along with many other similar minor effects, have a measurable and potentially important cumulative influence on cerebral functioning.”

Much evidence, in fact, raises the specter that modern western society is rife with a pernicious form of “subclin­ical” (symptomless) or “marginal” malnutrition that leaves no obvious traces of brain malfunction. The brain may get enough vitamins and minerals to appear to function “nor­mally.” But is it really operating at optimal levels? Some researchers believe substantial segments of the population do not get nearly the levels of vitamins and minerals needed to optimize brain function. Deterioration in mental func­tion previously attributed to “normal aging,” may, in fact, be at least partly due to subtle undetected and correctable deficiencies of specific vitamins needed by the brain, says Katherine Tucker, associate professor of nutritional epidemiology at Tufts University. “It’s a new and powerful idea,” she says, “with accumulating evidence to support it.”

It seems obvious that the poor-quality, high-fat, low-vitamin diets of many Americans, sadly, including school­children, are inadequate to fuel peak brain performance, and that undernourished brains might perk up when sup­plied vitamin and mineral supplements. In short, our brains quietly survive and endure on poor diets in a permanent state of lethargy that we accept as “normal” because we can’t imagine otherwise. We are unaware that we have the potential to be smarter and feel better—that our brains, when properly nourished, can reach for and achieve more and function at higher levels.

BOTTOM LINE: Vitamins, impressive studies show, can help ensure maximum brain functioning from birth to old age.