Weekly Roundup: Caffeine and Effective Brains, Your Brain Anticipates the Future During Rest, Late Sleep is Bad Even for Your Owls, and Low-Light Boosts Brain Connectivity
I’ve seen so many interesting research papers this week I almost couldn’t decide what to write. But let’s stick to some topics I’ve covered previously such as a favourite of mine reporting on the, mostly positive, effects of caffeine. But also sleep, how your brain practises during rest, and low-light therapy boosts brain connectivity.
Caffeine Boosts Efficiency
That sounds like a really nice title - however, there is one big caveat. Wait for it, wait…this study was in ants only. “What!”, I can here you shout, “Ants, how on earth can this be applied to my human coffee habits!?”. But bear with me - the research is still interesting.
In this study, by Henrique Galante et al., ants were given either “snacks” laced with caffeine or simple sugary snacks. The surprising outcome was that those who had the caffeine-laced snacks basically became more effective in navigating i.e. they navigated back to their nest quicker and more effectively. This suggests that the caffeine induced better learning abilities. Moreover it was specific to caffeine and not energy, otherwise the sugary snack should have been just as, or more, effective.
Yes, I know this is in ants, and it is a long stretch to apply this to us human beings. But then again I did report a while back on correlation between coffee consumption and team effectiveness in business:
I have reported on caffeine multiple times with sometimes more positive such as increased brain growth:
But also slightly more negative impacts such as on decision making.
And again it should be noted coffee consumption is generally considered positive:
You may also wonder why the researchers were doing this particular experiment in ants? And the answer I also found fascinating - they were trying to find ways to poison invasive ant species better! Yes, you read that correctly - the logic goes that if these ants become more effective at foraging they can then get them to be more effective at transporting poison in poison traps back into their nexts and then this would be effective at combating these invasive species.
Invasive species can wreak chaos on local ecosystems - but for us some more interesting research into caffeine. And many people in big corporations may also feel like ants.
But from ants and learning to learning during rest, or more specifically anticipating the future.
Our Brains Anticipate the Future During Rest
We know that sleep is the key time when our brains consolidate learning or even that during short rests our brain practise previously learnt material. This effect is strong and has been consistently reported.
This new research, by Kourosh Maboudi, et al. of Rice University, is pretty fascinating and I won’t have the space here to go into the details, but basically it involved being able to track specific neurons of mice during exposure to a new environment and then tracking these neurons to see if they were playing it back or doing something different.
Pretty amazing the techniques these researchers have developed and work with nowadays.
And what did they find?
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