You can feel caffeine buzz without actually drinking coffee, say study

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Washington D.C.: The placebo effect of coffee can heighten arousal, ambition and focus in regular drinkers without them actually consuming the beverage, recent findings suggest. As part of the study, a team of researchers explored the association between coffee and arousal to see if the brain's exposure to stimuli could deliver the same cognitive benefits as a caffeine buzz.

"As long as individuals see a connection between coffee and arousal, whatever its origin may be, mere exposure to coffee-related cues might trigger arousal in and of themselves without ingesting any form of caffeine," said Eugene Chan, lead researcher of the study, published in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition.

According to the researchers, smelling coffee gives rise to the beverage's psychoactive, arousing effects. This is because the brains of habitual coffee consumers are conditioned to respond to coffee in certain ways, as per the prominent Pavlov's dog theory.

"So walking past your favourite cafe, smelling the odours of coffee grounds, or even witnessing coffee-related cues in the form of advertising can trigger the chemical receptors in our body enough for us to obtain the same arousal sensations without consumption," Chain explained.

Researchers exposed 871 participants from Western and Eastern cultures to coffee and tea-related cues across four separate experiments that would make them think of the substance without actually ingesting it.

In one study, participants had to come up with advertising slogans for coffee or tea. In another, they had to mock-up news stories about the health benefits of drinking coffee or tea. The arousal levels and heart rates were monitored by the researchers throughout the studies.

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