TO GET the most out of caffeine, you鈥檝e got to believe in the effect it鈥檚
having on you. 鈥淚t seems that what you think may be as important as what you
drink,鈥� Andrew Scholey, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Northumbria,
told a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Winchester last week.
Scholey and his colleagues told a group of coffee drinkers they were either
going to be given caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. But only half of each
group got the drink they expected. The others were deliberately given the wrong
type of coffee.
People who drank caffeine were faster and more accurate on a computerised
test鈥攂ut only if they believed they鈥檇 got caffeine. People who drank
normal coffee but thought it was decaffeinated performed less well in the tests,
while those who thought they鈥檇 had caffeine but had been given decaffeinated
coffee speeded up in the tests. However, they made many more errors.
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