The Origin of Cognition in the Breakdown of the Caffeinated Mind

Ah, coffee. The sine qua non of modernity. And not merely the opium of the masses either. Alfréd Rényi once said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Does coffee make me think better, or does it just make me think I'm thinking better? It feels like the former. Although, I hear a voice in my head asking, "And how would it feel if it was the latter, pray tell?"

This of course parallels Wittgenstein questioning, when his friend said it looks as if the Sun is going around the Earth, what it would look like if it was actually the other way round instead. Very incisive from Wittgenstein, although he missed the crux of the phenomenology and epistemology here - it doesn't feel as if the Earth is moving because we are moving along with it, and it is parsimonious to presume that the Sun is moving rather than that the Earth is rotating and that we are not feeling it. After all, the concept of inertia is not part of the manifest image, the common-sensical way that things appear, although this is possibly being circular about things. Which also explains the difference between Aristotelian and Newtonian laws of motion. It is a reasonable approximation in this case to think of humans as Occam-compatible Bayesians. Of course, we should not ignore the social dimension of knowledge - if one heard everyone else say day after day that we were rotating away from the Sun, then one would soon question one's assumptions and sanity.

So back to the question about coffee and cognition. It does seem that my thinking is more prolific and of a higher standard under the influence of caffeine, and the records stand up to scrutiny when the effects have worn off. However, given the lack of blinding and randomisation, a rigorous statistical analysis cannot be conducted. And there are still a lot of confounding factors to be ruled out.

What exactly does caffeine do to the organ of cognition? It is soluble in both water and lipid, allowing it to cross the blood-brain barrier easily. Once inside, it acts as a competitive inhibitor of adenosine due to structural similarities, binding nonselectively to adenosine receptors in the brain. A₁ and A_2A receptors may inhibit cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain, causing sleep. A_2A receptors are concentrated in the basal ganglia, which are involved in behaviour selection. The downstream effects of caffeine are increased levels of acetylcholine, glutamate, dopamine, and serotonin. At high doses there is also an increase in noradrenaline and a decrease in GABA.

The effect of caffeine on how my cognition appears to me can take place anywhere along the causal chain. I might just be more likely to drink coffee on days when I am more active cognitively. It might increase arousal or decrease the activation energy for thought so I am more likely to think in the first place. It might put me in the mood to think because I associate drinking coffee with thinking. It might increase the divergence of cognitive search (via the effect of dopamine acting on D₂ receptors in the prefrontal cortex), making my thoughts more wide-ranging and creative. It might increase my focus so I continue thinking for longer. It might make me associate the products of coffee-fueled cognition with positive affect and hence evaluate them differently even after the caffeine has worn off. And so on and so forth.

Of course, much research has been done on the effects of caffeine on the brain and cognition, although the sample populations may have very different cognitive needs and practices from me. More research may be needed on populations which don't drink coffee normally. Nonetheless, the point of this exercise is not to attain a definitive answer, but to conduct an analysis. All those effects I have identified above are probably active, in various proportions.

Herodotus attributed a curious heuristic to the Persians - they would either debate a problem while sober and then decide while drunk, or debate while drunk and decide sober. Perhaps a Persian coffee heuristic would serve us well - to always think through a problem both with and without caffeine. After all, if the mind works differently with caffeine and without, then it is almost as if we are working on a problem with two different minds, which is often synergistic rather than merely additive. Of course, desensitisation and other long-term effects of caffeine would compromise our ability to follow this heuristic, so careful dosing and formulation of coffee-and-thought regimens are necessary. Then we can adapt Einstein in saying, my coffee and I are smarter than I.