Study: Caffeine Makes You Hallucinate

Thursday, 09 June 2011 | by Pat's Picks

For a couple months we’ve been collecting Starbucks Alter Egos from our Pat’s Papers readers. What started off as a fun blog post has turned into a multiple-page archive. For months we’ve blamed the baristas, highlighting their humorous yet tenuous grasp of standard spellings. But then this morning, an article in the LA Times gave me pause. Could it be? Are our readers aurally hallucinating their “alter egos,” a reaction researchers say caffeine can cause?

A new study has found that five cups of coffee are enough to cause auditory hallucinations. Researchers tested their premise by telling their subject to listen for Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” playing in the background of a coffee shop. Though there was in fact no music playing, several of the study’s participants said they could hear the song. And it’s not the first to link excessive caffeine intake with olfactory hallucinations—for decades scientists have known that caffeine can cause people to hear and see things that aren’t there.

Let’s go back to those baristas. Maybe they’ve known something the general public has been blind to for years. While we line up to get our latte or mocha or drip coffee to make it through a boring afternoon at work, there our baristas are, high on their seventh shot of espresso and having a blast serving a iced coffee to Crazy instead of Tracy, a latte to Titty instead of Kitty and a mocha to Cock instead of Zach. Sounds like more fun than answering emails.

Read an abstract of the study, published in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences

(Image courtesy of r-z via Flickr)