Kyung-An Han

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm excited to talk to you about our recent study on caffeine's effect on behavior.

Well, what do you mean by good?

I think good is really subjective.

I mean, if your goal is to stay awake to study finals, obviously it's a good idea to drink coffee whenever you need it.

But you just need to watch out not to drive afterwards because you don't want to drive through yellow lights.

Oh, I suppose that's what- That would be impulsivity.

Well, actually, caffeine has been used by people, athletes, to enhance their physical performance as well.

So when caffeine acts on muscle, it increases production of ATP.

So it is known as actually performance enhancer.

Obviously, it's not really like other illegal kind of enhancer, but nonetheless, it has been helpful to some individuals.

And obviously, it is also a cognitive enhancer as well, too, meaning it tends to increase your attention to the task.

More importantly, it makes you be awake.

So whenever you need to study last minute for final exam, or whether you need to work at night for night shift workers, this will help people to be awake.

In that sense, it's really helpful.

But like everything, every chemical that we intake, too much is always detrimental.

But what we demonstrate is that also time of day is also critical as well too.

In our study,

Drinking coffee during the daytime could be bad because it will make you not sleeping well because it reduces sleep time as well as quality of sleep, but nonetheless people sleep.

But one drink coffee at night, I don't know, I do have a really good experience with it too.