Kickstarting the day with no cup of coffee is unthinkable for a lot of. Do you suspect that the caffeine from the morning coffee is what keeps you going? Possibly not, as a recent study suggests the morning caffeine boost is likely to be all in your head.

Researchers from Portugal evaluated if the alertness related to morning coffee is from caffeine or from the experience of drinking it. They then found that drinking coffee could have more of a placebo effect.

“There’s a standard expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning. Once you get to grasp higher the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the aspects which will modulate it and even the potential advantages of that mechanism,” Nuno Sousa, corresponding creator of the study from the University of Minho in Portugal, said in a news release.

Through the study, the participants, who often drank no less than one cup of coffee per day, were evaluated after they kept away from eating or drinking any caffeinated beverages for no less than three hours. The research team took two functional MRI scans of the participants–one before the study and the opposite half-hour after taking caffeine or drinking a standardized cup of coffee.

The researchers expected that MRI scans from the coffee drinkers would show a rise in brain activity in certain regions. They analyzed the prefrontal cortex-the brain region related to executive memory and the default mode network that was related to self-reflection and introspection.

While evaluating the MRI scans, researchers found that participants who drank coffee or those that had caffeine had reduced connectivity within the default mode network, which helped them in transitioning from a state of rest to a state of task-oriented work.

The participants who drank coffee showed increased connectivity in the upper visual network and the appropriate executive control network of the brain related to working memory, cognitive control, and goal-directed behavior. Nevertheless, when participants consumed only caffeine, the researchers didn’t observe this heightened connectivity.

Researchers imagine the advantage of coffee over caffeine often is the distinctive aroma, taste, or psychological expectations tied to the drink.

“Making an allowance for that among the effects that we found were reproduced by caffeine, we could expect other caffeinated drinks to share among the effects. Nevertheless, others were specific for coffee drinking, driven by aspects comparable to the actual smell and taste of the drink, or the psychological expectation related to consuming that drink,” the primary creator of the study, Maria Picó-Pérez of Jaume I University said.

The study has certain limitations, because it has not tested if the advantages coffee drinkers claim may very well be as a result of the relief of withdrawal symptoms. The observed changes in brain connectivity were found during a resting-state sequence.

Published by Medicaldaily.com