When answering this sort of question, the answers are the exact words you hear in the recording. So if the speaker says “caffeinated”, don’t write “caffeine” or “coffee” … you must write “caffeinated”.
This lesson is about coffee and the original is from npr: here. Full transcript here.
Listen to the recording and write no more than TWO words for each answer to questions 1 to 5
- Caffeine is described as being what kind of drug?
- Caffeine is different from other drugs in what kind of way?
- Drinking coffee after reading a what might help you in an exam 24 hours later?
- Which word is used to indicate that the scientist is the best in the field of caffeine?
- The mental disorder associated with quitting coffee is called what?
- psychoactive
- subtle
- textbook chapter
- preeminent
- caffeine withdrawal
Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Cravings (And Why You Don’t Have To Quit)
GROSS: But, you know, we think of caffeine as a stimulant that helps you stay awake or wake up. Most people don’t think of it as a psychoactive drug, a drug that affects consciousness or mood or behavior. So in what sense is caffeine a psychoactive drug?
POLLAN: Well, it encourages a certain kind of consciousness. It makes us more focused. We can see – you know, I mean, if you think about consciousness as having different degrees of narrowness or focus versus taking in information from, you know, the whole field, coffee and tea help us focus, concentrate. And they’re clear. They’re very transparent. I think one of the reasons we don’t think of being caffeinated as an altered state of consciousness unless we use so much that we’re jittery is that it’s weirdly transparent, whereas, you know, other drugs you use and alcohol, they have a kind of physiological noise to them that – and you know you’re on them.
But caffeine is a little different. It’s very subtle that way. But yeah. It helps us stay awake, but it does a lot of other things, too. And this has been proven. I mean, there are studies that show that people’s both mental performance and athletic performance are improved by coffee. And your memory – if you have a cup of coffee after you’ve learned something or read a textbook chapter, you are more likely to test better on it the next day.
GROSS: Wow. So you tried to learn about the effects of caffeine by giving it up and seeing what impact it had to basically go into caffeine withdrawal. Why did you decide to give it up? Who convinced you?
POLLAN: Well, there was a researcher named Roland Griffiths, who I actually met doing my research on psychedelics. He’s the preeminent psychedelic researcher at Johns Hopkins, but he’s also, as it turns out, the preeminent caffeine researcher. That was the last phase of his career. And I started interviewing him, and he said, look; you’re never going to understand your relationship to this drug unless you get off it and see what it’s really about. And I think this is true for any kind of habit. Until you try to break it, you really don’t understand its hold on you. So it was kind of a challenge.
You know, if you really want to write this piece and understand caffeine in your life, you got to get off it. And I decided to get off it the hardest way possible, which was cold turkey. You know, you can taper off of caffeine, and it’s not that hard. Just, you know, go to, you know, half caf, and then quarter caf and decaf, which has a little bit of caffeine in it. But I wanted to see what withdrawal would be like. And in fact, Roland Griffiths is responsible for getting caffeine withdrawal as a mental disorder into the “Diagnostic And Statistical Manual” No. 5. And so I did it. I put it off as long as I could. I dreaded it. I love my coffee. It’s indispensable to my morning ritual and to my ability to write and read and think. But I did it for the piece. I did it for the readers – or the listeners, in this case. And…
GROSS: So how were you transformed when you went off caffeine cold turkey?
POLLAN: It was really hard. The first couple days were – I just couldn’t focus. I was irritable. I lost confidence. The whole book seemed like a really stupid idea. And loss of confidence is actually listed as one of the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. But the thing that really struck me was that, I – you know, I’ve never had ADD. I can focus pretty well. I felt like, oh, this is what ADD is like. I can’t keep stuff out of the peripheries, you know? The peripheral information and sense data keeps rushing in and getting in the way of staying on a – I felt like I was a horse that had taken its blinders off, and suddenly, I could see in too many degrees of circumference.
And so that was a real problem for working. I really had trouble sitting and writing and staying still. And, you know, after a few days, this began to lift. I felt as though there were a – and I think anyone who, you know, delays having their morning cup of coffee knows what I’m talking about. There was a kind of a sense of a veil or fog that had descended between me and reality. I was just kind of muzzy-headed. And that gradually lifted.
But I have to say, even weeks later, I felt like there was a little mental hitch between me and reality. I felt as if, you know, this wasn’t my natural language (laughter). I was speaking in another language, which never goes that well or that smoothly, and that sense of transparency was lost. I got over it eventually, and I wrote a big chunk of the piece without the influence of caffeine. But it was an interesting three months.
And, you know, I recommend it, actually. I think it’s a really interesting exercise so you understand that you are, indeed, addicted. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You know, I think the word addiction has a lot of moral baggage attached to it. But as Roland Griffith told me, you know, if you have a steady supply of something, you can afford it, and it’s not interfering with your life, there’s nothing wrong with being addicted.
GROSS: Was your sleep changed when you gave up caffeine?
POLLAN: Oh, yeah. I forgot to talk about that.
GROSS: (Laughter). POLLAN: Yes.
POLLAN: It was amazing. I was sleeping like a teenager again. I would pop off and just sleep through the night, which I don’t do that often. And I had some great sleeps. And I guess that was the big compensating benefit of giving up caffeine. And of course, one of the things we know about caffeine – everybody knows that it does mess with your sleep, in ways I didn’t fully understand till I started exploring that. But sleep – you know, caffeine is the enemy of good sleep.
GROSS: Ways you didn’t fully understand – like what?
POLLAN: Well, you know, I always figured, if I can have a – oh, let’s say I decide to, you know, go crazy and have an espresso after dinner. And oh, gee, I can fall asleep. I slept that night, so maybe it’s not a problem for me. Well, it’s a problem in ways we don’t perceive because caffeine undermines the quality – not necessarily the quantity, but the quality of our sleep, and specifically one very particular kind of sleep, which I’d never heard of before, called slow wave or deep sleep. This isn’t REM sleep, where you’re having dreams, or light sleep. This is a really deep place you go for not that long a part of the night, but it’s really important to your mental and physical health. It’s where these slow waves start radiating from the front of your brain into the back. And they kind of harmonize all the neurons, get them on the same page. And it’s where you kind of take memories from short-term working memory and put them in their proper place. It’s like cleaning up the desktop on your computer by the – at the end of the day.
And Matt Walker, you know, the psychologist who wrote “Why We Sleep,” you know, is – thinks that this is very important to our health, to have sufficient amounts of deep sleep. And as we get older, we have less of it naturally. And coffee or tea cuts into that, even if you stop drinking it, say, at noon because caffeine has a very long half-life and quarter-life. So, for example, the caffeine you ingest at noon, a quarter of it is still circulating in your bloodstream at midnight. So it’s still around. And this is the subtle and perhaps insidious effect it’s having on you.
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