You'll have to guess at the amounts needed based on your size/sex because your doctor will never write up a protocol on anything to do with stroke recovery. I do at least 8-12 cups of coffee a day, don't follow me, I'm not medically trained.
Caffeine causes widespread brain entropy (and that's a good thing)
By Christian Jarrett
Basic neuroscience teaches us how individual brain cells communicate
with each other, like neighbours chatting over the garden fence. This is
a vital part of brain function. Increasingly however neuroscientists
are zooming out and studying the information processing that happens
within and between neural networks across the entire brain, more akin to
the complex flow of digital information constantly pulsing around the
globe.
This has led them to realise the importance of what they call “brain
entropy” – intense complexity and irregular variability in brain
activity from one moment to the next, also marked by greater
long-distance correlations in neural activity. Greater entropy, up to a
point, is indicative of more information processing capacity, as opposed
to low entropy – characterised by orderliness and repetition – which is
seen when we are in a deep sleep or coma.
A new study in Scientific Reports
is the first to examine whether and how ingesting a psychostimulant –
in this case caffeine – affects brain entropy. The results show caffeine
causes a widespread increase in cerebral entropy. This dose of neural
anarchy is probably welcome, especially considered in light of another
new paper, in PLOS One, which finds greater brain entropy correlates with higher verbal IQ and reasoning ability.
For the caffeine study, Da Chang at Hangzhou Normal University in
China and other researchers scanned the brains of 60 participants – 30
men and women – at baseline, and also after they ingested a 200mg
caffeine pill (roughly approximate to two cups of coffee). It was a
“resting-state” scan meaning that the participants simply lay in the
scanner doing nothing. For both scans, Chang’s team analysed changing
neural activity levels from one moment to the next, and looked for
correlations in activity across and within brain regions to calculate
brain entropy. They also measured changes in cerebral blood flow across
the brain.
The scans showed that caffeine increased brain entropy across nearly
the entire cerebral cortex, but especially in “lateral prefrontal
cortex, the DMN [default mode network, involving in day-dreaming and
self-reflection], visual cortex, and motor network”, which the
researchers linked to caffeine’s known beneficial effects on “attention,
vigilance, and action/motion function.” There was little correlation
locally between increased entropy and cerebral blood flow (which was
reduced by caffeine), suggesting the effects of the caffeine were via
influences on neuronal function, rather than due to vascular changes.
“Increased resting brain entropy indicates increased resting brain
activity irregularity or complexity, suggesting an increase of
information processing capacity in the resting brain,” the researchers
said.
Meanwhile, a separate group led by Glenn Saxe at New York
University’s School of Medicine used the same methods as Chang’s team to
measure brain entropy in 900 healthy participants, who also completed
measures of their verbal intelligence and reasoning ability outside of
the scanner. The New York researchers defined brain entropy as “a
measure of the brain’s overall flexibility or readiness to encounter
unpredictable stimuli” and they found that it correlated with
intelligence.
Specifically, superior vocabulary performance was associated with
greater resting-state entropy in the left inferior frontal lobe, while
superior reasoning ability was associated with greater entropy in that
same region, but also in bilateral prefrontal areas.
Saxe and his colleagues said that “entropy in this context provides
an indicator of the brain’s general readiness to process unpredictable
stimuli from the environment” – a brain with greater entropy may in
effect be better able to model and predict the outcomes of a complex, chaotic world.
The researchers added, though, that they had not measured “the active
use of brain states during a particular task”. Indeed, follow up
research is now needed to see how brain entropy varies during
performance of specific mental challenges, and how caffeine and other
substances might affect entropy during such tasks.
In contrast to the entropy–intelligence association, participants’
age and years of education did not correlate with their IQ test scores.
“These results suggest that entropy is a reliable predictor of
intelligence, and provides unique information not captured by
developmental status and educational status alone,” the researchers
said.
The new findings add to past research measuring neural entropy that’s shown entropy is reduced in adults diagnosed with ADHD, for example, and in people addicted to cocaine. However, the story is not as simple as more entropy is good, less is bad. For instance, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia have greater neural entropy than healthy controls, perhaps indicative of “an underlying dysregulation of more complex functional networks”.
It will be interesting to see how the research on neural entropy
develops in the future. For now, it is enough to marvel that as you
enjoy your morning coffee, you are increasing the entropy throughout
your brain – the bitter tonic is not merely waking you up, but
apparently also boosting your brain’s useful anarchy, its complexity and
information processing capacity.
—Caffeine Caused a Widespread Increase of Resting Brain Entropy
—Brain entropy and human intelligence: A resting-state fMRI study
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest
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