A new article published by the Research Digest website on April 10 gives coffee lovers a new reason to drink coffee (and a very good one):
Caffeine increases “brain entropy.” And the consequence of increased brain entropy, put simply, is a higher IQ!
Drinking coffee may very well make you smarter—at least for a short while.
What is brain entropy? The concept of “entropy” should be familiar to most people: it refers to the degree of disorder in a system. Brain entropy is an indicator neuroscientists use to measure the disorder of information in the brain. It is mainly characterized by the degree of irregular change in brain activity from one moment to the next, as well as by long-distance correlations in neural activity between different brain regions.
We can think of the brain as a network in which a vast flow of information is constantly surging. The faster information changes, and the more long-distance communication there is, the higher the brain entropy. Greater entropy means greater information-processing capacity. If the rate of information change slows down and long-distance communication disappears, brain entropy falls (the brain is in a low-entropy state during deep sleep or coma).
So how does caffeine change brain entropy?
In a newly published study, researchers from Hangzhou Normal University gave participants 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet form (roughly equivalent to two cups of coffee). Half an hour later, they had the participants lie flat in an MRI scanner for a scan. The participants simply lay there and did nothing—which, in the terminology of neuroscience, is called the “resting state.”
The scans showed that caffeine increased resting-state brain entropy across nearly the entire cerebral cortex. The increase was especially pronounced in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in various higher-order mental activities such as attention and memory; the default mode network, which is involved in daydreaming and self-reflection; the visual cortex; and the motor network. This not only echoes earlier findings that caffeine can improve attention, alertness, and motor function, but also suggests that consuming caffeine may enhance the brain’s information-processing capacity at rest.
In another study published at almost the same time, researchers at New York University School of Medicine measured the brain entropy of more than 900 participants and compared their brain entropy values with the results of tests of verbal intelligence and reasoning ability (two key dimensions of intelligence). They found a positive correlation between brain entropy and intelligence. The higher the brain entropy, the smarter the person.
More specifically, greater resting-state entropy in the left inferior frontal lobe was associated with better vocabulary-learning performance, while greater resting-state entropy in the bilateral prefrontal cortex was associated with stronger reasoning ability. The researchers believe that a high-entropy brain may be better able to simulate and predict how a complex, chaotic world will operate.
Putting the results of these two studies together, we can make a reasonable guess: drinking coffee may very well produce a short-term boost in verbal intelligence and reasoning ability. (I say “short-term” because caffeine’s average metabolic half-life in the bloodstream is 5.7 hours. As the concentration of caffeine in the blood falls, brain entropy gradually returns to its normal level.)
The smart drug so many people dream of may have been right beside us all along.
p.s.:
Research Digest’s report: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/04/10/caffeine-causes-widespread-brain-entropy-and-thats-a-good-thing/
The two studies mentioned in the article:
Chang, D., Song, D., Zhang, J., Shang, Y., Ge, Q., & Wang, Z. (2018). Caffeine Caused a Widespread Increase of Resting Brain Entropy. Scientific reports, 8(1), 2700.
Saxe, G. N., Calderone, D., & Morales, L. J. (2018). Brain entropy and human intelligence: A resting-state fMRI study. PloS one, 13(2), e0191582.
p.p.s.:
The two studies mentioned above only scanned brain entropy in the resting state—in other words, what the brain looks like when it is “idling.” Scientists still do not understand how brain entropy changes when the brain is carrying out various specific tasks.
Note
- These articles in the “New Insights in Psychology” series were short popular-science pieces and informal essays written at the time to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: New Insights in Psychology. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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