Bad Science: The things you can perk up with a cup of coffee
'Danger from just seven cups of coffee a day," said the Daily Express on Wednesday. "Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people, say sleep experts. The equivalent of just seven cups of instant coffee a day is enough to trigger the weird responses." The story appeared in almost every national newspaper. This was weak observational data. That's just the start of our story, but you should know exactly what the researchers did. They sent an email inviting students to fill out an online survey, and 219 agreed. The survey is still online (in all its time-consuming glory, I just clicked answers randomly to see the next question). It asks about caffeine intake in vast detail, and then uses one scale to measure how prone you are to feeling persecuted, and uses another, the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS), 16 questions designed to measure "predisposition to hallucination-like experiences"....
Read the whole article on The Guardian - Science
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