A coffee can make you forgetful

BBC News

A cup of coffee each morning may wake you up, but a new study suggests caffeine might hinder your short-term recall of certain words.

Caffeine made it harder for people to find a word that they already knew - the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon.

Valerie Lesk, of the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, believes caffeine improves alertness by shutting down other brain pathways.

This makes it harder to recall words, she says in Behavioural Psychology.

Caffeine is known to excite the brain and increase alertness.

But Miss Lesk and her colleague Stephen Womble, from Trinity College, Dublin, found it can hamper or boost short-term memory, depending on what you are trying to remember.

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