Drinking coffee makes you more open-minded
The New Scientist Breaking News provides this one: Drinking coffee makes you more open-minded:
The coffee you drink as a pick-me-up in the morning could also make you more open to persuasion, researchers say. Evidence from a new study suggests that this happens because caffeine revs up the brain, not because it generally boosts mood.
[found via Steve Barth]
One reading of the news brief suggests caffeine is a good thing in making people more open-minded. Another reading suggests that caffeine weakens people's defenses to opinion-changing arguments. It's not completely clear from the blurb - maybe that's the point. Checking Dr Pearl Martin's c.v, it appears she is very much interested in psychological effects of various chemicals.
2 Comment(s)
Saw the article also, and funny, the first thing that I thought of as I read it was how appropriate this would be to a KM'ish discussion.
I mean, one thing that we've known thanks to Worldcafe, Conversationcafe, and even Gurteen's KM Cafe who bring it up on their sites is that the British Parliament banned coffeehouses in the 1700's as hotbeds of sedition (too much thinking and conversation, clearly).
So it seems that the researchers are just now catching up to what the British Parliment knew over 300 years ago, and what many KM'ers have known for sometime....coffee gatherings seem to spark open-minded conversation. Lost knowledge....found again.
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Revs me up to resist arguments! Puts the fight in me!