Dr. Chris Alford focused upon caffeine, beginning with the question 'is it a cure or is it a curse of modern living?' A group session on attempting to rate the amount of caffeine in certain food and drinks revealed that we don't seem to know much, which is bizarre when over 6 billion caffeine drinks are consumed worldwide everyday! In fact, caffeine is second only to oil in monetary value. Alford talked about how certain people may be predisposed to like coffee, whereas others may have a genetic polymorphism that causes those caffeine jitters. Both sides of the cure or curse argument were presented with a range of studies looking at sleep deprivation, caffeine withdrawal, sports performance, effect on health and the power of beliefs.
The good news is that the fatal dosage of coffee would be 30g of pure instant coffee (prior to boiling water), which is equal to about 2 and a half jars. A pretty difficult task to achieve! So we are all pretty safe using caffeine in a clever way and in moderation.
I would like to give a special mention to the compère for the evening (who's name I have forgotten sorry!). A young physicist PhD student who gelled the evening together with a vibrant energy and well-timed jest. He served up the audience a 'truth gateau', about how being a physicist is not as glamorous as it sounds. Cue a hilarious tale about being sung happy birthday by a room full of physicists. This was said to have made 30 seconds feel like 30 minutes, breaking the rules of time itself! He also hosted a delightful pub quiz all about the brain (did you know a leech has 32 brains?!).
The second speaker was Dr. Chris Bailey who took a neurological slant on how we may erase unwanted memories. This sounds like a page right out of a sci-fi novel, but Bailey explained the ins and outs of how we create a long-term memory through synaptic plasticity, and how interfering with this process may cause associations to fade away. The science behind this was well explained using a series of vignettes including the Pavlov's dogs experiment, Bailey's own childhood hatred of lavender and an example of application to post-traumatic stress disorder. Bailey's work focusing on looking for pharmaceuticals that target certain memory traces only, searching for a drug that may erase pleasurable associations with addictive stimuli. Propranolol has been identified as working on fear memories alone, and shows promise in erasing unwanted memories to do with phobias and, as mentioned previously, PTSD. However, work in addiction is still ongoing.
(Please note, this blog was fuelled by coffee! In my view, caffeine is a cure.)
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