I'm hearing voices of Juan Valdez in my head!

William Atkins
Thursday, 09 June 2011 23:08

Science - Health

Australian research shows heavy coffee drinkers are three times more likely to hallucinate or hear voices than other people. Now, that's a coffee buzz! Now, maybe it's not Juan, but Bing Crosby instead?

Researchers at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) studied 92 people with different amount of intakes of coffee each day, along with different stress levels.

Each subject was given a hearing test that first included hearing American crooner Bing Crosby singing 'White Christmas.' [Listen for yourself at YouTube's "White Christmas/Bing Crosby".]

Then, the second part of the hearing test included only static (definitely not as much holiday spirit!).

However, during this part of the test they were asked if they heard Bing Crosby sing one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time 'White Christmas.'

They found that people who were highly stressed out and drank a lot of coffee each day were three times more likely to hear imaginary songs, like Bing singing White Christmas than were people not stressed out and who drank no or low amounts of coffee each day.

For the first part of the test, five cups of coffee each day were classified as heavy coffee drinking. The second part used caffeine tablets that equalled 400 milliliters of brewed coffee.

The lead researcher in the study was Dr. Simon Crowe, from the School of Psychological Science at La Trobe.

He stated, "If you are stressed and have a high level of caffeine, you are more likely to notice things that aren't there, see things that aren't there.' [Fox News (June 8, 2011): 'Large Amounts of Coffee Cause Hallucinations, Study Finds']

If you are hearing Bing Crosby tell you to go to Page two, then you'd better do it. Page 2 concludes.