Coffee and Brain Connectivity

Habitual coffee drinking is reflected in the functional connectivity between different brain networks

Gunnar De Winter
Predict

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(Pixabay, geralt)

Caffeine beans

In over 70 countries, a bean is cultivated that, when roasted and ground, gives us a brew that helps many of us face the morning and kickstart our day. Coffee.

It’s not a modern thing either. The first solid evidence of coffee drinking comes from Yemenite Sufi shrines in the fifteenth century. They hauled the beans from the Ethiopian highlands through Somalia until they reached their cups.

The dark brew spread quickly and in 2019 its export was good for a solid $30 billion. Leading exporters are Brazil, Colombia, and Switzerland. The biggest coffee slurpers live in Finland, Norway, and Iceland. Nothing better than a cup of coffee to sniff, drink, and curl your hands around on a cold, gloomy morning.

The majority of our coffee comes from two species: Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta. There are many wild species of coffee, but they are less tasty — except for a newly rediscovered species called Coffea stenophylla, which is resilient to the climate shifts that affect the two commercial coffee species.

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