A panacea: the magic of caffeine

When imams and his monks first gulped down their coffee in the temple, did they know what elixir they had swallowed? I don't know. Because the scientific community didn't give the juice a name until hundreds of years later. In 1820, the German chemist Runge extracted caffeine from it for the first time. Caffeine is an alkaloid, a xanthine alkaloid compound that exists in the form of needle-like crystals, shaped like white fluff and snowflakes of birds, with a slightly bitter and odorless taste.

Caffeine is not only hidden in the seeds of coffee trees, but also in every corner of nature, just wearing all kinds of masks, waiting for people to uncover. Perhaps every shrub on earth contains this substance, including in the cola nuts eaten by the Sultans and in the honey tree tea leaves of the indigenous Bushmen of South Africa. Indians living in the Amazon region can also obtain caffeine after roasting the seeds of Guarana. Ancient Brazilians boiled yerba mate, a leaf of a holly tree, to drink this brain-stimulating drink.

Miraculously, people almost everywhere on earth can find this odorless substance, although it is never directly exposed to people, and it is not greeted by people saying "I am here.". Initially, it must have been the deep desire of the body and soul that made mankind embark on a blind journey of searching for "miracle medicine", without any sensory or scientific support. The substance has existed in many forms, but it was not until it appeared in the form of coffee that it had a crucial impact on culture. The Sultan's cola fruit did not change the culture of the world, although its caffeine content was higher than coffee. But coffee, which grew up in Ethiopia and was discovered by the Arabs, did it.

Gustav von Bunge, a Swiss scholar of Russian descent and a professor in Basel, has explained that people crave caffeine because it contains nitrogen-rich xanthines that can penetrate every cell of the body in small amounts. Therefore, people crave caffeine, but the cells of the body are unconsciously thirsting for more nitrogen. However, whether or not caffeine is really "incidentally" ingested into the human body, it causes a violent reaction as soon as it enters the human body. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a wonderful "enchantment". It quickly relaxes all blood vessels and leaves all parts of the body open. The central nervous system, spinal cord, and brain are all occupied by caffeine, which is very sobering. It penetrates into the respiratory center, the medulla oblongata, bringing a comfortable feeling of gas exchange to the whole body; it is like a hero with a strong arm, reducing the burden on the heart muscle; it makes the exhaustion of the limbs disappear, making the skeletal muscle more powerful; it accelerates the peristalsis of the large intestine and reduces the burden on the kidneys. Once caffeine is ingested, all cells in the body have a feeling of renewal.

American biologist Holatio Wood has studied the effects of caffeine on blood circulation and muscles, and psychologist Hollingworth has studied the effect of caffeine on the curve of intellectual development. Their research conditions are very superior. Reliable data show that by 1912, Hollingworth had made nearly 76,000 measurements and experiments. Wood ultimately summed up the effects of caffeine on muscles as follows: "Caffeine is a stimulant injected into the reflex center of the spinal cord. It allows the muscular system to contract more vigorously without fatigue afterwards. After ingesting caffeine, people's overall work efficiency is improved. ”

He then added an important conclusion: "If caffeine-stimulated muscles are always more powerful (and don't double fatigue afterwards), then we can conclude that caffeine not only increases muscle contraction, but also makes the way muscles work more economically, that is, with the same amount of energy to do more work." ”

This economic law, which is indispensable in human work today, was later supplemented by a study. In 1925, scientists Aares and Fraud conducted a study on brains and energy. They found that after drinking coffee, the process of learning new knowledge became easier, but people's ability to repeat what they had learned was not improved. (Because the brain is stuffed with new images and words.) In addition, research has also shown that after drinking coffee, more intuitive elements begin to emerge in the minds of abstract thinkers, and people's thoughts become concise and clear, and language expressions become more detailed. For example, a person's description of a sport will contain more visual impressions. "There are more and more meaningful connections between human tissues, and there are fewer and fewer automatic connections between the unconscious, because coffee enhances the brain's ability to coordinate." But after drinking coffee, people's ability to repeat the knowledge already stored in memory does not rise, but declines..." The role of coffee on the brain cannot be clearly stated as follows: the unique, stimulating, and subversive effects of coffee have repeatedly placed themselves in conflict throughout their history.

Hollingworth, Wood and other scientists experimented with only a few tens of thousands of people in the 20th century, and the conclusions they came to were already staggering. By contrast, since the end of the Middle Ages, the number of coffee consumers who have spread from the Arabian coast to every corner of the globe has been innumerable. Coffee has changed the world! Its effect on muscles, the brain and the new vitality it brings to people has changed the face of the world!

Why is today's New York high-rise buildings and bustling with traffic, very different from Rome in 1300? There are undoubtedly many reasons behind this. One of the most important reasons is that since the advent of coffee, people's theoretical working hours are no longer 12 hours a day, but 24 hours.

Classical and medieval civilizations as a whole possessed only "narcotics" (physiologically speaking, alcoholic beverages had no other use than narcotic effects), but no drugs to relieve narcotics. When feeling tired and drowsy, people don't have any medication to keep the body awake.

We all know how important telescopes and microscopes are—without them, we wouldn't see the largest and smallest objects. And discovering that coffee was no less important than inventing a telescope or a microscope. Because coffee unconsciously enhances and changes the brain's ability. In the thousands of years before humans discovered coffee, when the human body was tired, it had to stop the work at hand. But the break at this time will change the nature of work - because when you wake up, you are no longer the same person you were before the break. Before coffee was discovered, no one (except geniuses with extraordinary willpower, who had every century) could perform "differential calculations" because it required workers to always maintain a high degree of precision in their thinking.

Amazingly, since the advent of coffee, a large number of ordinary people who are not geniuses have seemed to have genius-like minds. In the classical period, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and even all the liberal arts and sciences, especially medicine and its subsidiary sciences, were only understood, applied, and developed by a small number of people, because the dependence of human society on wine as a whole made most scholars lack "exploratory thinking" – the culture of the worship of Dionysus pushed them in another direction.

Analytical thinking, which has dominated our culture since modern times, as opposed to synthetic thinking, can be traced back to coffee, which makes thinking itself a generalized act. Today, countless people in all walks of life are engaged in "differential computing" that only archimedes, Helen and other geniuses in ancient times could do.

A cup of coffee is a miracle, a miracle carefully modulated with the best proportions, like a piano chord.