Very Interesting...

[tcepsa]

Inspired by a friend, I decided to try an experiment today. At lunch, I drank three glasses of Mountain Dew. It's been a little over two hours, and so far I haven't been feeling jittery or hyper... if anything, I've been concentrating better (I reviewed a 7-ish page document without checking my e-mail or LJ once--highly unusual ;)

I realize that that's hardly a large enough data set for it to be statistically significant, but I'm very tempted to do further research into the results of caffeine on me.

Comments

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

the paradoxical reaction of folks with ADD/HD to stimulants.

I don't think the reaction is paradoxical, I think "stimulant" is used too loosely. The amphetamines, the endogenous trace amines and various related chemicals have different activity profiles against the TA family receptors. Most seem to increase both focus and vigilance to some extent, but the balance between those effects varies widely from substance to substance and somewhat from person to person. The "stimulants" marketed for the treatment of ADD tend to be those that lean more towards increasing focus. The dose-response curves for the 2 effects aren't the same, leading to the common observations that a small amount of many "stimulants" will cause sedation, and too large a dose of most stimulant ADD meds reverses their usual effects.