It’s 7:00 A.M., bright and early, and you have to be at work. You are exhausted and worn out. Last night you were out partying hard and you are not ready for the long day ahead of you. Perhaps a hot cup of coffee or an iced latte will carry you through, really anything with caffeine is befitting. It is common to find a person drinking a caffeinated beverage after a long night for the benefits that they assume they’ll acquire just from drinking it. It is common knowledge that coffee and drinks of that type can improve your attention span and wake you up. They are believed to give the drinker the energy that they did not have prior to drinking it. There are a lot of popular energy drinks or supplements to put in your drinks. A lot of people put extra expresso in their coffee. Expresso is more concentrated and is more caffeinated. It is popular in teens when they want to stay up and study, hard workers with long shifts, and others who had a long night and an early morning. However, is it worth drinking if there will not be improved behaviors? While under the influence of caffeine, will the motor skills still be as smooth as they were before? Aren’t there more efficient ways of giving yourself that energy boost without the bad effects? Does caffeine even have an effect on motor skills? To what extent are the motor skills affected by the ingestion of caffeine? The focus of the paper will be to explore those questions. To help answer the questions, an intense research on caffeine, motor skills, and the brain are needed. An experiment will be performed to determine the real extent. Caffeine is a group of diuretic agents called methyl xanthine which relaxes smooth muscles and acts on the nervous system. It is known to affect the central and peripheral mechanisms of the brain. Smooth muscles help control involuntary actions. They are mainly in the digestive tract. The nervous system is the system of nerves and it is how the brain communicates to other parts of the body. Caffeine has also been known to improve learning and memory which has a great deal to do with the brain. It is rumored that if you are studying or trying to learn new information while under the influence of caffeine, you will retain it easier and faster. The process of motor timing and skills are related to the temporal processes and the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is an area in the brain. This means that caffeine can affect the brain and indirectly one’s motor skills. The brain also works to make predictions that will help to coordinate perception and coordination, which is the synchronization of the sensorimotor. Studies have shown that most motor skills are not always conscious because some actions occur involuntarily, like those actions that are controlled by smooth muscles. This can be used to proves that caffeine is a major factor in motor skills because they are not always controlled, sometimes they are like instinct. It can also be argued that motor skills can be trained, unlike instincts. It really depends on the skill that is being practiced. The overall goal of the experiment is to prove that caffeine does have an effect on the motor skills and that it is not healthy.
Caffeine is one of many methyl xanthines that work to improve alertness. It is most active from 15 to 120 minutes after it is ingested, so for about 2 hours after you ingest the caffeine, the effects will be the most effective. Caffeine’s widespread use is due to its safety; safety meaning that it is not a drug or legally addictive like narcotics or alcohol. Caffeine works to alert certain receptors that are similar to dopamine. Dopamine is released during moments of enjoyment and happiness and is used to represent reward. When your brain releases dopamine, it encourages the brain to do that action more often. You are often releasing dopamine when you eat chocolate. Dopamine is associated with a lot of other things like good music and good smells. So, when drinking caffeine, with the dopamine-related receptors alerted, it is encouraging the body to have more. Other effects caffeine has on the body is that it can cause shakes and tremors. Many of these benefits are apparent after one single dose or only 200 mg. Mostly small cups at fast-food restaurants average about 16 ounces. The caffeine does not account for all 16 of the ounces neither is it consistent. The amount of caffeine varies greatly in each drink depending on many different factors. The amount of caffeine in coffee commonly ranges from 60-700 mg depending on the size of the serving, the type of beans used to make the coffee, and the method used to make the drink. It has been studied that doses of over 500 mg can impair the performance of the drinker, meaning that some coffee beverages that are commonly bought by people can be more than enough to impair motor skills. This means many people are overdosing on caffeine and becoming reliant on these overdoses. Many people are not aware of the actual caffeine doses and so they drink too much without knowing or monitoring the amount that they drank. Many people even drink larger sizes, often times several of them a day. Also, the caffeine content of each drink is not stated for people to read or see, so there may initially be too much caffeine in a drink regardless of the size. Similar to the way people drink alcohol ignoring the effects, and become more immune to the effects of the alcohol intoxication, the same goes for people and caffeine. With alcoholics, they begin to drink larger and larger amounts of alcohol in shorter amounts of times. Even though caffeine is not commonly associated or compared to alcohol habits, there are many similarities in the way they are abused.
Motor skills have been linked to areas in the brain called the Basal Ganglia, which is also thought to be responsible for certain learning processes. A lot of motor skills are slowly learned during childhood through activities and toys like blocks and scissors. In many kindergarten classes you will find the students learning to trace the heart through the paper with scissors. That activity is helping to develop important motor skills. The basal ganglia is active during other sensorimotor and cognitive processes in the brain. Sensorimotor processes involve both the sensory and the motor skill pathways meaning using both the senses and the muscles, like using the eyes to cut a shape in a piece of paper. Cognitive processes are acquiring knowledge through the senses and other experiences. Senses associated with motor skills are vision and physiology, or the sense of touch. This shows how it is important to have your senses in tact. Under the influence of alcohol, it is very hard to see and the sense of balance is thrown off. There is rumored to be another sense that helps to know where you are. It is called proprioception and it is when you can tell where your body is in space. However, caffeine does not have the same intoxicating effects as alcohol. But it does draw upon these senses. Motor skills are also associated with coordination. There are so similar that they are often used interchangeably. Coordination is associated with the cerebellum, which is a spot in the back of the brain. The cerebellum and the basal ganglia are closely related and it is also thought that the cerebellum modifies motor control as well. Even though terms like coordination, motor control, and motor skills are all very similar, they have set differences. The location of the brain that controls them is the main difference. Motor skills are very dependent on the brain rather than on muscles. They are very reliant on memory and many motor skills are actions that were repeated a lot until they were memorized. The effects of caffeine on the brain and the memory will be very important to the motor skills. To determine the full effects and get a sound and precise answer, I am going to perform an experiment.
The goals or aims of this experiment are to essentially examine what caffeine does to the area of the brain that controls motor skills. The brain is complex, with many areas and jobs. The brain’s full capacity is still unknown. The brain could be capable of so much more that we are not aware of. Caffeine after ingestion has to flow through the bloodstream and blood has to flow around the brain. The caffeine may have an effect on the way certain parts of the brain function. Whether it is to improve certain traits like vigilance or alertness, or to damage certain traits like accuracy or speed, caffeine is a chemical that affects the body. Since the brain controls essentially all actions, if the brain is affected by the caffeine, then the results of my experiment will be affected by the caffeine that was ingested. Caffeine has been reported to affect attention spans, alertness, vigilance and skills relating to such. However, motor skills require a sense of alertness and vigilance. So, caffeine may have a direct effect on the motor skills. Motor skills are reliant on vision and reflexes, both very rooted and reliant on the brain. Caffeine will speed up one’s reaction times but make the action more rigid. Caffeine often makes people fidgety and makes them crash. When energy drinks with too much caffeine are relied on and people are drinking too much of them, some people will drink them routinely to avoid the crashes and fidgets. Even though they are not legally addictive, people become dependent on them. This will examine if having that dependency is detrimental to motor skills in any way. This is important because of the widespread use of caffeine. Nearly everyone drinks lots of caffeinated beverages. People have even invested in drinks like sodas claiming to be, “caffeine free”. Does this point to the realization of the harmful effects that caffeine has? Is this because of the sudden awareness that the same effects can be reached by other means? Motor skills are used all the time and life can depend on them. Motor skills are very complex and tied to many other things and areas in the brain, it is very sensitive and so the experiment should be very precise and careful and follow very strict guidelines.
The scientific method is a common and sound way of testing an idea. It involves many steps whose goal is to get a clear answer with as few errors as possible. The first step is to make an observation. People are curious and there are a lot of unknown things that can be researched. The observation that is guiding this research is based on the caffeine consumption of many Americans and the belief that caffeine will boost your energy and skills. Energy boosting drinks have become so popular. Even after all the incidents involving an overdose of the drinks, people still stay reliant on them and they still sell like crazy. Another observation is that some people get caffeine crashes or get the jitters from large amounts of caffeine. The problem that was identified after this observation is that jitters affect motor skills and motor skills are very important. How accurate can you be when you are jittering out of control constantly? The next step is to propose a hypothesis that will be a prediction for the experiment. The hypothesis for this experiment is that caffeine consumption will lead to faster reaction times but more rigid responses. Next, an experiment must be designed and tested. The experiment includes controlled, independent, and dependent variables. The dependent variable is a result of the independent variable because the experiment is testing the independent variable and it changes throughout the experiment. The dependent variable in this experiment will be the accuracy of the motor skills. The accuracy will be measured through a test, which is essentially the whole experiment. The independent variable will be the amount of caffeine consumed. The controlled variables are constant throughout the whole experiment and are there to get a ground reading. The controlled variable will be a healthy person who is not very dependent on caffeine. The next step is analyzing the data from the experiment. The data is most commonly put into graphs, tables, or charts. The best representation for the data from this type of experiment will be a graph. The next step is to assess the hypothesis in terms of the results and determine if the results proved the hypothesis wrong. It is often times hard to prove a hypothesis to be right, but the results can show what is wrong with the hypothesis. The next step is to revise or accept the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is accepted, more conclusions can be drawn up and proposed. If it is rejected, the hypothesis can be revised and include some of the results of the experiment to make it clearer.
Once the experiment is performed, the data is recorded, processed, and presented. Several types of data including qualitative and quantitative types of data should both be recorded. For this experiment, that will mean the accuracy of the motor skills using words like rigid or smooth, and also the speed of the motor skills using seconds as the units. Next, the data must be processed and analyzed. The test should have been appropriate for the question and if the results are do not fit any of the research, a new experiment should be performed. To determine if the test performed in this experiment is appropriate for the question being asked is to see how far off the results are from the hypothesis. The hypothesis should generally mirror the results if the research is thorough. If the test does not fit and the results are not yielding the right information, a new experiment will be tried and where the results were lacking before, will be changed to get better results. The anomalous data should be considered. Anomalous data is any results that stray from the normal line of data, essentially the outliers. That data should be analyzed and the cause of its abnormality should be investigated. For this experiment, possible causes for anomalous data could be that one of the people who were tested on were either too dependent on caffeine for it to have an effect, or so independent on caffeine that it will have a major effect, or the effects being swayed by the sizes of the subjects. Larger subjects will probably need more caffeine likewise, smaller subjects would need less caffeine. Ways to avoid this phenomenon are to choose the subjects carefully and monitor their caffeine consumption over the span of the experiment. Other ways to avoid it are to rather give a very healthy, proportionate amount of caffeine to each subject.
After the experiment and analysis are done, it is time to conclude the essay. It is important to discuss any errors from the experiment. A few possible errors that could be made in this experiment could be related to the research and that it misguided or led to wrong conclusions. An example would be choosing the wrong dosage of caffeine or the testing procedure was performed incorrectly. Errors are very important because it helps to narrow down the experiment similar to eliminating the wrong answers in a multiple choice question leaving answers that are closer to the right answer. Next is the discussion of the experiment as a whole with many references to the data and other scientific knowledge. This is very important because it will tie everything together. To reference to data would mean that you point out a result, compare it to the hypothesis, and then back up the results with science. Once that is complete and lots of scientific evidence is provided, it is time to answer the research question. The hypothesis and its validity and truth is addressed. To address the hypothesis, ask if the hypothesis was indeed correct and how far off the prediction was. Next, evaluate what could have made the hypothesis closer to the truth. This is essentially another look at the errors in the experiment. Next, the essay is concluded and a brief summary of the data is stated. An example of a conclusion for this essay would state what effect the caffeine had on the motor skills and a short description of scientific evidence that backs it up.