Tea, whether white tea, green tea, oolung, or black, are all made from the tea

plant, chameleus senensis. That's different from herbal tea, which is defined as pouring hot

water over any plant in the world other than this particular plant.

There are at least 287,655 different plants that we know of on this planet.

Why is this one plant the most popular beverage in the world?

It's not the caffeine, or the coffee plant

is more caffeine, but more people drink tea than coffee. It's probably not the taste.

Most people would probably prefer peppermint or some of the fruity berry tea to be better

tasting. I mean, it's a pretty enough plant, but why do we drink literally billions of cups a day

of this particular plant?

It turns out there's something in this plant that's found concentrated in only two places

in nature, in the tea plant, and in an odd mushroom called a bay-bobble-eat, which has

these little holes instead of gills.

Scientists figured this one might not pair as well with crumpets, so they called the compound

tianine.

What does it do that's got billions of people hooked on it?

We aren't quite sure until we hooked people up to an EEG.

An electroencephalogram measures the activity of our brain waves, which are split into

four major bandwidths. We have delta waves, theta waves, alpha waves, and beta waves. Delta

waves, where basically our brain is electrically pulsing very slowly at about a wave per second,

are seen primarily in deep sleep.

Then there are theta waves, about five cycles per second,

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