Welcome to Curiosity Weekly. Grab your morning coffee, your midday tea, or little matcha treat,

wherever you are in your day, because we're diving into a new study that explores how caffeine

shapes our thinking and keeps us pushing through tough tasks. Then, get ready to fall in love with math.

We'll chat with my good pal, kind Santos, also known as the Math Queen. And remember that wild story we covered in our episode titled, Mapping Minds is the White Whale of Brain Science? The story described research suggesting there's a plastic spoons worth of microplastics in the brain. You had questions. I dug deeper,

and I'll share my take on what I found. I'm Dr. Samantha Amin, and this is Curiosity Weekly.

Oh, caffeine, it fuels our mornings and powers our days. But despite being the most popular

psychoactive drug on the planet, scientists are still learning all the different

ways its shapes our thinking and behaviors. There's a new study from Amherst College that dives

into an intriguing question. Does caffeine make us more persistent when we face a problem that can't be

solved? For one of their experiments, the team sorted participants into three groups.

Group one, where each person had to chew on a piece of gum containing 40 milligrams of caffeine.

Group two, they chewed on uncaffeinated gum, and group three didn't chew anything.

Then they had each participant complete two tasks.

There was one that was a hidden picture task, something like Where's Waldo, but you have to find

like 10 Waldo's.

The second task was a series of word scrambles.

Now, both of these were unsolvable.

The hidden picture task didn't even have all the pictures, and one of the word scrambles

didn't actually have an answer.

Just 40 milligrams of caffeine didn't have an

effect on how long the participants tried to solve the problems. But in a follow-up experiment,

the researchers upped the caffeine to 100 milligrams. That's roughly the amount in a strong

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