Why coffee keeps you awake? It is well-known that the effect of coffee on mood is related to its content in caffeine (you can see its pic on the right) But why caffeine has such a strong effect on us? Caffeine operates using the same mechanisms of amphetamines, cocaine, and heroin to stimulate the brain, though with milder effects. It manipulates the same channels as the other drugs, and that is one of the things that gives caffeine its addictive qualities. There is a chemical in our brain called adenosine , that binds to certain receptors and slows down nerve cell activity when we are sleeping. To a nerve cell, caffeine looks like adenosine and it binds to the adenosine receptors. However, as it's not really adenosine, it doesn't slow down the cell's activity like adenosine would. So the cell cannot "see" adenosine anymore because caffeine has taken up all the receptors adenosine binds to. Then, instead of slowing down because of the adenos
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