✼

Coffee fiends like me love to use scientific research to justify our habit. So, here goes. A new study finds that people who consume caffeine shortly after learning something show memory gains 24 hours later.

Scientists have long known that our memories are unstable in the minutes or hours after they’re first created. During this period, called ‘consolidation’, the memory moves into long-term storage and into a fairly stable molecular state. (Caveat: Stable memories become unstable again whenever you recall them, as I wrote about a few weeks ago.)

In the new study, published today in Nature Neurosciencepublished today in Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, wanted to see whether caffeine affects the memory