Coffee powered cognition

I start each morning with a mug of coffee. That is quickly chased down by another, perhaps with a piece of toast, but the coffee is more important. Like many people I believe that coffee is essential to wake me physically and mentally. Coffee tastes good. I enjoy drinking it, I feel better. Caffeine is a stimulant, it makes me feel better. But I'm a psychologist;"feel better" is not good enough-I want numbers.

I recently discovered the Quantified mind website with a battery of cognitive tests organised into experiments you can take at home. The tests are all drawn from psychology literature. No single test maps exactly onto skills you use in your daily life but taken together they indicate speed of cognition, capacity of working memory, reaction time - all things that affect your cognitive skills. The science pages on Quantified Mind explain it more eloquently than me.

So as you have by now guessed, I signed up to do an experiment comparing my cognitive abilities with and without my morning coffee. Or to be more exact, before and after my morning coffee. The study runs over 31 days, on odd days I take the tests before coffee, on evens I take them after coffee. The long data gathering is important to get a reliable figure and to mitigate practice effects. I need to average out my performance on mornings that I've slept well and I'm relaxed and have nowhere to go to with performance on mornings that are mornings-after-the-night-before *, or after a bout of insomnia and I have to rush to a meeting I don't want to go to. And I need to take the test enough times so that my scores are not improving every time from practice.

So, yes I am a psychologist but I'm also a bit of a geek **. I wanted to find a way to display my results as the data grew and experiment with some new technology (or at least new to me). Quantified Mind doesn't have an API so I'm using old fashioned cut'n'paste to grab the data and put it into Google spreadsheets that automatically updates the graph you see below. It seems to work well so I will be exploring more facilities over coming weeks.

Here's my overall scores so far:

* yes there might a beer-cognition experiment lurking in there somewhere

** HCI is not just about making websites pretty.