I like my women the way I like my coffee: detrimental to hippocampal neurogenesis, but conducive to short term memory and attentional control.

Memory formation and memory retrieval are very different tasks, so one should be specific when making claims like "Caffeine helps long term memory." For example, if caffeine only hinders long term memory formation, but not retrieval, then this would suggest using it during an exam, but not while studying. If vice versa, then vice versa.

Unfortunately for our purposes, the authors of your first article have blurred this distinction in their abstract, no doubt because it was not the subject of their study: their method was to add caffeine to rats' water supplies, without controlling the timing of the doses in relation to the events of formation and retrieval.

I was happy to find your last article addresses precisely this question:

Groups of 12 adult male Wistar rats receiving caffeine (0.3-30 mg/kg, ip, in 0.1 ml/100 g body weight) administered 30 min before training, immediately after training, or 30 min before the test session were tested ... Post-training administration of caffeine improved memory retention at the doses of 0.3-10 mg/kg ... but not at the dose of 30 mg/kg. Pre-test caffeine administration also caused a small increase in memory retrieval .... In contrast

What do you think?

I'm happy to free-ride off of your opinion. Relative to the other things I'm working on, deciding whether to drink coffee or not seems like a fairly minor optimization. And doing my own research when I've already got this (seemingly solid) analysis of yours is an even smaller optimization.

Re: "Use caffeine for short-term performance on a focused task (such as an exam)."

Really? What about state-specific memory? If you are intoxicated by caffeine during an exam, don't you need to be taking it during the revision process as well?

It's not clear to me exactly what types of learning or memory cause the hippocampus to grow, even after reading this article. I don't even think they have a clue whether there's a training effect such that the added neurons make it generally easier to process new inputs for learning/memory - that is, they're seeing a correlation and speculating that there's causation in both directions.

However, I'm reminded that severe stress (see Sapolsky's "Zebras") causes the hippocampus to shrink (and the amygdala, which is apparently involved in fear, to gr... (read more)

Caffeine, of course, is rather addictive.

So one might (and I do) find it difficult to optimize finely according to what tasks one is attempting. The addictive nature of the drug probably explains the "always or never" consumption pattern.

I cycle caffeine and ephedrine to avoid the withdrawal and dependence effects. Of course, I always combine Ephedrine and caffeine on important test days. There seems to be a multiplier effect. The improved focus is especially important on long tests, which generally become a battle of attrition.

I also used the EC stack as a weight-loss tool with great success. It powerfully wards off hunger, and I simply forget to eat meals when I'm using EC.

There are conflicting issues though. There are studies (that I read years ago, and have no link to) that show that consistency is better... that consistent low-level caffeine drinkers are more alert than their non-caffeine colleagues, but less jittery than high-caffeine people (optimum seemed to be 2-3 cups per day).
Associated with that would be method of consumption: concentrated does (espresso) v. sipping american coffee over an afternoon. Using is in a "targeted" manner might fail you: If you are not particularly used to the effects and sudde... (read more)

Here's a recent Lifehacker article covering some of the same ground as well as some other stuff, including withdrawal: What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain

I have sort of been doing what you recommend anyway, because I found needing coffee to be normally awake (like my father does) absolutely unacceptable. I like coffee, but I never drink it unless there is a specific reason to. The same for tea, and I almost never drink coke anyway because I prefer the taste of most other non-alcoholic beverages, including cold tape-water.

But I never noticed any effect on me, so recently I haven't bothered drinking coffee for anything but social reasons ( a cup every two weeks or so). Maybe I'll try it again next time. Or ... (read more)

Avoid caffeine before tasks requiring manual dexterity.

I don't trust a single one of these findings, as I don't trust their proxies to be of any real use, I don't trust their methodology to be representative of the real world, and frankly I'm extremely skeptical that any result I see is not classical statistics shenanigans before I at least see it confirmed by a meta-analysis based on large number of trials.

Anyone have any experience or advice about optimal dosing? What is the maximum amount of caffeine I can consume while still avoiding dependency? What pattern of consumption is best?

Personally I find caffeine to be amazing for basically everything, but it becomes too weak after you build some tolerance, and withdrawal seems to affect me particularly badly.

To reason about Caffeine consumption, or the consumption of any mental enhancer, one should not consider only the damages and benefits of it. But the difference between those and the ones you'd have from consuming other enhancer.

Compare it with other stuff, not just being sober, otherwise, you are falling into the fallacy of the bicameral mind. The mind that evolved to think that everything is 0 or 1.

What about Spiking that coffee with Provigil or Ritalin?