Hallucinating isn’t all that uncommon: A whopping 10 percent of people claim to hear voices in their lifetime (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re crazy). And while caffeine can cause a range of ailments including bone loss and a rise in blood pressure—and is accused of causing plenty more— hallucinations have remained safely off the list.
Until now, that is. Supposedly, a team of psychologists from Durham University in the U.K. have found that big-time coffee drinkers are three times more likely to suffer hallucinations. The researchers wanted to assess how an excess amount of caffeine affects a healthy population, so they asked 200 non-smoking students about their daily caffeine intake, including anything from coffee to tea to energy drinks to chocolate to caffeine pills.
After probing each person for their caffeine habits, the researchers assessed the students to determine their stress levels as well as how likely they were to hallucinate. A small number (the exact number wasn’t released, but it was small) of the subjects claimed they could see things that weren’t there, hear voices when no one was around, or even “sense the dead.”
