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"The equivalent of just seven cups of instant coffee a day is enough to trigger the weird responses."

Late last night stumbled across two articles on coffee related studies. The first speculates

...Whether coffee itself deserves the credit is not yet clear, but researchers say the findings at least suggest that coffee drinkers can enjoy that morning cup "in good conscience."The study found that among 1,400 Finnish adults followed for 20 years, those who drank three to five cups of coffee per day in middle-age were two-thirds less likely than non-drinkers to develop dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.

That reassuring study coupled with the second and equally reassuring Guardian's debunking of an earlier survey. That survey claimed "Danger from just seven cups of coffee a day," and that "Too much coffee can make you hallucinate and sense dead people" The Bad Science column questions the methodology of the report and the manner in which it was reported .Happy reassurance in both cases for any coffee people,who may be up late worrying over the state of the world .....

The second study and survey asks about caffeine intake in vast detail, and then uses one scale to measure how prone you are to feeling persecuted, and uses another, the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS), 16 questions designed to measure "predisposition to hallucination-like experiences". Some of these questions are about having hallucinations and seeing ghosts, but some really are a very long way from there. Heavy coffee drinkers could have got higher scores on this scale by responding positively to questions like: "No matter how hard I try to concentrate on my work, unrelated thoughts always creep into my mind"

http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/story.html?id=1249078

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/17/bad-science-ben-goldacre