Washington D.C.: The placebo effect of coffee can heighten arousal, ambition and focus in regular drinkers without them actually consuming the beverage, recent findings suggest. As part of the study, a team of researchers explored the association between coffee and arousal to see if the brain's exposure to stimuli could deliver the same cognitive benefits as a caffeine buzz.

"As long as individuals see a connection between coffee and arousal, whatever its origin may be, mere exposure to coffee-related cues might trigger arousal in and of themselves without ingesting any form of caffeine," said Eugene Chan, lead researcher of the study, published in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition.