Further evidence that everything bad for you is good for you—with the possible exceptions of cigarettes and reality television—comes to us from Austria. Scientists at the Medical University Innsbruck suggest that caffeine could make us smarter. Well, if not smarter, at least enhance our mental performance by making us more alert and better able to handle the tasks of the day.

The study’s author, Dr. Florian Koppelstatter, and his team of researchers fed subjects 100 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of two cups of coffee, and then performed brain scans. What they discovered might not come as much of a surprise to bleary-eyed commuters, but they noticed that as soon as the caffeine hit the brain, the areas associated with short-term memory and attention span lit up like the fourth of July. From this, the scientists concluded that caffeine does indeed help improve organization skills and the ability to prioritize information, plan new tasks and retrieve stored information. If that’s not reason enough to have another cup of joe, there are other studies out there suggesting that caffeine just might protect against liver damage, gallstones, depression and even Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Caffeine is the most popular and widely consumed drug in the world (it is a drug, after all) and, on average, people around the world consume 76 milligrams of caffeine, or about 1_ cups of coffee, per day. Americans are well above average on this one, consuming 238 milligrams per person per day, but are still lagging behind the Scandinavians, who guzzle a whopping 400 milligrams of brew daily (we can only suppose that that’s what happens when beer costs $18).

Although this kind of study is good news for java junkies, it shouldn’t be taken as a license to start mainlining triple-venti Americanos. Too much caffeine will still make you jittery and anxious, thereby undoing any positive benefits. —Chris Johns