So this is why attendees drink so much coffee

If you want your meeting attendees to make good decisions based on what they learn, go ahead and pump them full of coffee (or water, or any other beverage, though I presume alcohol would nullify the effect). So says an article to be published in the March 2011 issue of Association for Psychological Science.

After feeling the inevitable full-bladder effect of mucho coffee during a long lecture, Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, did some research on that bodily discomfort and decisionmaking. The upshot? "You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder," Tuk says.

Do with this nugget what you will -- I'm just the messenger.