While drinking loads of coffee and not getting enough sleep on a regular basis isn’t particularly good for your long-term health, research has found that in the short term, caffeine does more than just keep you alert. Essentially, researchers believe that caffeine will help you focus on even extremely tedious tasks and will improve nearly everything associated with intelligence, including reasoning and reaction time. It is important to stress that researchers do not believe that it makes you smarter on a permanent basis, only that it temporarily makes your brain work more efficiently (until you crash, of course).