17 ms·

Smart drugs reduce quality of effort, and slow decision-making

246 points by wjb3 3y ago

inciampati 3y ago
Wow. Smart drugs just increase time spent working. N=40
cmcaleer 3y ago
Anecdote regarding 'smart drugs': The most interesting thing I observed in starting treatment of my ADHD as an adult is that it I think that it stimulated my brain such that I was better able to recognise my tiredness. I remember taking dexamphetamine while I was titrating in the afternoon and pulling over an hour later while driving because I felt I was too tired to safely drive. This was after what I had considered a 'normal' amount of sleep in the past. When I spoke to people who took these drugs in university (almost all w/o ADHD) sleepiness or calmness never reported by them as a side effect. I avoided coffee and 'energy' drinks in the past because I had this effect, and didn't really understand how people took caffeine to keep themselves awake - I thought it was kind of a meme and I wouldn't understand why my coworkers would drink it during night shifts. I don't think dehydration adequately explains these to me, as I do take care to try to stay hydrated.
- jhfdbkofdchk 3y ago
  yeah that's how you know you legit have ADHD, when a cup or two of coffee makes you calm instead of wired. I do have a threshold where if I drink too much coffee I can't sleep, get jittery etc.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    That is also how you know you have a caffeine dependence, though
    - kaashif 3y ago
      Yeah, back when I drank a lot of coffee, one cup would make me feel calmer, while going too far and drinking like 3-4 cups (which I did do once to see what it was like) makes me feel like shit, have a headache, be unable to sleep well, etc. After stopping, even one cup makes me jittery and I no longer feel like I need to drink coffee to feel awake. Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread.
      - matwood 3y ago
        > Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread. There are plenty of reasons to not want to be dependent on caffeine, but I wouldn't put its dependence in the terrible category.
    - qwertox 3y ago
      Agree. If I don't drink coffee for a couple of weeks, which I rarely do due to the extreme migraine from withdrawal (3-4 days), and then drink one with half a spoon of coffee, I'm extremely alert and focused for house. Now I'm drinking like at least 10 cups a day with zero benefit.
      - robocat 3y ago
        It is easy to quit without headaches - slowly reduce your caffeine intake over a few weeks. Quitting cold turkey (abruptly stopping) will give most people nasty withdrawal symptoms. I regularly give up either (a) using caffeine only pills and breaking them to linearly decrease caffeine dose, or (b) measured reduction of instant coffee over time. Start at your current caffeine intake, every morning take one dose (might start high) and reduce slowly over say 3 weeks. It requires significant patience and self-control, but it has worked for me. My main problem is ensuring I don't have social coffees: it is easy to fall back into the habit of drinking coffee if I don't follow the titration regime. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=robocat%20caffeine%20quit&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=robocat%20caffeine%20quit&type...
      - ishjoh 3y ago
        One easy thing you can do to reduce your caffeine intake is to drink 1/2 caff or have every X coffee be decaf. I switched to 1/2 caff and tapered down, that was a lot easier for me.
  - culi 3y ago
    I think this is a vast simplification. People vary. Sometimes drastically. Sometimes even from day to day. I have certain foods that seems to dramatically change the way stimulants like caffeine affect me. For whatever reason if I eat bananas and nut butter (maybe I have an allergy or food intolerance?) I find that caffeine makes me feel like I crash. When taken on an empty stomach I can get very "wired" but it also depends heavily on my sleep schedule and the time of day I take it. I've noticed I can get an incredibly productive boost from caffeine when I take it at a time that disrupts my current circadian rhythm. I (used to) usually drink coffee in the morning and it rarely felt like it helped at all. I knew if I was desperate I could drink it around noon and see a big boost but then I wouldn't be able to go sleep on time and would pay for it the next day Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine. There is no published evidence that stimulants universally make people ADHD more tired or calm. And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine. > And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy. There was a 6 month time in my late 20s when I was averaging 3.5 hours of sleep during the week while working two jobs and going to school. The third energy drink of the day seemed to signal my body to be tired. Years later with a much better life balance and fully off of caffeine for months at a time a single 12 ounce can of Coca-Cola at lunchtime was enough to keep me wired until late into the evening. Some time after that, while fully off of caffeine for about a year, 80 mg accidentally ingested from caffeinated protein bars disrupted my sleep deep into the night and took a couple of days to recover from. I could definitely do better with procrastination, and sometimes have trouble focusing, but am pretty sure I don't have ADD/ADHD.
    - jhfdbkofdchk 3y ago
      Ok.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    It sucks that meds used to work this way for me, but now they just don't. They stopped working after a couple months, and never started working again, even after taking absolutely nothing for weeks. It's been almost a year since they've worked and I'm convinced my brain just patched a backdoor or something and just wants me to be useless and dysfunctional all the time.
    - cvdub 3y ago
      They are probably still working, but you’ll never get the same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the first few months. The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion. That’s what leads to abuse and addiction. Don’t chase it! I’m sure you’ve heard all this before, but make sure you’re getting enough sleep and exercise. Also, avoid acidic drinks in the morning like coffee and OJ when taking your medication. The acid can break down some of the medication before your body has a chance to absorb it.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        > They are probably still working, but you’ll never get the same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the first few months. > The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion. That’s what leads to abuse and addiction. Don’t chase it! Yeah that's so not what I'm talking about. When they worked, I was able to practice art, take regular showers, get chores done and stay focused without getting bored and compulsive. It doesn't help with any of those anymore. I can't use it to draw, can't take regular showers, can't get chores done even if they're staring me in the face, and boy do I get extremely, painfully bored all the time. And this happens whether I am on or off stimulants. Again, they used to work. That is, actually treat the ADHD. And now they don't. This has nothing to do with euphoria.
      - specto 3y ago
        Interesting, I never had any euphoria. I wonder if the 10mg xr isn't enough for me, but it makes my blood pressure spike so I can't try higher
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I can relate. Various friends took them and I never bothered. They looked like crackheads and it scared me. I was recently diagnosed with severe ADHD by several doctors (something I've been treating as anxiety/depression for my whole life), and was prescribed lisdexamfetamine. It makes me super calm and my thoughts organized. When I'm tired, I feel tired. If I'm sleepy, I'm sleepy. My productivity isn't insane, it's just more stable and predictable now. I wish I had been diagnosed many decades ago.
  - cmcaleer 3y ago
    This is almost exactly my experience. I sat on my diagnosis for a number of years thinking it was wrong and 'this is just me', not really fully understanding the benefits I was giving up by foregoing meds. After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore. Turns out being able to keep your shit together makes you less anxious. Who knew! Paranoia about the cardiac side effects have led me in to caring a lot about my overall cardiac health, which has meant that I've largely countered side negative effects with the obsession over HIIT and less medication overall. Giving up alcohol has been kind of sad but I'm getting to the age where hangovers are starting to get brutal so maybe it's for the best. It's also been nice to keep certain aspects of ADHD that I like, like my hyperfocus on certain subjects. I wish I could tell teenage me to investigate this sooner.
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      > After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore Exactly. I'm currently slowly going off antidepressants.
  - paulocal 3y ago
    Same story here, just with modafinil. All the signs were there since as far back as I was 7 years old. I've been able to control my focus so much better which seems to make me less tired. When I sit to get work done and inevitably get distracted, I can recover instead of go down a spiral of unproductiveness. I'm also better at prioritizing my focus on the things that are important, such as a must-have feature for launch, rather than a nice-to-have that I just enjoy working on more. And surprisingly, I've been getting some of the best sleep of my life so far on a pill designed to keep you awake. Who knew?
- jm4 3y ago
  I had the same experience with amphetamine. I think it's an ADHD thing. My doctor started me off on a low dose and I was falling asleep when I took it. We bumped it up and I'm working harder to stick to a good sleep schedule. It's mostly subsided, but I do still need the occasional afternoon nap. I didn't have that same experience with methylphenidate. That one was a much more pronounced effect. I felt pretty locked in and it was easy to focus. The downside was I was getting headaches, stomach cramps, I would sweat more and my heart was always racing like I had too much coffee. The amphetamine feels much different. It's more of a chilled out effect where all the noise seems to go away. It doesn't make me feel any smarter, but I do feel less distracted and I'm able to complete boring routine tasks. I wonder if that's why I sometimes get sleepy with it. It's like a relaxation spa for my brain.
- specto 3y ago
  Same here, it makes me super relaxed and tired feeling
baryphonic 3y ago
> While on a drug, participants made a poorer, more random first attempt at filling a knapsack than they did after taking the placebo, and this had an especially negative impact on the subsequent performance of those who’d been above average in the placebo condition, explaining why they dropped below the mean. Overall, the results suggest that the participants’ approach to solving the knapsack task became less systematic while they were on each of the three drugs, the researchers write. I can't help but think that since the knapsack problem is NP-complete, any attempt to fill the sack could subjectively appear "more random." Certainly the participants could use certain heuristics, but since in general there is no known way to systematically solve the problem, this study seems to enable some confirmation bias on the part of the experimenters.
- bglazer 3y ago
  NP-complete just means that it’s very difficult to verify that any solution is the best possible solution. It’s very easy to compare any two attempts at a solution. That’s what the researchers did, they saw that the knapsacks from the drugged attempts were worse than placebo
  - nyssos 3y ago
    > NP-complete just means that it’s very difficult to verify that any solution is the best possible solution. It means that it's hard to find the best solution, but easy to verify.
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  That’s an interesting observation. However, maybe that makes it the perfect type of problem. That is, it’s a problem you can spend a lot more time on without better results, on average.
mdorazio 3y ago
The authors of the paper seem to have misinterpreted why many cognitively healthy students take ritalin/adderall. It's not to make you smarter or more able to solve complex problems, it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to. Basically, quantity over quality. A much better test would have been to give all the study participants some new material requiring multiple hours of study to memorize & learn, then give them a test. The knapsack problem is fine to test some measure of "intelligence", but a bad choice to simulate academics.
- poultron 3y ago
  Agree - as someone who took Adderall in highschool and college, and has started taking it again as an executive in my career, I always took it to be able to handle multitasking more efficiently with less distraction, and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating. A test in which you HAVE to get a job done and you're being monitored and timed - I wouldn't expect a large improvement in results with 'smart drugs'. I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity without knowing someone is looking over your shoulder. Also notice as I take my "smart drugs" my ability to focus in meetings is increased, and therefore allows me to better recall information in subsequent days... vs when not on meds I'm constantly distracted and my memory is much more foggy, especially specifics or details.
  - FFP999 3y ago
    > I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity... I think you've confused "productivity" with "bulk". Do you evaluate engineers by how many lines of source code they write in a day?
    - Slava_Propanei 3y ago
instagraham 3y ago
Wow. Worth noting that there doesn't seem to have been much research or coverage of modafinil since the 2016 boom in "it's safe and makes you smart!" media hype. By far the easiest to obtain and abuse, though it's as yet unclear what abusing it looks like
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Abuse typically means taking higher than prescribed doses which then "unlocks" some kind of euphoria - e.g. Adderall, benzodiazepines etc. Modafinil can't really be abused in this way, it doesn't get you high and increasing the dose is usually counter-productive. Another element of abuse is addiction and Modafinil has no physical addiction and IMHO minimal to non-existent psychological addiction.
  - instagraham 3y ago
    I think for some, it can definitely be called a high. For a person with ADHD, modafinil-induced hyperfocus can feel like an absolute trip. For a boring weekend with no energy to do anything, modafinil can mean the difference between doing something for hours and just browsing Instagram till you feel sick. If the above examples sound beneficial, they may be - in part. But I'm sure clinicians and mental health practitioners can see how such a substance embedding itself in your life can yield undesirable outcomes, perhaps mirroring addiction.
- Inviz 3y ago
  Would you mind sharing where's your antagonism towards modafinil coming from? Is it your personal experience or is it everybody's enthusiasm rubs you the wrong way?
  - instagraham 3y ago
    I don't have antagonism towards it - just tentative caution. I'd advise the same to any DYOR-er. Personal experience plays some part: I've been a regular user since 2016. Initially weekly, for a while daily, then back to weekly. It hit me that what was initially a minor perceived upgrade to my chaotic workflow had become an almost regular part of my life. I'm still not entirely sure if I would call myself addicted - I seem to be able to walk away from it but among ADHD crutches it is the most desirable at present. That said, I've been careful to never exceed 200mg a day and to take breaks from it if I've taken it for more than 3-4 days at a time. In terms of its actual benefit, it seems to be quite hit and miss. I find it just puts me in a more conducive state for focus, but only 3/10 times. I don't think medical or media coverage has quite documented how much modafinil is used these days by working professionals and people without narcolepsy - situations where modafinil can be used in endless combination of 'other things that we don't yet understand an interaction with'. What is the effect of 3 days disturbed sleep with 200mg modafinil daily? What effect on people with other mental health comorbidities? What is the effect on the liver and kidney for frequent use (the foul-smelling urine it results in is honestly anxiety-inducing). What worries me is that since 2016, there appears to be a scarcity of research on modafinil, even though anecdotally its use has exploded. It feels safe in much the same way I imagine aspartame may have seemed safe when first synthesised. It may be a 'safer' smart drug than alternative medications, much like how aspartame is probably still 'safer' than abusing sugar. But the truth is that perhaps we still do not know.
gtroja 3y ago
I take adhd drugs to resist the urge to do something else that the voices of my head tell me to. Maybe I think less, but I think enough to get the task done
TrackerFF 3y ago
I have ADHD (inattentive), and wasn't diagnosed until I was in my mid 20s - I somehow managed to graduate from university. I attribute the countless all-nighters for that. I never tried ADHD meds before I was officially diagnosed, but I good chunk of my classmates would regularly use meds in the days / weeks leading to exams, so that they could cram for 12 hours. From experience, the different drugs available can feel wildly different on me - so I'm going to assume that would also be valid for the non-ADHD users? But, anyway, looking back - the playing field def seemed uneven. How on earth are unmedicated neurodivergent going to compete against "enhanced" healthy people - it's like playing football with crutches, while your opponent is not only healthy, but also using steroids. EDIT: And, yes, I'm sure some % of the students that perform better when using meds may have some underlying/undiagnosed condition.
- culi 3y ago
  I think you have a very simplified view of how ADHD and stimulants work. There's no actual research to back up the oft-repeated claim that stimulants affect people with an ADHD diagnosis differently from those without one. Actually the one bit of research I found suggests the exact opposite—that stimulants negatively impact the productivity and concentration of people without ADHD https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-you-dont-have-adhd-ritalin-and-similar-drugs-may-hurt-your-concentration https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-you-dont-have-adhd...
  - TrackerFF 3y ago
    So the implication is that there must be millions of students out there that are experiencing placebo effects from taking stimulants? Because there is practically an endless supply of feedback out there, from "normal" students, that report their ability to study/focus/cram going up, when using ADHD meds.
  - anonymoushn 3y ago
    If they negatively impact productivity and concentration for people without ADHD, and they affect people with and without ADHD diagnoses the same way, do they negatively impact productivity and concentration for people with ADHD?
jugg1es 3y ago
I'd like to see if they still get these results if they use people who are acclimated to these drugs before-hand. The first time taking any drug always hits the hardest and it's possible these people were just too high.
photochemsyn 3y ago
They missed an opportunity to compare microdosing psychedelics like LSD with the amphetamine class stimulants. Many users report that psychedelics do have interesting cognitive effects related to enhanced creativity and making long-range connections between disparate subjects, though I'm not sure it would help with knapsack optimization. As others note, the ADHD-type drugs just let you work longer without needing sleep, although the bill must eventually be paid with interest, which is why people who take a lot of stimulants tend to go through boom-bust cycles over time. Such drugs also have a kind of jangly nervous side effect which inhibits the creation of complex mental architectures of the kind that mathematicians rely on, so I'm not surprised by the study's results. They're more suited to rote learning (unfortunately common in today's academia) and repetitive tasks (factory work etc.).
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  > why people who take a lot of stimulants tend to go through boom-bust cycles over time SBF (and all those in Alameda+FTX who got scripts from their in-house psych) in particular having the biggest boom-bust cycle in stimulant history. Though that doesn't count world leaders alleged to have stimulant use history.
mtizim 3y ago
> single dose trial Humans make better decisions when in a state they've been pretty much their entire lives than in an altered one, more news at 11. The study seems useless - it's like giving the participants their own, long used car, asking them to set a time, and then comparing that to the time they would set in the same car, but with a slightly different clutch. I'd very gladly read a similar comparison for long term regular users.
jfrbfbreudh 3y ago
I take ADHD meds and find that it definitely dulls my thinking and creative problem solving, but it at least gives me the motivation to actually write code vs. do nothing. Ideally, I’d have unmedicated days where I just sit and think through problems, and then medicated days where I’d work on the actual implementation. Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
- r3d0c 3y ago
  the opposite for me, makes it easier for me to solve problem because i can cohesively hold multiple thoughts in my head for long enough for me to see the patterns to be able to understand them, along with the emotional regulation an increase in executive functioning ability that meds help with (which is what adhd really is, not just problems with motivation or bad at concentrating) but i also work out 5-6 days a week and that + meds have been a huge boon than just meds because it keeps the depression down too, which is what you might be afflicted with because on my rare off days i still can do some work & be motivated
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  > Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days. I often wonder about this with me. I've got various hallmarks of ADHD (especially after my SO was diagnosed), but generally i'm productive. In this specific case, i can't figure out if it's something like ADHD that drives this behavior _or_ just normal human avoidance of work i dislike. Ie i of course don't have this problem when it's an interesting problem. I also tend not to have this problem after i get started, since most larger domains have interesting subdomains. Difficulty (read: vagueness, scope issues, etc) definitely lead to more of this for me though. Human brains are weird.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    ADHD isn't so much as you are all over the place, its more along the lines of erradic attention. Hyperfocusing on a problem (especially one that is interesting) and being super productive is a common symptom. Stimulants basically help regulate the dopamine levels so you can context switch easier and spread your attention to more things.
willtemperley 3y ago
It's not unusual for students to crush and snort ritalin before exams in the UK. We have an interesting system - final year exams are essentially a one-shot thing in the UK. If you are lucky enough to able to retake a final exam, your mark is capped at 40% - a third class mark. An upper second class degree is required for PhD entry. Little wonder people will do _anything_ to pass those exams.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  What's the justification for capping scores on retakes? I can't believe that any empirical data supports it.
  - TrackerFF 3y ago
    My guess would be that it gives students the unfair advantage of more study time? Where I studied (Norway), university students would regularly fail on purpose on the first exam, so that they could get two-ish months more time to read on the subject, as the re-take/postponed exam would be around August/September, or January/February - depending on semester. It was/is called "strategic re-take", and unsurprisingly, you'd always see a bunch or A grades on the re-take. Same thing happens in the high-school level. People that want to study wildly popular majors, like medicine, will spend YEARS re-taking HS classes/exams to polish their grades. Those studies are so competitive that you could get almost straight A's, but still not be good enough.
  - willtemperley 3y ago
    Good question. I suppose it's to penalise those who can't work under pressure to a very tight schedule and reward those who are prepared to risk brain-damage with performance enhancing drugs for the sake of recognition.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- etothepii 3y ago
  This is university specific.
ryukoposting 3y ago
Shocker, your brain function is impaired while on a drug you've never taken before and you weren't prescribed. In my experience, it doesn't matter if you have multiple psychological evaluations and 10+ years of success with a consistent dosage of an ADHD medication. Most doctors just won't write the prescription because of this sort of bunk.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic. I don't know exactly how they are used by those without a medical need, but I thought it was as temporary fixes, not taken habitually. The article specifically says: > More work will be needed to establish exactly why these drugs have these effects in those without a medical need for them, as well as to explore the potential impacts of other so-called smart drugs.
  - jonahrd 3y ago
    That is the point of the study, but in my non-scientific opinion it seems like a very poorly crafted study. Nobody is going to have issues with attention/motivation during the one, short task they were assigned at some study. It's a very novel, motivating environment. And then of course if you're feeling the effects of a new drug, you'll be "off" a bit. This doesn't really prove anything about kids who take it for a few nights during exam week to study.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    > I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic. Yes, but the conclusions drawn by this study and others are frequently wielded against people who do have ADHD. The very term "smart drugs" comes from this mindset - the belief that these drugs don't paper over an ailment, rather they make the user "smarter."
Hnrobert42 3y ago
This study makes me think my dose may be too high. When my Adderall hits in the morning, EVERYTHING seems like a good idea. Then, I end up spending two hours writing the perfect email.
- mp05 3y ago
  This is me to a tee when I was frankly abusing Adderall as a young adult. My judgment of how best to use my time goes straight down the toilet when I'm jacked on amphetamines. The physical side effects are not very desirable either.
  - Hnrobert42 3y ago
    What physical side effects? I don’t have any that I am aware of.
- cvdub 3y ago
  Adderall reduces your task activation threshold, the amount of effort required to start something. It’s definitely possible to reduce this threshold too far! If you do you’ll end up jumping into the first project you come across and tackling it with gusto, whether or not it’s high value. Having too much caffeine with Adderall makes this effect much worse for me. A little bit of laziness is good! You need to be able to power through the tedious stuff you have to do in life, but you never want to stop thinking, “this is tedious and boring, do I really have to do this? Is there a better way?” It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees.
tomohawk 3y ago
I decided long ago to not take substances such as these, or even caffeine. I also abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and the like. This forced me to develop skills and discipline over the years to achieve self control, and this has more than paid off. I find I can work a 12 hour day, and then go in the next day and do the same. It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me - especially when I consider family members who are/were farmers where this is quite a normal work day and used to be quite normal for everyone until about WWII. Am I an outlier? I don't know, but I know others who have taken the same path with similar results. I've worked with many people who cannot function without caffeine, let alone other substances. They will often claim how it enhances their abilities, but it doesn't come across that way in my observations. They seem to be dependent on a substance for normal, or even sub-normal performance.
- dboreham 3y ago
  12 hours farming is not really the same as 12 hours figuring out k8s.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
  The average farmer works less hours than the average office worker. This isn't even due to modern automation, it seems they have generally always worked <40 hours even during harvests. People began to work longer hours during industrialization and even then I can't find any time when working 12 hours a day was the norm.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Generally speaking, people work more if they can get paid more by working more.
matznerd 3y ago
This study is about the amphetamine stimulants methylphenidate, dextroamphetamine, and the eugeroic (wakefulness agent) modafinil, and not about nootropics. Though the term smart drug can be inclusive of all of them... Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study showed (especially in a first time user). Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in an EEG)... See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man through the use of drugs" "Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had significantly increased." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/ Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG" "The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers, showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain functional processes." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/ Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm" "U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons during cognitive steps of information processing." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/
- scythe 3y ago
  The authors are rather unfair to modafinil, also, lumping it in with the other two even though the negative "effects" of modafinil were not statistically significant (except in the rather dubious case of the rank testing of "productivity deviations") and the mean deviation was very small. Also, the "value attained" is not available for modafinil specifically; for this criterion — which is the most believable, as it measures what participants actually tried to achieve — the drugs are all counted together, while on other measures they are listed separately. This is particularly disconcerting since the total value attained makes its way into the abstract and the press release yet gets shorted on the analysis.
narrator 3y ago
Meanwhile, in Russia they're making all kinds of smart drugs that work way better than the ones in the study: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de... Piracetam was also developed in Romania in the 60s. I don't like communism or anything, but the complete ignorance of the U.S medical system about drugs developed outside the United States that are now out of patent is just a tragedy. Luckily, in the 80s and 90s AIDS patients lobbied to let foreign drugs be imported because many of them worked better than the domestically developed AIDS drugs. What's weird is illegal drugs are vastly more popular and studied in the U.S, with the recent hallucinogen microdosing trend, than drugs that have been used safely for decades overseas.
Eumenes 3y ago
Kinda strange how they forgot to include the big stimulants, like Adderall and Vyvanse, in the study. My guess its impossible to incorporate a placebo with amphetamines. College kids are taking those, not Ritalin or Concerta, lol.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  This is an Australian study, so they used Australian brands. We don't have those. Two of the three tested drugs were amphetamines though, very similar to those you listed[0]. 0. https://bocarecoverycenter.com/treatment/understanding-add-adhd-medications/ https://bocarecoverycenter.com/treatment/understanding-add-a...
FFP999 3y ago
I spent a good deal of my 20s in an informal study on the cognitive effects of long-term self-prescribed amphetamine use. (Translation: I used to hang out with a whole lot of tweakers.) This article squares with my experience: amphetamines make your brain faster, not better.
karmakaze 3y ago
> All of the drugs also increased the number of times the participants moved items in and out of the knapsack. “Thus, if one measures motivation in terms of time spent or number of items moved, drugs clearly enhanced motivation,” the team writes. However, on average, the drugs did not increase ‘effort quality’ or productivity, measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move. Productivity was lower in all three drug conditions, compared with placebo. This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes sustained effort which is one of the increased behaviors. I'd like to see this done again with a different problem, a different metric, or simply their raw data. Now that I think about it, all of these types of reports should include the raw data or GTFO. This one seems to provide some on the referenced https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 > MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along with underlying data, can be found in the notebook “figures.mlx” and “SOM.mlx” of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835 https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Why are you leaving out the rest of the performance criteria that the article mentions are done more poorly while on any of the drugs?
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Two observations: (1) When studying, the extra time spent could outweigh the reduced quality of thought. (2) Not a new point but it's strange how you can take a drug and think it has one effect when it has another.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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michael1999 3y ago
How does a placebo for amphetamines work? I'd know the difference in 30 minutes.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  Good question. Adding a third control group that took caffeine would have been interesting, since it's so well studied and mimics some of the side effects of amphetamines.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  You can definitely get high with a placebo. I have seen people in festivals getting high just by touching people, the "explanation" being that the people were sweating the drugs and by touching enough of them, you get enough for yourself to get high. This is as convincing to me as homeopathy, so definitely placebo, and it happened to people who took these drugs before and are familiar with their effects. And here, they are not giving you a big dose of MDMA so you can dance until sunrise, they are giving you a moderate dose of amphetamines to (tentatively) boost your ability to solve a maths problem. Unless you have already trained yourself, don't overestimate your ability to discriminate, the placebo effect is really strong here.
insanitybit 3y ago
> The results showed that on average, the drugs didn’t affect the chance of a participant finding the solution to a knapsack problem. Contrary to perhaps many students’ expectations, however, participants tended to perform worse after taking one of the drugs, packing a lower total value of items. I have to assume that everyone who has taken these drugs could have predicted this, yeah? No one gets this drug and thinks "I will literally be more intelligent", they get them so that they can grind out 12 hours of work without being distracted by anything. 12 hours of work at 90% efficiency is way better than ~2 hours of work at 100% efficiency. > Not only that, but they spent substantially more time working on their solution while on the smart drugs than they did after taking the placebo. In fact, participants spent almost as much time on the easiest presentations of the knapsack task while on methylphenidate (Ritalin) as they did on the hardest instances of the task after taking the placebo, without any corresponding improvement in performance. As expected! One of the "traps" you have to be aware of when taking these medications is to be sure to not overfocus on things that don't matter. > The results have clear implications: healthy people who take these drugs hoping for cognitive gains may work harder and longer at a problem, but without any benefit. No way lol that is a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Without any benefit? Seriously? The benefits are massive.
Clubber 3y ago
This phenomenon reminds me of athletes taking steroids to improve their performance, or slave dock workers being given cocaine to improve their output. The problem with both is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  I'm going to disagree with you that the problem, or even the main problem among a wide array of problems, with slave dock workers being given cocaine to improve output is “it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive”.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    If you read my comment with a little more discern rather than jumping to virtue signal, you'll see "the problem," I was referring to is taking performance enhancing drugs. There is no need for you to remind everyone that slavery was bad unless you just can't help yourself. >The problem with both is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Hey, I'm not the one who chose the analogy or the “with both"; if you would read what you wrote with more discernment before posting it, maybe we would have avoided this whole discussion.
      - Clubber 3y ago
        >The problem with both [examples of taking performance enhancing drugs, implied] is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive. Writers..
ulizzle 3y ago
I don’t think amphetamines do that on their own, but rather over time the fatigue builds up and the drugs can’t mask it anymore. The issue with smart drugs is that high tolerance leads to psychosis much easier than you’d think.
sarasasa28 3y ago
why are americans so addicted to adderall
- jobs_throwaway 3y ago
  we love money, and adderall helps you focus on shit you don't care about in order to make money
- astrange 3y ago
  Generational effects from childhood lead exposure.
gehwartzen 3y ago
Having been on Adderall I agree with most here that it increases my executive function but doesn’t really make me smarter. I have a long history of experimenting with both legal and illicit drugs and the only one I found to actually significantly increase my cognitive ability to solve complex problems is low dose Ketamine. Low dose lsd/shrooms as well but to a much lesser degree.
- Extropy_ 3y ago
  I've found that small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms appear to calm me and allow me to "get in the zone" a lot better, as well as radically increase my creativity. I also found that low-dose MDMA, taken after eating, dramatically increased my focus and productivity while somewhat dulling my creativity. I've never tried LSD or Ketamine though.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Generally, there is no drug that can make you smarter. Psychedelics can help you explore different perspective, but thats just being equivalent to a Monte Carlo approach to problem solving. That being said, if you are ADHD, stimulants can essentially make you more efficient, which will make you appear smarter.
languagehacker 3y ago
A few important things to consider: Lumping all of the medications in question into a single study is disingenuous, and seems biased towards concluding their ineffectiveness. All three of the drugs in question have different mechanisms of action, which means that they will have a different effect on people with different brain chemistry. My read here is that if everyone takes all three and a placebo, performance may be enhanced in one case, but the remaining three cases can make the study come across as conclusive that on the whole, this course of treatment is ineffective. Not a lot of detail on the placebo and why it performs so much better, but I'm curious about the "nocebo" effect and subjects' prior exposure to the non-placebo dosage. In other words, is the feeling of being on a new "smart" drug too distracting to successfully take the test in question for the first time? The sample size is incredibly small at only 40 people, and skewed in terms of population. These were self-selecting individuals who responded to campus advertisements. This has been the modern critique of psychological experimentation in academia for decades, and I find it a little disparaging that we still have to suffer through it. I wish the HRB would ban things like campus advertisements as a means of recruiting test subjects -- we all really ought to know better by now. While the sequencing of studies on each individual helps to avoid some amount of sequence-based confounding variables, and the spacing of seven days between studies allows for a pretty decent return to homeostasis, the number of study participants is still too low to be conclusive. I'd need to see this study get repeated numerous times, at a larger scale, over individuals with a more consistent neurological history to be considered conclusive. I don't entirely buy the efficacy of working on individuals without any history of psychotropic medication or illicit drug use -- remember that this will rule out participants who have taken things like fluoxetine -- ruling out nearly 20% of adults in many countries -- or slightly skirted Australia's drug laws. These are people answering an ad on a college campus, likely for compensation. I don't think it's likely that all the subjects truthfully self-reported. If anything I'd expect the neurological variability of a fully unscreened or undiagnosed population to make it really truly hard to measure these drugs effectiveness. Given the mechanisms of action, I'd expect that the likely 20% of subjects with undiagnosed depression and additional likely 5% of individuals with undiagnosed ADHD would really throw a wrench in any conclusive numbers. I'm not trying to say that smart drugs are the answer to performing better at work. In fact, I'd expect a good night of sleep to make a bigger bump in these kinds of test scores. But I found the BPS is really jumping to conclusions based on what looks to me like very flimsy evidence. Testing on people is hard, but publishing summaries of articles that don't entirely stand on their own and drawing authoritative conclusions is incredibly easy.
T3RMINATED 3y ago
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Inviz 3y ago
Modafinil is a great tool to have in one's toolbelt. There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be very draining to work through if you need to load in the context every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great deal.
- Volrath89 3y ago
  True. I remember I used this back in the day when I was a pro online poker player. I would like to try again in Software, maybe to kickstart an indie project ... food for thought. How often do you use it and have you found any side effects? (or long term effects for that matter)
  - Inviz 3y ago
    I use about 100mg (average amount) 2-4 days a week for the last 1.5 years, going through a very challenging project. I had a small stretch of time when my skin started drying up on the forehead and was peeling off in minor quantities, so i took a break for a month and it fixed it. Some of the days I may not take it and not notice it, there's definitely no cravings. But during a break I felt slightly hazy when getting off it. I do notice an increase in typical stimulator tell-tale symptoms (like some jaw clenching), but i do have that from coffee as well (which i drink too). There can be days when i'm too wired up to fall asleep fast, so i may drop a 5-htp pill. The upside is that there's a lot of times when I manage to really concentrate on some activities. Doing 8 hours shifts is trivial. People note that I am pretty responsive at the end of the working days. Quite often I manage to do some personal hobby work after a full working day too. Modafinil doesn't have the ecstatic effects of Adderall and its friends, so working a lot can make me feel overly emotionally invested into some things that are not important in a grand picture. The stress can add up if not managed well. So I do not recommend working a lot for working's sake, there has to be a cause to pull heroic stunts like this. My excuse is to save up the money to enable myself to do other activites not related to programming later.
cosmojg 3y ago
Everything's a trade-off. Most people who take stimulants regularly would be far less likely to even make an effort or make a decision without them. It seems obvious that the quality of an effort or decision will decrease in proportion when you take away all of the additional indecisive overthinking an individual would normally be doing instead of, y'know, actually doing the thing. Again, that's the trade-off, and I think most people are behaving rationally when they accept that deal. Until clinical psychology cracks how to simply teach the skills of "not overthinking," "staying singularly focused," and "maintaining a bias towards action," it would seem that we're stuck with stimulants for the foreseeable future.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Mandatory reading about Adderall https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...
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epgui 3y ago
All other things being equal, I think slower thinking or decision-making is probably a very good thing. I mean it depends on what the goal and situation is, but I strongly believe that in general, fast thinking prioritizes heuristics over analysis and comes at an enormous (often unrecognized) cost.
nurettin 3y ago
So if you suspect that you took a "smart drug" and it is a placebo, you get smarter. Got it.
beefman 3y ago
I've long wished for more studies like this. So it's good to see. This one does miss some important variables: 1. Dose-dependent effects 2. Naive vs experienced users of a drug 3. Novel vs familiar task Though the authors spend a lot of time showing these stimulants reduce work efficiency, their central finding seems to be: "There was no significant effect of drug on performance" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
zeroCalories 3y ago
My personal experience as someone diagnosed with ADHD is that they definitely make me more effective. My attention gets grabbed and redirected in inefficient ways, and being on the meds allows me to keep my focus fully on a task. But when I'm working on something I find exciting or fun, like a production failure, or a video game, I don't think my meds help me. Sometimes I wonder if my ADHD is even real.
fredgrott 3y ago
Seems suspicious as these are narco class drugs and the study gave them to those who did not have the condition for the medicine. Did they give the study participants ample warning that they could be addicted after one dose? Ah ah! ADHD'ers including me have double the amount of DATs and NATs you guys and gals do not! Its why I will not get addicted taking Ritalin, Adderall, etc and yet you in fact will!
tflinton 3y ago
I've been taking Adderall for a very long time. Prior to it I had a very difficult time motivating myself and simply being able to block out a thousand other thoughts and stimulus. I developed techniques to cope prior to taking it but once I started it was like night and day. It doesn't at all make me smarter but allows me to decide what I want to do rather than some sub-cognitive part of me. Should people take it to make them smarter? In my experience it helps focus, not intelligence.
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sneak 3y ago
When I hear “smart drugs” in a headline, I don’t think of amphetamines.
neilv 3y ago
Even in the '90s, I heard that a large percentage of CS undergrads were on prescription meds, such as Ritalin. A much larger percentage than you'd think would have an abnormal condition. I didn't ask many students about it, but my guess at the time was that it was for performance enhancement above typical human capability. And this was a bit before the current FAANG pressure to spend lots of time on Leetcode memorizing and rehearsing, in addition to coursework -- CS students only needed to get through their time-consuming lab-heavy courses, and then they could get a good job. (This was slightly before CS became one of the very high paying upper-middle careers, like medicine and law, which seemed to put high-stakes demands on undergrads' school performance.) Large numbers of people drugged-up for years, simply to pass status-career gatekeeping, doesn't seem like a great situation.
Webster09 3y ago
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AstralStorm 3y ago
First time I hear someone calling amphetamines smart drugs. Modafinil itself has weak to non-existent nootropic effect as well, and it only partially abates sleep deprivation. This effect of amphetamines on creativity and work quality is expected and has been described in the literature before. It gets worse when sleep deprived. They are best for repetitive boring work that requires alertness, not learning.

246 points by wjb3 3y ago

Wow. Smart drugs just increase time spent working. N=40

Anecdote regarding 'smart drugs': The most interesting thing I observed in starting treatment of my ADHD as an adult is that it I think that it stimulated my brain such that I was better able to recognise my tiredness. I remember taking dexamphetamine while I was titrating in the afternoon and pulling over an hour later while driving because I felt I was too tired to safely drive. This was after what I had considered a 'normal' amount of sleep in the past. When I spoke to people who took these drugs in university (almost all w/o ADHD) sleepiness or calmness never reported by them as a side effect. I avoided coffee and 'energy' drinks in the past because I had this effect, and didn't really understand how people took caffeine to keep themselves awake - I thought it was kind of a meme and I wouldn't understand why my coworkers would drink it during night shifts. I don't think dehydration adequately explains these to me, as I do take care to try to stay hydrated.

jhfdbkofdchk 3y ago
yeah that's how you know you legit have ADHD, when a cup or two of coffee makes you calm instead of wired. I do have a threshold where if I drink too much coffee I can't sleep, get jittery etc.
- deleted 3y ago
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- petesergeant 3y ago
  That is also how you know you have a caffeine dependence, though
  - kaashif 3y ago
    Yeah, back when I drank a lot of coffee, one cup would make me feel calmer, while going too far and drinking like 3-4 cups (which I did do once to see what it was like) makes me feel like shit, have a headache, be unable to sleep well, etc. After stopping, even one cup makes me jittery and I no longer feel like I need to drink coffee to feel awake. Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread.
    - matwood 3y ago
      > Caffeine dependence is terrible and widespread. There are plenty of reasons to not want to be dependent on caffeine, but I wouldn't put its dependence in the terrible category.
  - qwertox 3y ago
    Agree. If I don't drink coffee for a couple of weeks, which I rarely do due to the extreme migraine from withdrawal (3-4 days), and then drink one with half a spoon of coffee, I'm extremely alert and focused for house. Now I'm drinking like at least 10 cups a day with zero benefit.
    - robocat 3y ago
      It is easy to quit without headaches - slowly reduce your caffeine intake over a few weeks. Quitting cold turkey (abruptly stopping) will give most people nasty withdrawal symptoms. I regularly give up either (a) using caffeine only pills and breaking them to linearly decrease caffeine dose, or (b) measured reduction of instant coffee over time. Start at your current caffeine intake, every morning take one dose (might start high) and reduce slowly over say 3 weeks. It requires significant patience and self-control, but it has worked for me. My main problem is ensuring I don't have social coffees: it is easy to fall back into the habit of drinking coffee if I don't follow the titration regime. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=robocat%20caffeine%20quit&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=robocat%20caffeine%20quit&type...
    - ishjoh 3y ago
      One easy thing you can do to reduce your caffeine intake is to drink 1/2 caff or have every X coffee be decaf. I switched to 1/2 caff and tapered down, that was a lot easier for me.
- culi 3y ago
  I think this is a vast simplification. People vary. Sometimes drastically. Sometimes even from day to day. I have certain foods that seems to dramatically change the way stimulants like caffeine affect me. For whatever reason if I eat bananas and nut butter (maybe I have an allergy or food intolerance?) I find that caffeine makes me feel like I crash. When taken on an empty stomach I can get very "wired" but it also depends heavily on my sleep schedule and the time of day I take it. I've noticed I can get an incredibly productive boost from caffeine when I take it at a time that disrupts my current circadian rhythm. I (used to) usually drink coffee in the morning and it rarely felt like it helped at all. I knew if I was desperate I could drink it around noon and see a big boost but then I wouldn't be able to go sleep on time and would pay for it the next day Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine. There is no published evidence that stimulants universally make people ADHD more tired or calm. And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine. > And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy. There was a 6 month time in my late 20s when I was averaging 3.5 hours of sleep during the week while working two jobs and going to school. The third energy drink of the day seemed to signal my body to be tired. Years later with a much better life balance and fully off of caffeine for months at a time a single 12 ounce can of Coca-Cola at lunchtime was enough to keep me wired until late into the evening. Some time after that, while fully off of caffeine for about a year, 80 mg accidentally ingested from caffeinated protein bars disrupted my sleep deep into the night and took a couple of days to recover from. I could definitely do better with procrastination, and sometimes have trouble focusing, but am pretty sure I don't have ADD/ADHD.
  - jhfdbkofdchk 3y ago
    Ok.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  It sucks that meds used to work this way for me, but now they just don't. They stopped working after a couple months, and never started working again, even after taking absolutely nothing for weeks. It's been almost a year since they've worked and I'm convinced my brain just patched a backdoor or something and just wants me to be useless and dysfunctional all the time.
  - cvdub 3y ago
    They are probably still working, but you’ll never get the same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the first few months. The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion. That’s what leads to abuse and addiction. Don’t chase it! I’m sure you’ve heard all this before, but make sure you’re getting enough sleep and exercise. Also, avoid acidic drinks in the morning like coffee and OJ when taking your medication. The acid can break down some of the medication before your body has a chance to absorb it.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      > They are probably still working, but you’ll never get the same rush of excitement/euphoria that you felt in the first few months. > The euphoria is a negative side effect in my opinion. That’s what leads to abuse and addiction. Don’t chase it! Yeah that's so not what I'm talking about. When they worked, I was able to practice art, take regular showers, get chores done and stay focused without getting bored and compulsive. It doesn't help with any of those anymore. I can't use it to draw, can't take regular showers, can't get chores done even if they're staring me in the face, and boy do I get extremely, painfully bored all the time. And this happens whether I am on or off stimulants. Again, they used to work. That is, actually treat the ADHD. And now they don't. This has nothing to do with euphoria.
    - specto 3y ago
      Interesting, I never had any euphoria. I wonder if the 10mg xr isn't enough for me, but it makes my blood pressure spike so I can't try higher
gtirloni 3y ago
I can relate. Various friends took them and I never bothered. They looked like crackheads and it scared me. I was recently diagnosed with severe ADHD by several doctors (something I've been treating as anxiety/depression for my whole life), and was prescribed lisdexamfetamine. It makes me super calm and my thoughts organized. When I'm tired, I feel tired. If I'm sleepy, I'm sleepy. My productivity isn't insane, it's just more stable and predictable now. I wish I had been diagnosed many decades ago.
- cmcaleer 3y ago
  This is almost exactly my experience. I sat on my diagnosis for a number of years thinking it was wrong and 'this is just me', not really fully understanding the benefits I was giving up by foregoing meds. After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore. Turns out being able to keep your shit together makes you less anxious. Who knew! Paranoia about the cardiac side effects have led me in to caring a lot about my overall cardiac health, which has meant that I've largely countered side negative effects with the obsession over HIIT and less medication overall. Giving up alcohol has been kind of sad but I'm getting to the age where hangovers are starting to get brutal so maybe it's for the best. It's also been nice to keep certain aspects of ADHD that I like, like my hyperfocus on certain subjects. I wish I could tell teenage me to investigate this sooner.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    > After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore Exactly. I'm currently slowly going off antidepressants.
- paulocal 3y ago
  Same story here, just with modafinil. All the signs were there since as far back as I was 7 years old. I've been able to control my focus so much better which seems to make me less tired. When I sit to get work done and inevitably get distracted, I can recover instead of go down a spiral of unproductiveness. I'm also better at prioritizing my focus on the things that are important, such as a must-have feature for launch, rather than a nice-to-have that I just enjoy working on more. And surprisingly, I've been getting some of the best sleep of my life so far on a pill designed to keep you awake. Who knew?
jm4 3y ago
I had the same experience with amphetamine. I think it's an ADHD thing. My doctor started me off on a low dose and I was falling asleep when I took it. We bumped it up and I'm working harder to stick to a good sleep schedule. It's mostly subsided, but I do still need the occasional afternoon nap. I didn't have that same experience with methylphenidate. That one was a much more pronounced effect. I felt pretty locked in and it was easy to focus. The downside was I was getting headaches, stomach cramps, I would sweat more and my heart was always racing like I had too much coffee. The amphetamine feels much different. It's more of a chilled out effect where all the noise seems to go away. It doesn't make me feel any smarter, but I do feel less distracted and I'm able to complete boring routine tasks. I wonder if that's why I sometimes get sleepy with it. It's like a relaxation spa for my brain.
specto 3y ago
Same here, it makes me super relaxed and tired feeling

baryphonic 3y ago

> While on a drug, participants made a poorer, more random first attempt at filling a knapsack than they did after taking the placebo, and this had an especially negative impact on the subsequent performance of those who’d been above average in the placebo condition, explaining why they dropped below the mean. Overall, the results suggest that the participants’ approach to solving the knapsack task became less systematic while they were on each of the three drugs, the researchers write. I can't help but think that since the knapsack problem is NP-complete, any attempt to fill the sack could subjectively appear "more random." Certainly the participants could use certain heuristics, but since in general there is no known way to systematically solve the problem, this study seems to enable some confirmation bias on the part of the experimenters.

bglazer 3y ago
NP-complete just means that it’s very difficult to verify that any solution is the best possible solution. It’s very easy to compare any two attempts at a solution. That’s what the researchers did, they saw that the knapsacks from the drugged attempts were worse than placebo
- nyssos 3y ago
  > NP-complete just means that it’s very difficult to verify that any solution is the best possible solution. It means that it's hard to find the best solution, but easy to verify.
Hnrobert42 3y ago
That’s an interesting observation. However, maybe that makes it the perfect type of problem. That is, it’s a problem you can spend a lot more time on without better results, on average.

mdorazio 3y ago

The authors of the paper seem to have misinterpreted why many cognitively healthy students take ritalin/adderall. It's not to make you smarter or more able to solve complex problems, it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to. Basically, quantity over quality. A much better test would have been to give all the study participants some new material requiring multiple hours of study to memorize & learn, then give them a test. The knapsack problem is fine to test some measure of "intelligence", but a bad choice to simulate academics.

poultron 3y ago
Agree - as someone who took Adderall in highschool and college, and has started taking it again as an executive in my career, I always took it to be able to handle multitasking more efficiently with less distraction, and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating. A test in which you HAVE to get a job done and you're being monitored and timed - I wouldn't expect a large improvement in results with 'smart drugs'. I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity without knowing someone is looking over your shoulder. Also notice as I take my "smart drugs" my ability to focus in meetings is increased, and therefore allows me to better recall information in subsequent days... vs when not on meds I'm constantly distracted and my memory is much more foggy, especially specifics or details.
- FFP999 3y ago
  > I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity... I think you've confused "productivity" with "bulk". Do you evaluate engineers by how many lines of source code they write in a day?
  - Slava_Propanei 3y ago

instagraham 3y ago

Wow. Worth noting that there doesn't seem to have been much research or coverage of modafinil since the 2016 boom in "it's safe and makes you smart!" media hype. By far the easiest to obtain and abuse, though it's as yet unclear what abusing it looks like

The_Colonel 3y ago
Abuse typically means taking higher than prescribed doses which then "unlocks" some kind of euphoria - e.g. Adderall, benzodiazepines etc. Modafinil can't really be abused in this way, it doesn't get you high and increasing the dose is usually counter-productive. Another element of abuse is addiction and Modafinil has no physical addiction and IMHO minimal to non-existent psychological addiction.
- instagraham 3y ago
  I think for some, it can definitely be called a high. For a person with ADHD, modafinil-induced hyperfocus can feel like an absolute trip. For a boring weekend with no energy to do anything, modafinil can mean the difference between doing something for hours and just browsing Instagram till you feel sick. If the above examples sound beneficial, they may be - in part. But I'm sure clinicians and mental health practitioners can see how such a substance embedding itself in your life can yield undesirable outcomes, perhaps mirroring addiction.
Inviz 3y ago
Would you mind sharing where's your antagonism towards modafinil coming from? Is it your personal experience or is it everybody's enthusiasm rubs you the wrong way?
- instagraham 3y ago
  I don't have antagonism towards it - just tentative caution. I'd advise the same to any DYOR-er. Personal experience plays some part: I've been a regular user since 2016. Initially weekly, for a while daily, then back to weekly. It hit me that what was initially a minor perceived upgrade to my chaotic workflow had become an almost regular part of my life. I'm still not entirely sure if I would call myself addicted - I seem to be able to walk away from it but among ADHD crutches it is the most desirable at present. That said, I've been careful to never exceed 200mg a day and to take breaks from it if I've taken it for more than 3-4 days at a time. In terms of its actual benefit, it seems to be quite hit and miss. I find it just puts me in a more conducive state for focus, but only 3/10 times. I don't think medical or media coverage has quite documented how much modafinil is used these days by working professionals and people without narcolepsy - situations where modafinil can be used in endless combination of 'other things that we don't yet understand an interaction with'. What is the effect of 3 days disturbed sleep with 200mg modafinil daily? What effect on people with other mental health comorbidities? What is the effect on the liver and kidney for frequent use (the foul-smelling urine it results in is honestly anxiety-inducing). What worries me is that since 2016, there appears to be a scarcity of research on modafinil, even though anecdotally its use has exploded. It feels safe in much the same way I imagine aspartame may have seemed safe when first synthesised. It may be a 'safer' smart drug than alternative medications, much like how aspartame is probably still 'safer' than abusing sugar. But the truth is that perhaps we still do not know.

gtroja 3y ago

I take adhd drugs to resist the urge to do something else that the voices of my head tell me to. Maybe I think less, but I think enough to get the task done

TrackerFF 3y ago

I have ADHD (inattentive), and wasn't diagnosed until I was in my mid 20s - I somehow managed to graduate from university. I attribute the countless all-nighters for that. I never tried ADHD meds before I was officially diagnosed, but I good chunk of my classmates would regularly use meds in the days / weeks leading to exams, so that they could cram for 12 hours. From experience, the different drugs available can feel wildly different on me - so I'm going to assume that would also be valid for the non-ADHD users? But, anyway, looking back - the playing field def seemed uneven. How on earth are unmedicated neurodivergent going to compete against "enhanced" healthy people - it's like playing football with crutches, while your opponent is not only healthy, but also using steroids. EDIT: And, yes, I'm sure some % of the students that perform better when using meds may have some underlying/undiagnosed condition.

culi 3y ago
I think you have a very simplified view of how ADHD and stimulants work. There's no actual research to back up the oft-repeated claim that stimulants affect people with an ADHD diagnosis differently from those without one. Actually the one bit of research I found suggests the exact opposite—that stimulants negatively impact the productivity and concentration of people without ADHD https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-you-dont-have-adhd-ritalin-and-similar-drugs-may-hurt-your-concentration https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-you-dont-have-adhd...
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  So the implication is that there must be millions of students out there that are experiencing placebo effects from taking stimulants? Because there is practically an endless supply of feedback out there, from "normal" students, that report their ability to study/focus/cram going up, when using ADHD meds.
- anonymoushn 3y ago
  If they negatively impact productivity and concentration for people without ADHD, and they affect people with and without ADHD diagnoses the same way, do they negatively impact productivity and concentration for people with ADHD?

jugg1es 3y ago

I'd like to see if they still get these results if they use people who are acclimated to these drugs before-hand. The first time taking any drug always hits the hardest and it's possible these people were just too high.

photochemsyn 3y ago

They missed an opportunity to compare microdosing psychedelics like LSD with the amphetamine class stimulants. Many users report that psychedelics do have interesting cognitive effects related to enhanced creativity and making long-range connections between disparate subjects, though I'm not sure it would help with knapsack optimization. As others note, the ADHD-type drugs just let you work longer without needing sleep, although the bill must eventually be paid with interest, which is why people who take a lot of stimulants tend to go through boom-bust cycles over time. Such drugs also have a kind of jangly nervous side effect which inhibits the creation of complex mental architectures of the kind that mathematicians rely on, so I'm not surprised by the study's results. They're more suited to rote learning (unfortunately common in today's academia) and repetitive tasks (factory work etc.).

cmcaleer 3y ago
> why people who take a lot of stimulants tend to go through boom-bust cycles over time SBF (and all those in Alameda+FTX who got scripts from their in-house psych) in particular having the biggest boom-bust cycle in stimulant history. Though that doesn't count world leaders alleged to have stimulant use history.

mtizim 3y ago

> single dose trial Humans make better decisions when in a state they've been pretty much their entire lives than in an altered one, more news at 11. The study seems useless - it's like giving the participants their own, long used car, asking them to set a time, and then comparing that to the time they would set in the same car, but with a slightly different clutch. I'd very gladly read a similar comparison for long term regular users.

jfrbfbreudh 3y ago

I take ADHD meds and find that it definitely dulls my thinking and creative problem solving, but it at least gives me the motivation to actually write code vs. do nothing. Ideally, I’d have unmedicated days where I just sit and think through problems, and then medicated days where I’d work on the actual implementation. Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.

r3d0c 3y ago
the opposite for me, makes it easier for me to solve problem because i can cohesively hold multiple thoughts in my head for long enough for me to see the patterns to be able to understand them, along with the emotional regulation an increase in executive functioning ability that meds help with (which is what adhd really is, not just problems with motivation or bad at concentrating) but i also work out 5-6 days a week and that + meds have been a huge boon than just meds because it keeps the depression down too, which is what you might be afflicted with because on my rare off days i still can do some work & be motivated
unshavedyak 3y ago
> Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days. I often wonder about this with me. I've got various hallmarks of ADHD (especially after my SO was diagnosed), but generally i'm productive. In this specific case, i can't figure out if it's something like ADHD that drives this behavior _or_ just normal human avoidance of work i dislike. Ie i of course don't have this problem when it's an interesting problem. I also tend not to have this problem after i get started, since most larger domains have interesting subdomains. Difficulty (read: vagueness, scope issues, etc) definitely lead to more of this for me though. Human brains are weird.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  ADHD isn't so much as you are all over the place, its more along the lines of erradic attention. Hyperfocusing on a problem (especially one that is interesting) and being super productive is a common symptom. Stimulants basically help regulate the dopamine levels so you can context switch easier and spread your attention to more things.

willtemperley 3y ago

It's not unusual for students to crush and snort ritalin before exams in the UK. We have an interesting system - final year exams are essentially a one-shot thing in the UK. If you are lucky enough to able to retake a final exam, your mark is capped at 40% - a third class mark. An upper second class degree is required for PhD entry. Little wonder people will do _anything_ to pass those exams.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
What's the justification for capping scores on retakes? I can't believe that any empirical data supports it.
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  My guess would be that it gives students the unfair advantage of more study time? Where I studied (Norway), university students would regularly fail on purpose on the first exam, so that they could get two-ish months more time to read on the subject, as the re-take/postponed exam would be around August/September, or January/February - depending on semester. It was/is called "strategic re-take", and unsurprisingly, you'd always see a bunch or A grades on the re-take. Same thing happens in the high-school level. People that want to study wildly popular majors, like medicine, will spend YEARS re-taking HS classes/exams to polish their grades. Those studies are so competitive that you could get almost straight A's, but still not be good enough.
- willtemperley 3y ago
  Good question. I suppose it's to penalise those who can't work under pressure to a very tight schedule and reward those who are prepared to risk brain-damage with performance enhancing drugs for the sake of recognition.
- deleted 3y ago
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etothepii 3y ago
This is university specific.

ryukoposting 3y ago

Shocker, your brain function is impaired while on a drug you've never taken before and you weren't prescribed. In my experience, it doesn't matter if you have multiple psychological evaluations and 10+ years of success with a consistent dosage of an ADHD medication. Most doctors just won't write the prescription because of this sort of bunk.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic. I don't know exactly how they are used by those without a medical need, but I thought it was as temporary fixes, not taken habitually. The article specifically says: > More work will be needed to establish exactly why these drugs have these effects in those without a medical need for them, as well as to explore the potential impacts of other so-called smart drugs.
- jonahrd 3y ago
  That is the point of the study, but in my non-scientific opinion it seems like a very poorly crafted study. Nobody is going to have issues with attention/motivation during the one, short task they were assigned at some study. It's a very novel, motivating environment. And then of course if you're feeling the effects of a new drug, you'll be "off" a bit. This doesn't really prove anything about kids who take it for a few nights during exam week to study.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  > I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic. Yes, but the conclusions drawn by this study and others are frequently wielded against people who do have ADHD. The very term "smart drugs" comes from this mindset - the belief that these drugs don't paper over an ailment, rather they make the user "smarter."

Hnrobert42 3y ago

This study makes me think my dose may be too high. When my Adderall hits in the morning, EVERYTHING seems like a good idea. Then, I end up spending two hours writing the perfect email.

mp05 3y ago
This is me to a tee when I was frankly abusing Adderall as a young adult. My judgment of how best to use my time goes straight down the toilet when I'm jacked on amphetamines. The physical side effects are not very desirable either.
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  What physical side effects? I don’t have any that I am aware of.
cvdub 3y ago
Adderall reduces your task activation threshold, the amount of effort required to start something. It’s definitely possible to reduce this threshold too far! If you do you’ll end up jumping into the first project you come across and tackling it with gusto, whether or not it’s high value. Having too much caffeine with Adderall makes this effect much worse for me. A little bit of laziness is good! You need to be able to power through the tedious stuff you have to do in life, but you never want to stop thinking, “this is tedious and boring, do I really have to do this? Is there a better way?” It’s easy to lose the forest for the trees.

tomohawk 3y ago

I decided long ago to not take substances such as these, or even caffeine. I also abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and the like. This forced me to develop skills and discipline over the years to achieve self control, and this has more than paid off. I find I can work a 12 hour day, and then go in the next day and do the same. It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me - especially when I consider family members who are/were farmers where this is quite a normal work day and used to be quite normal for everyone until about WWII. Am I an outlier? I don't know, but I know others who have taken the same path with similar results. I've worked with many people who cannot function without caffeine, let alone other substances. They will often claim how it enhances their abilities, but it doesn't come across that way in my observations. They seem to be dependent on a substance for normal, or even sub-normal performance.

dboreham 3y ago
12 hours farming is not really the same as 12 hours figuring out k8s.
tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
The average farmer works less hours than the average office worker. This isn't even due to modern automation, it seems they have generally always worked <40 hours even during harvests. People began to work longer hours during industrialization and even then I can't find any time when working 12 hours a day was the norm.
- astrange 3y ago
  Generally speaking, people work more if they can get paid more by working more.

matznerd 3y ago

This study is about the amphetamine stimulants methylphenidate, dextroamphetamine, and the eugeroic (wakefulness agent) modafinil, and not about nootropics. Though the term smart drug can be inclusive of all of them... Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study showed (especially in a first time user). Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in an EEG)... See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man through the use of drugs" "Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had significantly increased." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/ Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG" "The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers, showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain functional processes." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/ Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm" "U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons during cognitive steps of information processing." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/

scythe 3y ago
The authors are rather unfair to modafinil, also, lumping it in with the other two even though the negative "effects" of modafinil were not statistically significant (except in the rather dubious case of the rank testing of "productivity deviations") and the mean deviation was very small. Also, the "value attained" is not available for modafinil specifically; for this criterion — which is the most believable, as it measures what participants actually tried to achieve — the drugs are all counted together, while on other measures they are listed separately. This is particularly disconcerting since the total value attained makes its way into the abstract and the press release yet gets shorted on the analysis.

narrator 3y ago

Meanwhile, in Russia they're making all kinds of smart drugs that work way better than the ones in the study: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de... Piracetam was also developed in Romania in the 60s. I don't like communism or anything, but the complete ignorance of the U.S medical system about drugs developed outside the United States that are now out of patent is just a tragedy. Luckily, in the 80s and 90s AIDS patients lobbied to let foreign drugs be imported because many of them worked better than the domestically developed AIDS drugs. What's weird is illegal drugs are vastly more popular and studied in the U.S, with the recent hallucinogen microdosing trend, than drugs that have been used safely for decades overseas.

Eumenes 3y ago

Kinda strange how they forgot to include the big stimulants, like Adderall and Vyvanse, in the study. My guess its impossible to incorporate a placebo with amphetamines. College kids are taking those, not Ritalin or Concerta, lol.

averageRoyalty 3y ago
This is an Australian study, so they used Australian brands. We don't have those. Two of the three tested drugs were amphetamines though, very similar to those you listed[0]. 0. https://bocarecoverycenter.com/treatment/understanding-add-adhd-medications/ https://bocarecoverycenter.com/treatment/understanding-add-a...

FFP999 3y ago

I spent a good deal of my 20s in an informal study on the cognitive effects of long-term self-prescribed amphetamine use. (Translation: I used to hang out with a whole lot of tweakers.) This article squares with my experience: amphetamines make your brain faster, not better.

karmakaze 3y ago

> All of the drugs also increased the number of times the participants moved items in and out of the knapsack. “Thus, if one measures motivation in terms of time spent or number of items moved, drugs clearly enhanced motivation,” the team writes. However, on average, the drugs did not increase ‘effort quality’ or productivity, measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move. Productivity was lower in all three drug conditions, compared with placebo. This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes sustained effort which is one of the increased behaviors. I'd like to see this done again with a different problem, a different metric, or simply their raw data. Now that I think about it, all of these types of reports should include the raw data or GTFO. This one seems to provide some on the referenced https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 > MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along with underlying data, can be found in the notebook “figures.mlx” and “SOM.mlx” of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835 https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
Why are you leaving out the rest of the performance criteria that the article mentions are done more poorly while on any of the drugs?

Jeff_Brown 3y ago

Two observations: (1) When studying, the extra time spent could outweigh the reduced quality of thought. (2) Not a new point but it's strange how you can take a drug and think it has one effect when it has another.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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michael1999 3y ago

How does a placebo for amphetamines work? I'd know the difference in 30 minutes.

insanitybit 3y ago
Good question. Adding a third control group that took caffeine would have been interesting, since it's so well studied and mimics some of the side effects of amphetamines.
GuB-42 3y ago
You can definitely get high with a placebo. I have seen people in festivals getting high just by touching people, the "explanation" being that the people were sweating the drugs and by touching enough of them, you get enough for yourself to get high. This is as convincing to me as homeopathy, so definitely placebo, and it happened to people who took these drugs before and are familiar with their effects. And here, they are not giving you a big dose of MDMA so you can dance until sunrise, they are giving you a moderate dose of amphetamines to (tentatively) boost your ability to solve a maths problem. Unless you have already trained yourself, don't overestimate your ability to discriminate, the placebo effect is really strong here.

insanitybit 3y ago

> The results showed that on average, the drugs didn’t affect the chance of a participant finding the solution to a knapsack problem. Contrary to perhaps many students’ expectations, however, participants tended to perform worse after taking one of the drugs, packing a lower total value of items. I have to assume that everyone who has taken these drugs could have predicted this, yeah? No one gets this drug and thinks "I will literally be more intelligent", they get them so that they can grind out 12 hours of work without being distracted by anything. 12 hours of work at 90% efficiency is way better than ~2 hours of work at 100% efficiency. > Not only that, but they spent substantially more time working on their solution while on the smart drugs than they did after taking the placebo. In fact, participants spent almost as much time on the easiest presentations of the knapsack task while on methylphenidate (Ritalin) as they did on the hardest instances of the task after taking the placebo, without any corresponding improvement in performance. As expected! One of the "traps" you have to be aware of when taking these medications is to be sure to not overfocus on things that don't matter. > The results have clear implications: healthy people who take these drugs hoping for cognitive gains may work harder and longer at a problem, but without any benefit. No way lol that is a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Without any benefit? Seriously? The benefits are massive.

Clubber 3y ago

This phenomenon reminds me of athletes taking steroids to improve their performance, or slave dock workers being given cocaine to improve their output. The problem with both is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive.

dragonwriter 3y ago
I'm going to disagree with you that the problem, or even the main problem among a wide array of problems, with slave dock workers being given cocaine to improve output is “it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive”.
- Clubber 3y ago
  If you read my comment with a little more discern rather than jumping to virtue signal, you'll see "the problem," I was referring to is taking performance enhancing drugs. There is no need for you to remind everyone that slavery was bad unless you just can't help yourself. >The problem with both is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Hey, I'm not the one who chose the analogy or the “with both"; if you would read what you wrote with more discernment before posting it, maybe we would have avoided this whole discussion.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      >The problem with both [examples of taking performance enhancing drugs, implied] is it requires other people to also take those drugs to be competitive. Writers..

ulizzle 3y ago

I don’t think amphetamines do that on their own, but rather over time the fatigue builds up and the drugs can’t mask it anymore. The issue with smart drugs is that high tolerance leads to psychosis much easier than you’d think.

sarasasa28 3y ago

why are americans so addicted to adderall

jobs_throwaway 3y ago
we love money, and adderall helps you focus on shit you don't care about in order to make money
astrange 3y ago
Generational effects from childhood lead exposure.

gehwartzen 3y ago

Having been on Adderall I agree with most here that it increases my executive function but doesn’t really make me smarter. I have a long history of experimenting with both legal and illicit drugs and the only one I found to actually significantly increase my cognitive ability to solve complex problems is low dose Ketamine. Low dose lsd/shrooms as well but to a much lesser degree.

Extropy_ 3y ago
I've found that small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms appear to calm me and allow me to "get in the zone" a lot better, as well as radically increase my creativity. I also found that low-dose MDMA, taken after eating, dramatically increased my focus and productivity while somewhat dulling my creativity. I've never tried LSD or Ketamine though.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Generally, there is no drug that can make you smarter. Psychedelics can help you explore different perspective, but thats just being equivalent to a Monte Carlo approach to problem solving. That being said, if you are ADHD, stimulants can essentially make you more efficient, which will make you appear smarter.

languagehacker 3y ago

A few important things to consider: Lumping all of the medications in question into a single study is disingenuous, and seems biased towards concluding their ineffectiveness. All three of the drugs in question have different mechanisms of action, which means that they will have a different effect on people with different brain chemistry. My read here is that if everyone takes all three and a placebo, performance may be enhanced in one case, but the remaining three cases can make the study come across as conclusive that on the whole, this course of treatment is ineffective. Not a lot of detail on the placebo and why it performs so much better, but I'm curious about the "nocebo" effect and subjects' prior exposure to the non-placebo dosage. In other words, is the feeling of being on a new "smart" drug too distracting to successfully take the test in question for the first time? The sample size is incredibly small at only 40 people, and skewed in terms of population. These were self-selecting individuals who responded to campus advertisements. This has been the modern critique of psychological experimentation in academia for decades, and I find it a little disparaging that we still have to suffer through it. I wish the HRB would ban things like campus advertisements as a means of recruiting test subjects -- we all really ought to know better by now. While the sequencing of studies on each individual helps to avoid some amount of sequence-based confounding variables, and the spacing of seven days between studies allows for a pretty decent return to homeostasis, the number of study participants is still too low to be conclusive. I'd need to see this study get repeated numerous times, at a larger scale, over individuals with a more consistent neurological history to be considered conclusive. I don't entirely buy the efficacy of working on individuals without any history of psychotropic medication or illicit drug use -- remember that this will rule out participants who have taken things like fluoxetine -- ruling out nearly 20% of adults in many countries -- or slightly skirted Australia's drug laws. These are people answering an ad on a college campus, likely for compensation. I don't think it's likely that all the subjects truthfully self-reported. If anything I'd expect the neurological variability of a fully unscreened or undiagnosed population to make it really truly hard to measure these drugs effectiveness. Given the mechanisms of action, I'd expect that the likely 20% of subjects with undiagnosed depression and additional likely 5% of individuals with undiagnosed ADHD would really throw a wrench in any conclusive numbers. I'm not trying to say that smart drugs are the answer to performing better at work. In fact, I'd expect a good night of sleep to make a bigger bump in these kinds of test scores. But I found the BPS is really jumping to conclusions based on what looks to me like very flimsy evidence. Testing on people is hard, but publishing summaries of articles that don't entirely stand on their own and drawing authoritative conclusions is incredibly easy.

T3RMINATED 3y ago

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Inviz 3y ago

Modafinil is a great tool to have in one's toolbelt. There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be very draining to work through if you need to load in the context every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great deal.

Volrath89 3y ago
True. I remember I used this back in the day when I was a pro online poker player. I would like to try again in Software, maybe to kickstart an indie project ... food for thought. How often do you use it and have you found any side effects? (or long term effects for that matter)
- Inviz 3y ago
  I use about 100mg (average amount) 2-4 days a week for the last 1.5 years, going through a very challenging project. I had a small stretch of time when my skin started drying up on the forehead and was peeling off in minor quantities, so i took a break for a month and it fixed it. Some of the days I may not take it and not notice it, there's definitely no cravings. But during a break I felt slightly hazy when getting off it. I do notice an increase in typical stimulator tell-tale symptoms (like some jaw clenching), but i do have that from coffee as well (which i drink too). There can be days when i'm too wired up to fall asleep fast, so i may drop a 5-htp pill. The upside is that there's a lot of times when I manage to really concentrate on some activities. Doing 8 hours shifts is trivial. People note that I am pretty responsive at the end of the working days. Quite often I manage to do some personal hobby work after a full working day too. Modafinil doesn't have the ecstatic effects of Adderall and its friends, so working a lot can make me feel overly emotionally invested into some things that are not important in a grand picture. The stress can add up if not managed well. So I do not recommend working a lot for working's sake, there has to be a cause to pull heroic stunts like this. My excuse is to save up the money to enable myself to do other activites not related to programming later.

cosmojg 3y ago

Everything's a trade-off. Most people who take stimulants regularly would be far less likely to even make an effort or make a decision without them. It seems obvious that the quality of an effort or decision will decrease in proportion when you take away all of the additional indecisive overthinking an individual would normally be doing instead of, y'know, actually doing the thing. Again, that's the trade-off, and I think most people are behaving rationally when they accept that deal. Until clinical psychology cracks how to simply teach the skills of "not overthinking," "staying singularly focused," and "maintaining a bias towards action," it would seem that we're stuck with stimulants for the foreseeable future.

ActorNightly 3y ago

Mandatory reading about Adderall https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

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epgui 3y ago

All other things being equal, I think slower thinking or decision-making is probably a very good thing. I mean it depends on what the goal and situation is, but I strongly believe that in general, fast thinking prioritizes heuristics over analysis and comes at an enormous (often unrecognized) cost.

nurettin 3y ago

So if you suspect that you took a "smart drug" and it is a placebo, you get smarter. Got it.

beefman 3y ago

I've long wished for more studies like this. So it's good to see. This one does miss some important variables: 1. Dose-dependent effects 2. Naive vs experienced users of a drug 3. Novel vs familiar task Though the authors spend a lot of time showing these stimulants reduce work efficiency, their central finding seems to be: "There was no significant effect of drug on performance" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165

zeroCalories 3y ago

My personal experience as someone diagnosed with ADHD is that they definitely make me more effective. My attention gets grabbed and redirected in inefficient ways, and being on the meds allows me to keep my focus fully on a task. But when I'm working on something I find exciting or fun, like a production failure, or a video game, I don't think my meds help me. Sometimes I wonder if my ADHD is even real.

fredgrott 3y ago

Seems suspicious as these are narco class drugs and the study gave them to those who did not have the condition for the medicine. Did they give the study participants ample warning that they could be addicted after one dose? Ah ah! ADHD'ers including me have double the amount of DATs and NATs you guys and gals do not! Its why I will not get addicted taking Ritalin, Adderall, etc and yet you in fact will!

tflinton 3y ago

I've been taking Adderall for a very long time. Prior to it I had a very difficult time motivating myself and simply being able to block out a thousand other thoughts and stimulus. I developed techniques to cope prior to taking it but once I started it was like night and day. It doesn't at all make me smarter but allows me to decide what I want to do rather than some sub-cognitive part of me. Should people take it to make them smarter? In my experience it helps focus, not intelligence.

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sneak 3y ago

When I hear “smart drugs” in a headline, I don’t think of amphetamines.

neilv 3y ago

Even in the '90s, I heard that a large percentage of CS undergrads were on prescription meds, such as Ritalin. A much larger percentage than you'd think would have an abnormal condition. I didn't ask many students about it, but my guess at the time was that it was for performance enhancement above typical human capability. And this was a bit before the current FAANG pressure to spend lots of time on Leetcode memorizing and rehearsing, in addition to coursework -- CS students only needed to get through their time-consuming lab-heavy courses, and then they could get a good job. (This was slightly before CS became one of the very high paying upper-middle careers, like medicine and law, which seemed to put high-stakes demands on undergrads' school performance.) Large numbers of people drugged-up for years, simply to pass status-career gatekeeping, doesn't seem like a great situation.

Webster09 3y ago

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AstralStorm 3y ago

First time I hear someone calling amphetamines smart drugs. Modafinil itself has weak to non-existent nootropic effect as well, and it only partially abates sleep deprivation. This effect of amphetamines on creativity and work quality is expected and has been described in the literature before. It gets worse when sleep deprived. They are best for repetitive boring work that requires alertness, not learning.