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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 s

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
    Ask yourself what is actually required to succeed in academia
    - FFP999 3y ago
      The ability to kowtow to corporate foundations to get funding?
    - bumby 3y ago
      Depends on level, no? Certainly it seems higher up (PhD or other research-oriented role), rote busy work may be necessary from time to time, but it also requires more creative work trying to synthesize new ideas.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        ADHD has too much creativity and barely any capacity for bulk, so trading a bit of that creativity to do the bulk work is worth it. Imagine if your brain refuses to do worthless uncreative work, that is ADHD, it is great for coming up with ideas but sucks for doing the work you often have to do.
        bumby 3y ago
        I agree with you there. But the thrust of the article was using drugs as “cognitive enhancers” not to treat a medical condition of ADHD. Bringing someone up to baseline is one thing, but this is not that.
  - breakfastduck 3y ago
    I think you're missing the point. If you struggle with ADHD / executive dysfunction, there is a material benefit to measuring by those in that kind of job. Ultimately it is not that you're at a normal baseline and these things just make you do more busy work, it's that you struggle to keep up with so many competing priorities and demands that you end up dealing with none of it. So yes, for this purpose, that measure is worthwhile in this case.
- pookha 3y ago
  I get distracted easier if my diet is awful (which it has been in the past)... Refined carbs, sugar, tap water (fluoride in tap water is insane:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/) and highly processed foods. Switch to a diet high in nitric oxide and run and I'm a much better problem solver. And I have no desire to work "for fourteen straight hours" and I'll find another job if I'm being asked too.
  - satellite2 3y ago
    The study on fluoride level is basically garbage. It's pure randomness and the IQ level is probably only correlated to the affluence of the region. Just look at the results https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/table/T1/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/table/T... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/figure/G2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/figure/...
    - pookha 3y ago
      What about these? https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/bsc/2023/fluoride/documents_provided_bsc_wg_031523.pdf https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/... "This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher fluoride exposure (e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure approximates or exceeds the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) is consistently associated with lower IQ in children." https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25446012/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25446012/ You don't seriously think that drinking fluoride is OK? It's been studied to death and it's obvious at this point that long term fluoride exposure causes developmental neurotoxicity. Multiple countries have sponsored these studies and they show negative correlations to IQ and an increase in fluoride. They've demonstrated this in rats with sodium fluoride as well.
      - satellite2 3y ago
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them. The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes. The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state. The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first. A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
nicoburns 3y ago
Yes, which makes sense because we rarely reward people for making high quality decisions. And this is especially the case within academic contexts.
The_Colonel 3y ago
Yeah, exactly. I take modafinil, and it doesn't make me smarter in the sense of "fluid" intelligence, it just gives me the ability to last longer on mental tasks. I used to be completely mentally exhausted after a single meeting, modafinil fixes that for me. It makes me smarter in the sense of "crystallized" intelligence as a consequence of accumulating more knowledge, experience, mental models etc. There's also the problem of getting used to the drug. When I first started taking it, there were various side effects (including perceived worsened short term memory), which subsided with time.
- thelittleone 3y ago
  I used to get great results from modafinil. But it slowed to the point of having no effect at all. Was concerned I was getting fake ones. So went to India where its made, bought from source and same thing. This was years after I had stopped already. But I'm grateful for the focus it gave me for 3 or 4 years.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Long term tolerance... When I found Ibometin as a remedy for occasional headaches, I could only take half a pill and had to actually ly down because it felt rather strong. These days, I can eat two and dont even notice the ffects. And no, I dont take it regularily, more like every 2 or 3 months.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      I wonder if for some of these drugs it may not be a tolerance effect, but perhaps the drugs are just doing what they are going to do (a long-term physiological change) and after that point no longer have an effect. Like growth hormones after bone plates have fused.
      - AstralStorm 3y ago
        Most of those do not affect neurogenesis (some exceptions apply), but some can be outright neurotoxic chronically, potentially by excitotoxicity. Which means oxidative stress on neurons impairing their function. A bunch of strong serotonergics produce such effects. Normally SSRI are screened for it, but that's mostly for acute version... Dose scheduling is underresearched part of the whole ordeal. Sometimes a pause is necessary to prevent the damage or recerse the tolerance.
michaelt 3y ago
> it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to Isn't the point of doing that to get better results? I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy; but I actually learn more by doing the former than the latter - nobody taking study drugs is hoping to spend twice as long for worse results.
- criddell 3y ago
  Think of it this way. Say unaided, you can get to 85% proficiency in 6 hours and that's about all you can sustain. With smart drugs, you only get to 75% proficiency in 6 hours but can keep going and will hit 95% in 9 hours. Think of it like a pick up truck with two gas tanks. It is less efficient than a small car but because of the larger tank it has more range.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; Many people using this kind of drugs normally lasted maybe 1 hour or so before giving up (without the drugs). And it often took a long ramp-up to even get to that 1 hour of focus. > and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy I guess this is maybe the case when your body isn't yet accustomed to the drug. I don't have any such issue after I got used to the drug (in my case modafinil).
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I would replace the word "learn" with memorize here. You aren't rewarded in school for learning, you are rewarded for information regurgitation. The point of taking Ritalin is to improve this capacity. Learning is secondary to passing in school
  - Loggias 3y ago
    This isn’t really the case for some college degrees. You cannot be successful in engineering e.g., specifically ME (in my case), through memorization alone. For many degrees, you’re absolutely correct though. I remember being envious of such workloads in college simply because of the idea that time spent studying directly correlates to your grade. Engineering degrees, in general, simply show that you know how to learn. Memorization is helpful but alone is not enough to understand concepts and apply them. Memorizing formulas vs. being able to derive them is a good example here.
tiahura 3y ago
Read the paper, or at least the abstract before you criticize researchers for misunderstanding. They were testing performance on the knapsack problem.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  No one is taking these drugs to improve their performance on the knapsack problem. They're taking them so they can work for 15 hours straight without being distracted. It doesn't make any sense to say they don't work when the test is completely irrelevant.
  - thruway516 3y ago
    They didn't say it doesn't work. They said it seems to make you dumber, at least on certain tasks - not the same thing as 'it doesn't work for studying or distraction'. Their findings are pretty interesting and relevant, at least for correcting a mis-perception that not a few people have about those drugs and what they're supposed to do (many people call them 'smart' drugs).
sheepscreek 3y ago
“Smart drugs” is a poor choice of words to describe them. They are really “executive function support drugs”. Even on them, a person will need to consciously make healthy choices. These drugs do not magically help you think smart. That still has to come from you. If anything, I feel ever so slightly “dumber” on them. They dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more fulfilling. Even if it’s a waste of my time but something I must do. The experience is more fulfilling. I reckon it’s the extra dopamine at play. Regardless, xyz is still my decision and I can very much pick an unhealthy thing. Drugs don’t aid your prioritization skills. They don’t improve your communication. Those are skills that have to be learned. Maybe not, if you won an organized parent lottery. Then at least you will know what good looks like, and can learn to emulate that.
- cvdub 3y ago
  Super accurate description! I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate, but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.
- somestag 3y ago
  Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants counteract. I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others. This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.
  - garciasn 3y ago
    > This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics. That's why some folks say they take psychedelics; they want to justify their drug use for 'fun' as something more beneficial. I wish people were more honest with themselves and others.
throw1234651234 3y ago
Reading all this, it feels like these basically do the same thing as drinking an energy drink, minus the 20point blood pressure spike and tooth destruction. I am theoretically very much against all of this except in absolutely extreme cases. https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd/#:~:text=One%20main%20aspect%20in%20the,causes%20in%20the%20behaviors%20themselves https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-adh....
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Change the person for the social environment, or change the social environment for the person. Very odd that in the US "land of the free" we chose to former. > Numbers in America show that at least 9% of the children that are school-age are diagnosed with the disorder That percentage seriously makes me think that we might be overdiagnosing based on personality type instead of just diagnosing based on underlying disorders. Either that or US schools are very different than French schools.
- cvdub 3y ago
  The article you linked is ridiculous… > There’s also the differences in how children are brought up in America and in France. For example, French parents have set strict limits from the time they are born. The children are raised with limits such as not being allowed to snack whenever they want. They have four strict meal times and they know those are the times they are allowed to eat, not before. While they love their children just as much as others do, they do believe in forced strict limitations to help the children grow up in guidelines and feel safe and secure. Really?
  - throw1234651234 3y ago
    In terms of whether these things actually make a difference in how likely a child is to seem "ADHD" - yes, really. Controlling inhibitions and not being on a constant insulin spike ride from snacking helps stay focused. I have also had a number of friends with "ADHD" for whom the solution was "cut sugar, sleep enough, go into a room with no electronics (or a user account with nothing else installed), do some cardio". I am not denying the existence of ADHD, but as a society, we look for shortcuts to problems that have real solutions and are therefore more likely to just pop a pill. See the sister comment, it addresses this too. And furthermore - yes, cutting screen time in children dramatically increases their ability to focus later in life.
insanitybit 3y ago
The problem with these tests is that the students participating are likely already very motivated. School is something we do for the first ~20 years of our life, it's hard to replicate how fucking boring and unmotivating it is in a lab.
hn8305823 3y ago
Makes sense since the entire point of school is to give you enough executive function to perform well in society. Learning can happen too, but school is obviously not optimized for that.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
It's my feeling that stimulant use in healthy people is rarely functional at all. I've seen a fair amount of friends try this, and generally very little is gained. Often they end up focused on something completely different than they intended. E.g they wanted to start some music before studying, then they ended up spending 5 hours making The Perfect Playlist. Stimulants make you very distractable that way. It can be very hard to control what you end up focusing on. In addition, when able to focus, the quality of work still suffers from several factors such as sleep deprivation and the fact that you forgot to eat or even drink for the last several hours. I've never seen code written in one of these stimulant fueled all-nighters that didn't create more work than it took to write. The only exception I've found is for doing housework and other mindless, repetitive tasks.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Right, no one calls these "smart drugs". They're called study drugs, because they help you focus for long periods of time.
- bigtunacan 3y ago
  That's maybe a location thing. I've never heard them referred to as "study drugs", but often heard then referred to as "smart drugs".
mattmaroon 3y ago
And to stay awake longer.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
Fun fact about the knapsack problem - it's what you're solving in a lot of video games when you do inventory management.
setgree 3y ago
You're right about the average user's mentality, but there's value in publishing this kind of research for anyone who didn't get the memo, e.g. Caroline Ellison, who once wrote: "Nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is" [0]. The implicit contrast to 'dumb' here is smart. [0] https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408 https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/13790363463003054...
- thruway516 3y ago
  Someone should also do a study to see if using 'smart' drugs over time lowers the criminal inhibitions of chronic abusers. SBF, Caroline Ellison and that whole gang, that Razzlekhan lady. It's funny how they all seemed smart but were ultimately just building a house of cards. I wonder if that is also an effect of long-term use.
oooyay 3y ago
> 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. imo, that's kind of a dangerous assertion. I'm an adult in his thirties. I take Adderall because I have a genuine loss in executive function at times. A small dose of Adderall (read: less than 2mg) puts me back on track where I can deeply focus, understand, and interpret things. There's certainly people I've seen abuse the drug, but I don't think it's safe to say that the results of Adderall are quantity over quality and frankly the abuse of the drug often doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in people that aren't very substance aware in the first place.
thruway516 3y ago
They did not misinterprete anything. They said it reduced the 'quality' of effort and increased the time to find a correct solution. It is you who misread the title as "Ritalin does not work for students".
didntknowya 3y ago
yeh even for coffee or energy drinks. many take it to study for longer, rather than have a better study session.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
So, if someone were dumb enough to procrastinate, it helps them study in the least effective way? Pharmaceutical advertising is so effective…

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
  Ask yourself what is actually required to succeed in academia
  - FFP999 3y ago
    The ability to kowtow to corporate foundations to get funding?
  - bumby 3y ago
    Depends on level, no? Certainly it seems higher up (PhD or other research-oriented role), rote busy work may be necessary from time to time, but it also requires more creative work trying to synthesize new ideas.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      ADHD has too much creativity and barely any capacity for bulk, so trading a bit of that creativity to do the bulk work is worth it. Imagine if your brain refuses to do worthless uncreative work, that is ADHD, it is great for coming up with ideas but sucks for doing the work you often have to do.
      - bumby 3y ago
        I agree with you there. But the thrust of the article was using drugs as “cognitive enhancers” not to treat a medical condition of ADHD. Bringing someone up to baseline is one thing, but this is not that.
- breakfastduck 3y ago
  I think you're missing the point. If you struggle with ADHD / executive dysfunction, there is a material benefit to measuring by those in that kind of job. Ultimately it is not that you're at a normal baseline and these things just make you do more busy work, it's that you struggle to keep up with so many competing priorities and demands that you end up dealing with none of it. So yes, for this purpose, that measure is worthwhile in this case.
pookha 3y ago
I get distracted easier if my diet is awful (which it has been in the past)... Refined carbs, sugar, tap water (fluoride in tap water is insane:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/) and highly processed foods. Switch to a diet high in nitric oxide and run and I'm a much better problem solver. And I have no desire to work "for fourteen straight hours" and I'll find another job if I'm being asked too.
- satellite2 3y ago
  The study on fluoride level is basically garbage. It's pure randomness and the IQ level is probably only correlated to the affluence of the region. Just look at the results https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/table/T1/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/table/T... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/figure/G2/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/figure/...
  - pookha 3y ago
    What about these? https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/bsc/2023/fluoride/documents_provided_bsc_wg_031523.pdf https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/ntp/about_ntp/... "This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher fluoride exposure (e.g., represented by populations whose total fluoride exposure approximates or exceeds the World Health Organization Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality of 1.5 mg/L of fluoride) is consistently associated with lower IQ in children." https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25446012/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25446012/ You don't seriously think that drinking fluoride is OK? It's been studied to death and it's obvious at this point that long term fluoride exposure causes developmental neurotoxicity. Multiple countries have sponsored these studies and they show negative correlations to IQ and an increase in fluoride. They've demonstrated this in rats with sodium fluoride as well.
    - satellite2 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
> and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them. The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes. The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state. The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first. A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
- WalterBright 3y ago

nicoburns 3y ago

Yes, which makes sense because we rarely reward people for making high quality decisions. And this is especially the case within academic contexts.

The_Colonel 3y ago

Yeah, exactly. I take modafinil, and it doesn't make me smarter in the sense of "fluid" intelligence, it just gives me the ability to last longer on mental tasks. I used to be completely mentally exhausted after a single meeting, modafinil fixes that for me. It makes me smarter in the sense of "crystallized" intelligence as a consequence of accumulating more knowledge, experience, mental models etc. There's also the problem of getting used to the drug. When I first started taking it, there were various side effects (including perceived worsened short term memory), which subsided with time.

thelittleone 3y ago
I used to get great results from modafinil. But it slowed to the point of having no effect at all. Was concerned I was getting fake ones. So went to India where its made, bought from source and same thing. This was years after I had stopped already. But I'm grateful for the focus it gave me for 3 or 4 years.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Long term tolerance... When I found Ibometin as a remedy for occasional headaches, I could only take half a pill and had to actually ly down because it felt rather strong. These days, I can eat two and dont even notice the ffects. And no, I dont take it regularily, more like every 2 or 3 months.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I wonder if for some of these drugs it may not be a tolerance effect, but perhaps the drugs are just doing what they are going to do (a long-term physiological change) and after that point no longer have an effect. Like growth hormones after bone plates have fused.
    - AstralStorm 3y ago
      Most of those do not affect neurogenesis (some exceptions apply), but some can be outright neurotoxic chronically, potentially by excitotoxicity. Which means oxidative stress on neurons impairing their function. A bunch of strong serotonergics produce such effects. Normally SSRI are screened for it, but that's mostly for acute version... Dose scheduling is underresearched part of the whole ordeal. Sometimes a pause is necessary to prevent the damage or recerse the tolerance.

michaelt 3y ago

> it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to Isn't the point of doing that to get better results? I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy; but I actually learn more by doing the former than the latter - nobody taking study drugs is hoping to spend twice as long for worse results.

criddell 3y ago
Think of it this way. Say unaided, you can get to 85% proficiency in 6 hours and that's about all you can sustain. With smart drugs, you only get to 75% proficiency in 6 hours but can keep going and will hit 95% in 9 hours. Think of it like a pick up truck with two gas tanks. It is less efficient than a small car but because of the larger tank it has more range.
The_Colonel 3y ago
> I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; Many people using this kind of drugs normally lasted maybe 1 hour or so before giving up (without the drugs). And it often took a long ramp-up to even get to that 1 hour of focus. > and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy I guess this is maybe the case when your body isn't yet accustomed to the drug. I don't have any such issue after I got used to the drug (in my case modafinil).
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I would replace the word "learn" with memorize here. You aren't rewarded in school for learning, you are rewarded for information regurgitation. The point of taking Ritalin is to improve this capacity. Learning is secondary to passing in school
- Loggias 3y ago
  This isn’t really the case for some college degrees. You cannot be successful in engineering e.g., specifically ME (in my case), through memorization alone. For many degrees, you’re absolutely correct though. I remember being envious of such workloads in college simply because of the idea that time spent studying directly correlates to your grade. Engineering degrees, in general, simply show that you know how to learn. Memorization is helpful but alone is not enough to understand concepts and apply them. Memorizing formulas vs. being able to derive them is a good example here.

tiahura 3y ago

Read the paper, or at least the abstract before you criticize researchers for misunderstanding. They were testing performance on the knapsack problem.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
No one is taking these drugs to improve their performance on the knapsack problem. They're taking them so they can work for 15 hours straight without being distracted. It doesn't make any sense to say they don't work when the test is completely irrelevant.
- thruway516 3y ago
  They didn't say it doesn't work. They said it seems to make you dumber, at least on certain tasks - not the same thing as 'it doesn't work for studying or distraction'. Their findings are pretty interesting and relevant, at least for correcting a mis-perception that not a few people have about those drugs and what they're supposed to do (many people call them 'smart' drugs).

sheepscreek 3y ago

“Smart drugs” is a poor choice of words to describe them. They are really “executive function support drugs”. Even on them, a person will need to consciously make healthy choices. These drugs do not magically help you think smart. That still has to come from you. If anything, I feel ever so slightly “dumber” on them. They dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more fulfilling. Even if it’s a waste of my time but something I must do. The experience is more fulfilling. I reckon it’s the extra dopamine at play. Regardless, xyz is still my decision and I can very much pick an unhealthy thing. Drugs don’t aid your prioritization skills. They don’t improve your communication. Those are skills that have to be learned. Maybe not, if you won an organized parent lottery. Then at least you will know what good looks like, and can learn to emulate that.

cvdub 3y ago
Super accurate description! I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate, but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.
somestag 3y ago
Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants counteract. I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others. This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.
- garciasn 3y ago
  > This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics. That's why some folks say they take psychedelics; they want to justify their drug use for 'fun' as something more beneficial. I wish people were more honest with themselves and others.

throw1234651234 3y ago

Reading all this, it feels like these basically do the same thing as drinking an energy drink, minus the 20point blood pressure spike and tooth destruction. I am theoretically very much against all of this except in absolutely extreme cases. https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-adhd/#:~:text=One%20main%20aspect%20in%20the,causes%20in%20the%20behaviors%20themselves https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-adh....

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
Change the person for the social environment, or change the social environment for the person. Very odd that in the US "land of the free" we chose to former. > Numbers in America show that at least 9% of the children that are school-age are diagnosed with the disorder That percentage seriously makes me think that we might be overdiagnosing based on personality type instead of just diagnosing based on underlying disorders. Either that or US schools are very different than French schools.
cvdub 3y ago
The article you linked is ridiculous… > There’s also the differences in how children are brought up in America and in France. For example, French parents have set strict limits from the time they are born. The children are raised with limits such as not being allowed to snack whenever they want. They have four strict meal times and they know those are the times they are allowed to eat, not before. While they love their children just as much as others do, they do believe in forced strict limitations to help the children grow up in guidelines and feel safe and secure. Really?
- throw1234651234 3y ago
  In terms of whether these things actually make a difference in how likely a child is to seem "ADHD" - yes, really. Controlling inhibitions and not being on a constant insulin spike ride from snacking helps stay focused. I have also had a number of friends with "ADHD" for whom the solution was "cut sugar, sleep enough, go into a room with no electronics (or a user account with nothing else installed), do some cardio". I am not denying the existence of ADHD, but as a society, we look for shortcuts to problems that have real solutions and are therefore more likely to just pop a pill. See the sister comment, it addresses this too. And furthermore - yes, cutting screen time in children dramatically increases their ability to focus later in life.

insanitybit 3y ago

The problem with these tests is that the students participating are likely already very motivated. School is something we do for the first ~20 years of our life, it's hard to replicate how fucking boring and unmotivating it is in a lab.

hn8305823 3y ago

Makes sense since the entire point of school is to give you enough executive function to perform well in society. Learning can happen too, but school is obviously not optimized for that.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

It's my feeling that stimulant use in healthy people is rarely functional at all. I've seen a fair amount of friends try this, and generally very little is gained. Often they end up focused on something completely different than they intended. E.g they wanted to start some music before studying, then they ended up spending 5 hours making The Perfect Playlist. Stimulants make you very distractable that way. It can be very hard to control what you end up focusing on. In addition, when able to focus, the quality of work still suffers from several factors such as sleep deprivation and the fact that you forgot to eat or even drink for the last several hours. I've never seen code written in one of these stimulant fueled all-nighters that didn't create more work than it took to write. The only exception I've found is for doing housework and other mindless, repetitive tasks.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Right, no one calls these "smart drugs". They're called study drugs, because they help you focus for long periods of time.

bigtunacan 3y ago
That's maybe a location thing. I've never heard them referred to as "study drugs", but often heard then referred to as "smart drugs".

mattmaroon 3y ago

And to stay awake longer.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

Fun fact about the knapsack problem - it's what you're solving in a lot of video games when you do inventory management.

setgree 3y ago

You're right about the average user's mentality, but there's value in publishing this kind of research for anyone who didn't get the memo, e.g. Caroline Ellison, who once wrote: "Nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is" [0]. The implicit contrast to 'dumb' here is smart. [0] https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1379036346300305408 https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/13790363463003054...

thruway516 3y ago
Someone should also do a study to see if using 'smart' drugs over time lowers the criminal inhibitions of chronic abusers. SBF, Caroline Ellison and that whole gang, that Razzlekhan lady. It's funny how they all seemed smart but were ultimately just building a house of cards. I wonder if that is also an effect of long-term use.

oooyay 3y ago

> 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. imo, that's kind of a dangerous assertion. I'm an adult in his thirties. I take Adderall because I have a genuine loss in executive function at times. A small dose of Adderall (read: less than 2mg) puts me back on track where I can deeply focus, understand, and interpret things. There's certainly people I've seen abuse the drug, but I don't think it's safe to say that the results of Adderall are quantity over quality and frankly the abuse of the drug often doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in people that aren't very substance aware in the first place.

thruway516 3y ago

They did not misinterprete anything. They said it reduced the 'quality' of effort and increased the time to find a correct solution. It is you who misread the title as "Ritalin does not work for students".

didntknowya 3y ago

yeh even for coffee or energy drinks. many take it to study for longer, rather than have a better study session.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

So, if someone were dumb enough to procrastinate, it helps them study in the least effective way? Pharmaceutical advertising is so effective…