7 ms·

Brain Gain

55 points by rms 18y ago

rms 18y ago
Here is the Nature editorial mentioned towards the end of this article: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a
anigbrowl 18y ago
sounds like Freud's temporary conviction that cocaine was the key to liberating man from his natural limitations. What goes around comes around...I guess writers like these articles, because we're always on the cusp a social change, and there will always be new people trying drugs for the first time and getting some positive benefits. tl;dr; 'intellectuals get high like everyone else - film at 11'.
- metaguri 18y ago
  Indeed. I, as many others I'm sure, have always wondered if my inability to concentrate was ADHD (although I'm sure it's not). I liked the other article today (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893) about focus. I'm going to pick up a few of those books to see if I can get inspired, although I believe the key is doing concentration calisthetics. Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
  - anigbrowl 18y ago
    I have chronic case of ADHD (medically diagnosed) although I am not currently taking any drugs for it. Good habits help as do good tools (Gmail has literally lowered my blood pressure), but the most important aids are an understanding but challenging partner and/or employer. I don't think of it as a disorder but as a condition, neither good nor bad; I'm lucky enough to have a high IQ that allows me to exploit the upside and try not to use the downsides as an excuse for inactivity. Good second link. I have nothing bad to say about Dr. Hoffman's 'problem child'.
tokenadult 18y ago
"Alex was happy enough to talk about his frequent use of Adderall at Harvard, but he didn’t want to see his name in print; he’s involved with an Internet start-up, and worried that potential investors might disapprove of his habit." Does this sound to all of you like how start-up investors would react to this issue? Is it a plus or a minus to be known as a start-up founder who uses Adderall to perform?
- frossie 18y ago
  I am not an investor nor do I play one on TV, but that would worry me, sure. First, there is the issue of burnout or escalating addiction or withdrawal or all the usual problems that could threaten the business. Secondly, many VCs see investing in a startup not so much as an investment in the business, but in the founder(s). Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills? I view these kinds of mental stimulants the same way as I view make-up: you can't have it on all the time, it is a way of papering over problems, so why not learn to live your life without it? One of the ways you achieve maturity in life is by learning how to triage when there is simply too much to do. Popping pills is to life skills is what bulimia is to healthy eating: you might achieve the same result (success or thinness respectively), but kind of defeats the whole point.
  - asciilifeform 18y ago
    >Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills? Would you place your chips on a guy who can't see beyond arm's length without eyeglasses? How about one incapable of regulating his own blood sugar without insulin injections?
    - ciupicri 18y ago
      Good point, but you're still not 100% right because FBI for example requires its agents to have a pretty good vision (http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2 http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2).
      - 18y ago
jballanc 18y ago
Several pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs that target nicotine receptors in the brain, in the hope that they can replicate the cognitive uptick that smokers get from cigarettes. I can't count how many articles/studies/editorials I've seen on this topic in the past year. Here's the bottom line: Nicotine works. Caffeine too. Let me ask you this: Why is it that Nicotine consumption is a globally universal trend? While it doesn't qualify as biological evolution, societies must compete with each other, and apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning. Of course, this should be obvious. It's a stimulant. It keeps you awake, alert, and focused (and was, consequently, distributed freely to WWI and WWII armies). On top of that, aside from slightly decreased athletic endurance, it's only major down-side doesn't even factor in if you don't care about living past 55-60. Considering that, even non-tobacco users didn't have hope of doing much better then that until recently, tobacco is a net win. In other words, this isn't a new trend. It's a search for a safe tobacco alternative.
- anigbrowl 18y ago
  apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning Nicotine consumption is at least as acceptable in poor or slowly developing countries as in well-developed ones. Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy. France has many virtues, but is arguably excessively paternalistic. Sure, you do have a point. I just had a cigarette, so I am in no position to argue :-) That said, at 38 I'm painfully aware of the deleterious effects of smoking for the last 2 decades and unable to be flippant about this. On a broader level, it's worth considering that something like 40-50% of tobacco sales in the US are made to mentally ill people, who find chemical relief therein, but aren't necessarily better off from doing so. One might, with equal or greater historical basis, argue for the success of tea-drinking societies. Or marijuana. The bottom line is that the most productive people in society will find ways to leverage productivity out of drugs as much as anything else, while the least productive will substitute the feeling for the practice.
  - jballanc 18y ago
    * Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy.* You're not thinking like an evolutionary biologist. Sure, poor societies smoke same as successful ones, but where are the largely non-smoking societies? (...and no, the US doesn't count, seeing as how the anti-smoking movement is only a couple decades old) I'm not saying that smoking is a cure-all (HA!). What I'm saying is that, in the past, smoking seems to have been better than not. What's interesting is that, now that life past 60 is a very real possibility for some societies, will smoking still remain advantageous. Here, I would agree with you, that the answer is probably no.
octane 18y ago
I've tried all these drugs at one point or another during college, and let me tell you from first hand experience that coffee is the hands down winner. It's cheap, readily available, 100% legal, not regulated, delicious, and gives you motivation in addition to performance. Furthermore, you can do it with other people in a social setting and you can do it fairly regularly (every morning and lunch) without completely wrecking your biological sleep cycles. It warms you up on cold days, can cool you down on hot days, will refresh you on both, and there's a ton of cool paraphernalia associated with it that doesn't put you into creepy junkie territory. The most important of all: you have perfect recollection afterwards of what you did while on it.
- madcaptenor 18y ago
  And mathematicians turn it into theorems!
  - davidmathers 18y ago
    Not Paul Erdős!
SapphireSun 18y ago
This article makes me feel tired. This semester has worked me harder than I've ever worked in my life. It is scary how much I identify with the people mentioned in the article (minus the stimulants and the partying). After reading that so many people want to live the way I've been living for the past five months, I can't help but feel pity for the western world. Counter intuitively, working so hard makes me feel small, unimportant, and unhappy. None of the work I'm doing right now matters in the long run, but it forces me to abandon side projects that might be. For people to want to live their lives in this way for more than a few months to achieve specific goals seems extremely shallow. There is little in life, save saving your own life, that would warrant this kind of constant grinding effort. We should be creative, happy creatures, not constantly constrained by time and energy. All these drugs allow us to do is become the epitome of a World of Warcraft player. The marginal gains of these drugs(at the moment) do not appear to be worth it to me. A truly transformative neuroenhancer might be attractive, but it has yet to come.
- cubedice 18y ago
  In the exact same boat here. Using stimulants is the most obvious solution to meeting ever rising demands, but is it the best? I agree with you that working hard is a difficult pill to swallow (har har), especially when the benefits of said work are--at most--nebulous. Unfortunately, I am not smart or clever enough to avoid these traps of society and--like you--willingly grind myself into a soulless nub trying to work my way to the next level. My consolation (and perhaps yours too) is that going through this experience relatively early in life has taught me quite a bit about how things work. No one should need stimulants to achieve that.
- badger7 18y ago
  "This article makes me feel tired." I know something you could take for that...
trominos 18y ago
What do you guys think government policy should be on this stuff? I go back and forth. I generally think of myself as a civil libertarian, so my initial reaction is to say that "people can take care of themselves" and then to let things go, but I do think that the fact that concentration drugs provide significant competitive advantage in many fields of work and study (and the resulting pressure to use them to keep up) has the potential to be an enormous problem. I really don't want to live in a world where people have to choose between drugs and comparative failure.
- JacobAldridge 18y ago
  I'd also call myself libertarian, so lean towards 'people can take care of themselves' (which can also be translated as 'people can make their own mistakes'). In the artificial world of university, there may be an advantage to enhancers. Outside that world, there are some sectors where it may also be an advantage, probably within the same "twenty-four hour work cycle" paradigm the article mentioned. (Hacking constantly for your startup, perhaps) But for most people, I doubt any advantage would last past college. If I started popping Adderall my clients would wonder why I was suddenly so intense, and my wife would wonder why we don't relax watching dvds much any more - there's no advantage in the life I want to lead. But hey - if your startup is built on drugs and improves my life, go for it.
- Ardit20 18y ago
  The article mentions that we should have equal opportunities, namely people with low cognitive abilities should be able to enhance them so they can compete with those people whose nature has given high cognitive abilities. Perhaps, if cognition is something completely hereditary and nurture plays a very small role, then sure allow them to have equal capacity, but as the story of Alex clearly shows this does not create equal opportunity but unfair advantage and competition. The guy is able to go out there drink and party and then do the paper in a short time and not really gain the greater knowledge from lecturers. So he is hacking education and focusing on only these papers and gets better grades, but surely he is not a better man for the job than the person who spend his time studying and attending lectures although short of time failed to finish all the essays to a high standard. So I think they create unfair competition and advantage hence should be banned.
gilesgoatboy 18y ago
This just horrifies the ever-living fuck out of me. The cumulative effect of these drugs cannot be good for you. And the guy who considered it an incredible achievement to be able to correlate the idea of harmony as a religious value to the idea of harmony as a political value, it appalls me that anyone considers this to be the sign of a bright person. That's like a kid being proud he can tie his own shoes. I believe taking LSD made me a better programmer. I'm not going to tell anybody that you shouldn't take risks or explore. However - reading a shit-ton of books on programming probably had more to do with it, and a one-time (or several-time) dramatic shock to the system carries different risks than an ongoing habit. The risk of addiction is an insane risk to take. I think the question of what the government's policy should be is stupid and irrelevant. Nobody who reads Hacker News has to comply with drug laws. Drug laws only exist for harassing poor people, and everybody who reads this is a child of privilege. The whole point of drug laws is that if you criminalize something everybody does, then you can arrest anyone you want. Taking drug laws literally is a sign of incredible naivete. But the question, "is it safe?", that's an important question. There's no way in hell substantially altering your neurochemistry on a daily basis with unproven chemicals could be safe over the long term. There's always the chance that it could turn out OK, but there's no way in hell it could be safe. It is inherently risky, and the research necessary to determine just how risky, and what specifically those risks are, would take decades. Another important question: does it work? Most people who waste their time on this kind of insane bullshit are people who don't get enough sleep and don't know anything about meditation or deep relaxation. I think it'll be a really long god damn time before any pill comes along that can compete with meditation, deep relaxation, and getting enough sleep. These people are just asking for trouble. And all this bullshit at the end of the article, about, well, what if you're 56 and your competition's a 26-yr-old in Singapore taking cognitive enhancers? That's a good thing. I wish all my competition were inexperienced, naive, drugged to the gills, and incapable of speaking English. That would be fucking fantastic! Of course in an ideal world, my competition would also all be severely mentally retarded, but you can't have everything, and many of them code in Java, which is close enough.
jgfoot 18y ago
Instead of learning how to manage his time and show some discipline in committing to a reasonable schedule, this kid took neuroenhancers to help compensate for "partying all weekend, or spen[ding] the last week being high." Just as the kid who reads Cliffs Notes instead of The Iliad deprives himself of an intellectual experience, this guy deprived himself of the opportunity to train himself to develop natural work habits that he will need as he embarks on a career.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
asciilifeform 18y ago
http://yarchive.net/med/lifestyle_drugs.html http://yarchive.net/med/lifestyle_drugs.html
jaxn 18y ago
Adderall? How about Provigil. From what I understand the Navy uses Provigil for long-flight pilots to be able to stay awake and alert without clouded judgement. So, what if there were no discernible side effects? What if it was a just that just helped you stay focused and alert for longer hours?
xiaoma 18y ago
This article is idiotic. Adderall is not a neuroenhancer. It is not nootropipc. It's an anti-narcaleptic (something that keeps you from falling asleep). A true nootropic doesn't increase the amount of crappy work you can put out. It makes your brain capable of greater peak performance. At this time, there aren't many drugs that fit this category, but there are a few. Caffeine, for one, does have nootropic effects after long term use. In multiple long-term studies, it's been strongly correlated with extra "spindly" dendrite structure and enhanced short term memory. Probably the most effective well-research neuroenhancers are racetams(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetams) (such as piracetam). They aren't popular with struggling students because they're a long term treatment. I.e., they won't help with your test next Friday, but after months to years of use, they'll make you a smarter person. What Margaret Talbot did in this article would be akin to writing about athletic enhancers, ignoring things like steroids and just writing about people who take speed before the big game.

55 points by rms 18y ago

rms 18y ago

Here is the Nature editorial mentioned towards the end of this article: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a

anigbrowl 18y ago

sounds like Freud's temporary conviction that cocaine was the key to liberating man from his natural limitations. What goes around comes around...I guess writers like these articles, because we're always on the cusp a social change, and there will always be new people trying drugs for the first time and getting some positive benefits. tl;dr; 'intellectuals get high like everyone else - film at 11'.

metaguri 18y ago
Indeed. I, as many others I'm sure, have always wondered if my inability to concentrate was ADHD (although I'm sure it's not). I liked the other article today (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=570893) about focus. I'm going to pick up a few of those books to see if I can get inspired, although I believe the key is doing concentration calisthetics. Regarding other drugs and intellectuals, this article comes to mind as well: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70015
- anigbrowl 18y ago
  I have chronic case of ADHD (medically diagnosed) although I am not currently taking any drugs for it. Good habits help as do good tools (Gmail has literally lowered my blood pressure), but the most important aids are an understanding but challenging partner and/or employer. I don't think of it as a disorder but as a condition, neither good nor bad; I'm lucky enough to have a high IQ that allows me to exploit the upside and try not to use the downsides as an excuse for inactivity. Good second link. I have nothing bad to say about Dr. Hoffman's 'problem child'.

tokenadult 18y ago

"Alex was happy enough to talk about his frequent use of Adderall at Harvard, but he didn’t want to see his name in print; he’s involved with an Internet start-up, and worried that potential investors might disapprove of his habit." Does this sound to all of you like how start-up investors would react to this issue? Is it a plus or a minus to be known as a start-up founder who uses Adderall to perform?

frossie 18y ago
I am not an investor nor do I play one on TV, but that would worry me, sure. First, there is the issue of burnout or escalating addiction or withdrawal or all the usual problems that could threaten the business. Secondly, many VCs see investing in a startup not so much as an investment in the business, but in the founder(s). Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills? I view these kinds of mental stimulants the same way as I view make-up: you can't have it on all the time, it is a way of papering over problems, so why not learn to live your life without it? One of the ways you achieve maturity in life is by learning how to triage when there is simply too much to do. Popping pills is to life skills is what bulimia is to healthy eating: you might achieve the same result (success or thinness respectively), but kind of defeats the whole point.
- asciilifeform 18y ago
  >Would you place your chips on a guy who can't organise his life without the aid of pills? Would you place your chips on a guy who can't see beyond arm's length without eyeglasses? How about one incapable of regulating his own blood sugar without insulin injections?
  - ciupicri 18y ago
    Good point, but you're still not 100% right because FBI for example requires its agents to have a pretty good vision (http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2 http://www.fbijobs.gov/1113.asp#2).
    - 18y ago

jballanc 18y ago

Several pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs that target nicotine receptors in the brain, in the hope that they can replicate the cognitive uptick that smokers get from cigarettes. I can't count how many articles/studies/editorials I've seen on this topic in the past year. Here's the bottom line: Nicotine works. Caffeine too. Let me ask you this: Why is it that Nicotine consumption is a globally universal trend? While it doesn't qualify as biological evolution, societies must compete with each other, and apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning. Of course, this should be obvious. It's a stimulant. It keeps you awake, alert, and focused (and was, consequently, distributed freely to WWI and WWII armies). On top of that, aside from slightly decreased athletic endurance, it's only major down-side doesn't even factor in if you don't care about living past 55-60. Considering that, even non-tobacco users didn't have hope of doing much better then that until recently, tobacco is a net win. In other words, this isn't a new trend. It's a search for a safe tobacco alternative.

anigbrowl 18y ago
apparently those where nicotine consumption is socially acceptable are winning Nicotine consumption is at least as acceptable in poor or slowly developing countries as in well-developed ones. Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy. France has many virtues, but is arguably excessively paternalistic. Sure, you do have a point. I just had a cigarette, so I am in no position to argue :-) That said, at 38 I'm painfully aware of the deleterious effects of smoking for the last 2 decades and unable to be flippant about this. On a broader level, it's worth considering that something like 40-50% of tobacco sales in the US are made to mentally ill people, who find chemical relief therein, but aren't necessarily better off from doing so. One might, with equal or greater historical basis, argue for the success of tea-drinking societies. Or marijuana. The bottom line is that the most productive people in society will find ways to leverage productivity out of drugs as much as anything else, while the least productive will substitute the feeling for the practice.
- jballanc 18y ago
  * Lots of people smoke in Egypt, Greece, and France, but none of those countries is a trailblazing economy.* You're not thinking like an evolutionary biologist. Sure, poor societies smoke same as successful ones, but where are the largely non-smoking societies? (...and no, the US doesn't count, seeing as how the anti-smoking movement is only a couple decades old) I'm not saying that smoking is a cure-all (HA!). What I'm saying is that, in the past, smoking seems to have been better than not. What's interesting is that, now that life past 60 is a very real possibility for some societies, will smoking still remain advantageous. Here, I would agree with you, that the answer is probably no.

octane 18y ago

I've tried all these drugs at one point or another during college, and let me tell you from first hand experience that coffee is the hands down winner. It's cheap, readily available, 100% legal, not regulated, delicious, and gives you motivation in addition to performance. Furthermore, you can do it with other people in a social setting and you can do it fairly regularly (every morning and lunch) without completely wrecking your biological sleep cycles. It warms you up on cold days, can cool you down on hot days, will refresh you on both, and there's a ton of cool paraphernalia associated with it that doesn't put you into creepy junkie territory. The most important of all: you have perfect recollection afterwards of what you did while on it.

madcaptenor 18y ago
And mathematicians turn it into theorems!
- davidmathers 18y ago
  Not Paul Erdős!

SapphireSun 18y ago

This article makes me feel tired. This semester has worked me harder than I've ever worked in my life. It is scary how much I identify with the people mentioned in the article (minus the stimulants and the partying). After reading that so many people want to live the way I've been living for the past five months, I can't help but feel pity for the western world. Counter intuitively, working so hard makes me feel small, unimportant, and unhappy. None of the work I'm doing right now matters in the long run, but it forces me to abandon side projects that might be. For people to want to live their lives in this way for more than a few months to achieve specific goals seems extremely shallow. There is little in life, save saving your own life, that would warrant this kind of constant grinding effort. We should be creative, happy creatures, not constantly constrained by time and energy. All these drugs allow us to do is become the epitome of a World of Warcraft player. The marginal gains of these drugs(at the moment) do not appear to be worth it to me. A truly transformative neuroenhancer might be attractive, but it has yet to come.

cubedice 18y ago
In the exact same boat here. Using stimulants is the most obvious solution to meeting ever rising demands, but is it the best? I agree with you that working hard is a difficult pill to swallow (har har), especially when the benefits of said work are--at most--nebulous. Unfortunately, I am not smart or clever enough to avoid these traps of society and--like you--willingly grind myself into a soulless nub trying to work my way to the next level. My consolation (and perhaps yours too) is that going through this experience relatively early in life has taught me quite a bit about how things work. No one should need stimulants to achieve that.
badger7 18y ago
"This article makes me feel tired." I know something you could take for that...

trominos 18y ago

What do you guys think government policy should be on this stuff? I go back and forth. I generally think of myself as a civil libertarian, so my initial reaction is to say that "people can take care of themselves" and then to let things go, but I do think that the fact that concentration drugs provide significant competitive advantage in many fields of work and study (and the resulting pressure to use them to keep up) has the potential to be an enormous problem. I really don't want to live in a world where people have to choose between drugs and comparative failure.

JacobAldridge 18y ago
I'd also call myself libertarian, so lean towards 'people can take care of themselves' (which can also be translated as 'people can make their own mistakes'). In the artificial world of university, there may be an advantage to enhancers. Outside that world, there are some sectors where it may also be an advantage, probably within the same "twenty-four hour work cycle" paradigm the article mentioned. (Hacking constantly for your startup, perhaps) But for most people, I doubt any advantage would last past college. If I started popping Adderall my clients would wonder why I was suddenly so intense, and my wife would wonder why we don't relax watching dvds much any more - there's no advantage in the life I want to lead. But hey - if your startup is built on drugs and improves my life, go for it.
Ardit20 18y ago
The article mentions that we should have equal opportunities, namely people with low cognitive abilities should be able to enhance them so they can compete with those people whose nature has given high cognitive abilities. Perhaps, if cognition is something completely hereditary and nurture plays a very small role, then sure allow them to have equal capacity, but as the story of Alex clearly shows this does not create equal opportunity but unfair advantage and competition. The guy is able to go out there drink and party and then do the paper in a short time and not really gain the greater knowledge from lecturers. So he is hacking education and focusing on only these papers and gets better grades, but surely he is not a better man for the job than the person who spend his time studying and attending lectures although short of time failed to finish all the essays to a high standard. So I think they create unfair competition and advantage hence should be banned.

gilesgoatboy 18y ago

This just horrifies the ever-living fuck out of me. The cumulative effect of these drugs cannot be good for you. And the guy who considered it an incredible achievement to be able to correlate the idea of harmony as a religious value to the idea of harmony as a political value, it appalls me that anyone considers this to be the sign of a bright person. That's like a kid being proud he can tie his own shoes. I believe taking LSD made me a better programmer. I'm not going to tell anybody that you shouldn't take risks or explore. However - reading a shit-ton of books on programming probably had more to do with it, and a one-time (or several-time) dramatic shock to the system carries different risks than an ongoing habit. The risk of addiction is an insane risk to take. I think the question of what the government's policy should be is stupid and irrelevant. Nobody who reads Hacker News has to comply with drug laws. Drug laws only exist for harassing poor people, and everybody who reads this is a child of privilege. The whole point of drug laws is that if you criminalize something everybody does, then you can arrest anyone you want. Taking drug laws literally is a sign of incredible naivete. But the question, "is it safe?", that's an important question. There's no way in hell substantially altering your neurochemistry on a daily basis with unproven chemicals could be safe over the long term. There's always the chance that it could turn out OK, but there's no way in hell it could be safe. It is inherently risky, and the research necessary to determine just how risky, and what specifically those risks are, would take decades. Another important question: does it work? Most people who waste their time on this kind of insane bullshit are people who don't get enough sleep and don't know anything about meditation or deep relaxation. I think it'll be a really long god damn time before any pill comes along that can compete with meditation, deep relaxation, and getting enough sleep. These people are just asking for trouble. And all this bullshit at the end of the article, about, well, what if you're 56 and your competition's a 26-yr-old in Singapore taking cognitive enhancers? That's a good thing. I wish all my competition were inexperienced, naive, drugged to the gills, and incapable of speaking English. That would be fucking fantastic! Of course in an ideal world, my competition would also all be severely mentally retarded, but you can't have everything, and many of them code in Java, which is close enough.

jgfoot 18y ago

Instead of learning how to manage his time and show some discipline in committing to a reasonable schedule, this kid took neuroenhancers to help compensate for "partying all weekend, or spen[ding] the last week being high." Just as the kid who reads Cliffs Notes instead of The Iliad deprives himself of an intellectual experience, this guy deprived himself of the opportunity to train himself to develop natural work habits that he will need as he embarks on a career.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

asciilifeform 18y ago

http://yarchive.net/med/lifestyle_drugs.html http://yarchive.net/med/lifestyle_drugs.html

jaxn 18y ago

Adderall? How about Provigil. From what I understand the Navy uses Provigil for long-flight pilots to be able to stay awake and alert without clouded judgement. So, what if there were no discernible side effects? What if it was a just that just helped you stay focused and alert for longer hours?

xiaoma 18y ago

This article is idiotic. Adderall is not a neuroenhancer. It is not nootropipc. It's an anti-narcaleptic (something that keeps you from falling asleep). A true nootropic doesn't increase the amount of crappy work you can put out. It makes your brain capable of greater peak performance. At this time, there aren't many drugs that fit this category, but there are a few. Caffeine, for one, does have nootropic effects after long term use. In multiple long-term studies, it's been strongly correlated with extra "spindly" dendrite structure and enhanced short term memory. Probably the most effective well-research neuroenhancers are racetams(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetams) (such as piracetam). They aren't popular with struggling students because they're a long term treatment. I.e., they won't help with your test next Friday, but after months to years of use, they'll make you a smarter person. What Margaret Talbot did in this article would be akin to writing about athletic enhancers, ignoring things like steroids and just writing about people who take speed before the big game.