Cognition Enhancer Research

oschobero writes to tell us the Economist has a look at pharmaceutical research as it applies to cognition enhancers. While the research is obviously focused on things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia, the resulting drugs may also have a benefit to healthy minds. "Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual's working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people's performance in tests of their ability to plan. Because of such positive effects on normal people, says the report, there is growing use of these drugs to stave off fatigue, help shift-workers, boost exam performance and aid recovery from the effects of long-distance flights."

Comments

One small problem...

[Penguinisto]

Taking a somewhat little-understood psychotropic drug for treatment of illness is one thing (especially when prescribing it to children), but it is another thing entirely to start talking it up as a performance enhancer.

What is the long-term (or even all of the short-term) effects of this? IIRC, Ritalin comes with a bucketload of side effects.

I guess that drugs specifically made for the mind start (at least for me) creeping deeper and deeper into questions of morality and ethics than one designed to treat any other body part. Just something that makes me a bit wary about them... For instance, is an "enhanced" person more susceptible to suggestion than otherwise? Are they more focused on the task at hand, but not as aware of their surroundings? How does it affect multitasking? Emotions? Attitude and outlook?

Dunno... but caffeine seems to work just fine for me, and I get to keep a clear mind which I retain full control of while I'm at it.

/P

Re:Oh, great.....

[aurispector]

There are no completely safe drugs, there are no drugs without side effects. That being said, even if these drugs are significantly safer, it just seems to be a bad idea to depend on drugs to run your everyday life. The line between theraputic and recreational use is blurring.

If I had to take non-theraputic medications to perform my job I'd get a different job.

Re:Ritalin is a great study drug.

[Beefpatrol]

I've been learning the same kinds of things with one of the ADD stimulants and an antidepressant for the last few years. One of the best things about these drugs is that they show you what "the other side" feels like. When you've been predominantly in one mode every day since puberty, it can be impossible to even understand what people mean when they ask simple questions about what you are going to do. For instance, there was always cognitive dissonance when a manager would ask me something like, "can you do thing X by deadline D?" My mental answer to a rhetorical question like that was always something like: "maybe." I usually answered verbally in the affirmative because I was aware that it was expected that I would, despite knowing that the actual answer was not so clear. In situations like that, I always felt like I had entered another dimension where people continuously behave in ways that don't make sense. The reason for this, I later found out, was because most of the time, normal people can say "yes" or "no" to a question like that and be sure that unless something extremely unusual were to happen, they would be correct; they either can do it, or they can't, and they know ahead of time which is true. Their reasons for saying "yes" or "no" didn't usually include thoughts like: "technically yes, and I've done it before -- it is actually pretty easy, but my track record for managing to do it is dismal for reasons that I don't understand, so an objective interpretation of the data suggests that a long-winded and unsatisfactory answer that indicates that I really don't know if I will do X by deadline D, and that the reasons for this are beyond my realm of comprehension, is what my reply *should* be, but I'm going to say yes anyway because any other response is going to piss people off. I absolutely hate corporate America -- this kind of weird asking of questions that are obviously unanswerable in an honest fashion must mean that either people are screwing with me or they are intensely stupid."

I didn't realize all this in a concrete manner until somewhere in my late 20s after trying some of these drugs that made things like mental crises, and the utter inability to turn my brain off to focus or sleep optional. I've since taken them on and off as necessary, but being able to intuitively understand what it means to be able to cause one's actions to align with one's intentions on a regular basis is invaluable. I can say with complete honesty that I really didn't understand how the world worked before.