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ADHD Drugs Aren't Doing What You Think, Scientists Warn (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: The study authors Lisa Weyandt, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Rhode Island, and Tara White, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University, started out investigating the effects of ADHD medications in students that actually have a diagnosable attention deficit disorder. They showed that in these students, there is decreased activity in the areas of the brain controlling "executive functions," which can make it hard for them to stay organized or focused. But because both authors work with college students, they soon became more interested in the misuse of Adderall. In students whose brains aren't affected by ADHD, does Adderall act as a supercharger? Does it make those areas fly into overdrive and unlock otherwise untapped intellectual ability, as all pill-popping students hope?
Weyant and White's double-blind, placebo-controlled study on 13 college students was a small sample, they admit, but their experiment had a rigorous study design. Neither the students nor the researchers knew who was getting Adderall and who was getting placebo sugar pill. The six tests evaluated different aspects of cognition, like working memory, reading ability and reaction time. While students on Adderall did make fewer errors on a reaction time test, it actually worsened working memory, as shown by a decline in performance on a task where they had to repeat sequences of numbers. In short, Adderall improved focus and attention -- but it didn't actually make anyone smarter. The research has been published in the journal Pharmacy.
Weyant and White's double-blind, placebo-controlled study on 13 college students was a small sample, they admit, but their experiment had a rigorous study design. Neither the students nor the researchers knew who was getting Adderall and who was getting placebo sugar pill. The six tests evaluated different aspects of cognition, like working memory, reading ability and reaction time. While students on Adderall did make fewer errors on a reaction time test, it actually worsened working memory, as shown by a decline in performance on a task where they had to repeat sequences of numbers. In short, Adderall improved focus and attention -- but it didn't actually make anyone smarter. The research has been published in the journal Pharmacy.
" Adderall improved focus and attention -- but it didn't actually make anyone smarter." Presumably, you are reasonably smarter already, being accepted in college. So the real benefit is focus and attention, not "smarter".
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I've had a lot of teachers whose specialty was in this area, and honestly this is kind of the equivalent of 'We checked, water is wet.' ADHD is basically a bandwidth problem--people with attention deficit disorders (there's several) lack the standard suite of preprocessing filters on their incoming data. These normally are present to basically try to get you to stick with what (the filters judge to be) the important stuff in the incoming data is--without these filters, you're attempting to drink from the proverbial firehose. Hyperactivity is the most common method by which the brain attempts to cope--"Maybe if we move really really really fast we can get all this sorted!"
There's other strategies, too, such as 'shut down' and 'increase processing power' which have their own relative issues and your attention is still going to be not working like what is classed as 'normal'--in some populations, ADD is normal, because assumptions about what is/isn't important in your environment tended to get selected against instead of heavily agricultural populations where we strongly selected for the ability to not be too bothered by spending many hours staring at the hind end of a draft animal... It's not shot; you can get hyperfocus and flow, where your attention is very tightly focused on doing a task, vastly more easily than the normal population.
There is, however, one thing about this that's surprising--and that's that you get the same kind of effects in normal people. One of the old methods for confirming an ADD diagnosis is that you had an atypical reaction to stimulants...which Adderall and Ritalin are. To be specific, they're amphetamines...
Correct. A sample size of 13 is utterly worthless statistically. No useful information can be had from such an experiment.
Incorrect. A sample size of 13 does give statistically significant results (for a fairly specific version of significant), and is, in fact, the smallest sample size to do so.
It might never have occurred to you to wonder why legal trials have a judge and 12 people on a jury - making 13 people. Perhaps you should look into that: mathematically it's quite interesting.