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."

Re:Oh, great.....

[Martin Blank]

There's a gigantic difference between drugs like amphetamine and methamphetamine and drugs like modafinil (Provigil). They work in different ways, and decades of use by narcoleptic patients shows no significant addictiveness for modafinil (or its predecessor adrafinil, which metabolizes to modafinil). Amphetamine and methamphetamine have strong addictive potential as well as significant side-effects, including jumpiness, jitters, and irritability that are not found in modafinil. (That's not to say there are no side-effects to modafinil, but they are rare or uncommon.)

Re:phone number 7bit 8bit digit theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at George Miller's seminal work:

The Magic Number Seven, Plus or minus Two
http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/

This is psych 101 guys...

-Anymouse

Digits and Nootropics

[DynaSoar]

To first address the comments regarding number of digits in working memory: the "magic number" is 7 plus or minus 2, the variance being context dependent. To hold more items in memory, which people obviously do, they employ "chunking", or grouping them together and remembering the chunks in the necessary sequence. The 7 digit phone number was based on the original 7 digit idea, the grouping of area code XXX, prefix YYY, and last 4 ZZZZ was based on chunking. Since this chunking is a major action of attention and memory, simply adding a single digit to a single chunk is a weird way to claim improvement.

Yet once again an article on cognition enhancement fails to note its origins and long standing history. The first nootropic, hydergine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydergine [wikipedia.org] , was developed by Albert Hoffmann of Sandoz. While he is best known for LSD, his "problem child", he considered hydergine to be his most important discovery. He credited his longentivity (he died recently at age 102) to using hydergine regularly.

Re:Ritalin is a great study drug.

[Martin Blank]

Ritalin is methylphenidate. Speed is amphetamine (and sometimes methamphetamine, but that more commonly goes by other names). They work in different ways and have different effects.

Re:legalize it

[Martin Blank]

Adrafinil is legal to import for personal use. It is not legal to sell OTC (at least in the US).

Re:I don't like drugs

[crazybit]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viagra [wikipedia.org] :

"It was initially studied for use in hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina pectoris (a symptom of ischaemic cardiovascular disease). The first clinical trials were conducted in Morriston Hospital in Swansea. Phase I clinical trials under the direction of Ian Osterloh suggested that the drug had little effect on angina, but that it could induce marked penile erections. Pfizer therefore decided to market it for erectile dysfunction, rather than for angina."

Evidently doctors had little idea this reaction would happen... why? because we are just beginning to understand our own bodies.
They didn't knew some receptors will trigger when they encounter this substance.

That discovery was completely random, they NEVER expected it. They just gave heart patients a testing drug for their hearts, and the patients ended up with a boner.

Re:Withdrawal and Other Downsides?

[grammar fascist]

I can answer these questions on the average for Adderall and Dexedrine (dextroamphetamines) and Ritalin (methylphenidate).

What happens to your cognition once you stop taking it, after you've gotten used to taking it? Do you get a tolerance, so you not only need higher doses for a smarts boost, but you also just return to your base performance after getting used to it?

Tolerance is rarely an issue with the low doses given to treat ADHD. A couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that an average dose of Adderall (20mg) is about 1/10 an average "first hit" of meth or cocaine. Prescription medications are also designed to metabolize much more slowly than recreational drugs.

Tolerance mainly results from neurons being overexcited and altering receptor sites in response. (This is in fact how caffeine tolerance develops.) People who take these medications under a doctor's care are generally not overstimulated. In fact, with ADHD, because medication corrects understimulation it's usually not an issue at all.

I would be more worried about tolerance if the general population started on them, though.

What's the withdrawal like?

Usually a little mentally fuzzier than before medication and maybe a bit crankier. It lasts about half an hour to an hour. People report that Ritalin and Dexedrine have "rougher edges" than Adderall, which makes sense since Adderall is a mixture of amphetamine salts that metabolize at different rates.

I suspect that maybe the many kids given Ritalin while growing up learn to depend on it for their baseline. When they outgrow their "hyperactivity" (AKA "childhood"), they quit the drugs, and sink into an unfamiliar dullness in which they can't think at their previous baseline without the artificial stimulation.

If they don't outgrow ADHD and they need medication to function, they shouldn't stop.

However, often the medication does have a lasting effect, though not one that people with "OMG DRUGGIES!!!" in mind would predict. It can train your mind to mimic the patterns it gets used to while on medication. People will often lower their dosage over time, and some quit altogether. I'm not aware of anyone needing more until they're a prescription crack-head. Both anecdotal evidence and the literature (peer-reviewed studies) support this.

It also tends to train behavior. While on medication, functional behavior is much easier, and people who learn to function effectively while on medication have an easier time off of it than they did before medication.

Again, I wouldn't apply this to the general population, just to people who use medication to treat neurological problems.

And how much do they just get burned out from the steady drugging?

They only do if the dose is too high. The beautiful thing about stimulants at these dosages is that their cognitive effects don't last into the next day, except for the gradual effects I mentioned.

most people can hold seven random digits

[non]

i disagree. people can hold however many digits in their head as they are accustomed to holding. to say that the number of digits just _happens_ to coincide with the number of digits in an american phone number is obviously ethnocentric.

not only that, but people become accustomed to structuring that memory in different manners. is it 2-2-3, or 3-2-2. or 3-4. people remember strings of digits in the patterns that they learned as a child.

i learned an 11-digit number on first go last weekend, its a swiss telephone number dialed from overseas; 414354#####. what is this bullshit about adding an *extra* digit to one's memory?

Re:Oh, great.....

[NIckGorton]

That being said, natural drugs generally have little to no harm in comparison to many other synthetic drugs, mostly because huge pharmaceutical companies pay chemical engineers to find a cheap method to produce something found in nature, and thus their quantum structure, and even their chemical composition, can be altered so that the body does not respond well to it (but the drug works so they don't care).

Natural does not equal safe, and synthetic does not equal unsafe. That is the same logical fallacy that suggests that organic vegetables are safer than (inorganic?) ones. Personally I would rather my lettuce be farmed with synthetic fertilizer than cow shit teeming with E. coli.

What suggests best whether something is safe or unsafe is its track record. Period. That's why, you are often better off with a drug older than yourself rather than anything that big Pharma is currently advertising on TV. Initial marketing of a drug is the 'Phase 4' of safety testing. Once something has been out there for a decade, enough people have taken it that we know what it does, how it does it, and what the risks are. At that point, you can better decide whether the risks for you outweigh the benefits.

Also during post marketing surveillance, if the FDA finds that a drug is unsafe, they yank it. That same safety measure is significantly more difficult with 'natural supplements'. In fact, despite considerable evidence of danger the FDA is unable to stop the sale of aristolochia an herb conclusively linked to kidney failure and cancer, yohimbe a sexual stimulant linked to heart and respiratory problems, bitter orange whose ingredients have effects similar to the banned weight-loss supplement ephedra, chaparral, comfrey, germander, and kava who are all known or likely causes of liver failure.

So don't make the logical error of assuming that just because something is natural, its safe. Hell, small pox is 'natural'.

Re:Holy crap, 7 digits?

[greg_barton]

Perhaps it's something about treating a three digit number like a single concept.

It's called chunking [wikipedia.org]

Re:Oh, great.....

[aurispector]

You are so deluded about pharmacology, biochemistry, human physiology and science in general as to be swimming in complete and total bullshit. Both of your posts reek of "truthiness" rather than actual information.

A molocule is a molocule; why would a plant (or other "natural" source as opposed to a synthetic process) make a molocule better compatible with human physiology? Wouldn't the plant make molocules better suited to it's OWN physiology? The fact that naturally derived substances have any desirable pharmacologic effects on humans is entirely accidental. You get the same problems with undesirable by-products regardless of source. How do you know the plant doesn't produce OTHER substances that are pure poison to humans? Or what if the "poison" has desirable pharmocologic properties? Do you eat the plant in blind faith that all the contents are "natural" and therefore "safer" or do you attempt to isolate the desired molocule. Will you truly isolate it or will you have quantities of other undesirable substances. How do you remove the undesirable substances? What about stereochemistry? Often one enantiomer will have desirable properties while the other will not. Do plants magically produce the correct one for our use and edification? These are the same issues raised when producing a molocule synthetically.

And what's this about optimized concentration? What the hell does this mean? Do you know what a DOSE is? None of this makes sense. And this nonsense about quantum structure - could you please cite some reputable sources for this claim, or at least explain what it's supposed to MEAN? Have you ever taken even an undergraduate-level chemistry course? All of the issues you raise are already accounted for in current medical practice, backed up by controlled studies. Just because something is found in a plant doesn't mean it's magically better.

To quote Fat Freddy from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: "I don't trust anything that doesn't come in a nice, clean gelatin capsule"!