Steroids For Your Brain?

Marek Kohn suggests that’s the wrong way to think about “smart drugs” such as Adderall and Ritalin:

“I think people think about smart drugs the way they think about steroids in athletics,” [professor Amy] Arnsten says, “but it’s not a proper analogy, because with steroids you’re creating more muscle. With smart drugs, all you’re doing is taking the brain that you have and putting it in its optimal chemical state. You’re not taking Homer Simpson and making him into Einstein.”

Smart drugs have provoked anxiety about whether students who take drugs to enhance performance are cheating, and whether they will put pressure on their peers to do likewise to avoid being at a competitive disadvantage.

Yet some researchers point out these drugs may not be enhancing cognition directly, but simply improving the user’s state of mind – making work more pleasurable and enhancing focus. “I’m just not seeing the evidence that indicates these are clear cognition enhancers,” says Martin Sarter, a professor at the University of Michigan, who thinks they may be achieving their effects by relieving tiredness and boredom. “What most of these are actually doing is enabling the person who’s taking them to focus,” says Steven Rose, emeritus professor of life sciences at the Open University. “It’s peripheral to the learning process itself.”

Previous Dish on Adderall here, here, and here.