![]() Whether it’s taking Ritalin to cram for a test, or Adderall to manage working a night shift, these medications have acquired a reputation as "smart drugs," capable of helping people perform better at complicated tasks, even when they don’t have ADHD, a perception that has persisted in spite of a lack of evidence. ![]() “Our research shows drugs that are expected to improve cognitive performance in patients may actually be leading to healthy users working harder while producing a lower quality of work in a longer amount of time,” said Bowman.Adderall and Ritalin, medications used to manage symptoms of attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, have long been considered study aids for people without ADHD. “Performance did not generally increase, so questions remain about how the drugs are affecting people’s minds and their decision making.”ĭr Elizabeth Bowman researcher at the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study said the results show we have yet to establish the effectiveness of pharmaceutical enhancers on our performance, when used by neurotypical people to perform everyday complex tasks. However, we discovered that this exertion caused more erratic thinking - in ways that we could make precise because the knapsack task had been widely studied in computer science. “Because of the dopamine the drugs induce, we expected to see increased motivation, and they do motivate one to try harder. “Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter’,” said Bossaerts. ![]() Professor Peter Bossaerts, Leverhulme International Professor of Neuroeonomics at the University of Cambridge, believes more research needs to be conducted to find out what effects the drugs are having on users without ADHD. In terms of 'productivity', for example – the level of progress per item moved in or out of the knapsack – the participants in the top 25% under a placebo regularly ended up in the bottom 25% under methylphenidate.īy contrast, participants who had a lower performance in a placebo condition only very occasionally exhibited a slight improvement after taking a drug. In addition, participants who performed at a higher level in the placebo condition compared to the rest of the group tended to show a bigger decrease in performance and productivity after receiving a drug. Overall, participants taking the drugs saw small decreases in accuracy and efficiency, along with large increases in time and effort, relative to their results when not taking the drugs.įor example, when given methylphenidate – often used to treat ADHD in children, but increasingly taken by college students cramming for exams – participants took around 50% longer on average to complete the knapsack problem as when they were given a placebo. The participants had to figure out how to best allocate items to the bag, to maximise the overall value of its contents. Participants were asked to complete an exercise known as the Knapsack Optimisation Problem – or ‘knapsack task’ – in which they were given a virtual knapsack with a set capacity, and a selection of items of different weights and values. While previous studies into the effects of smart drugs have used simpler cognitive tasks targeting memory or attention, the Melbourne trial involved more computationally complex activities that better simulate the difficult nature of tasks people encounter in daily life. They were assessed on how they performed in a test designed to model the complex decision-making and problem-solving present in our everyday lives. In four double-blinded, randomised trials in Melbourne, each a week apart, the same 40 healthy participants took one of three popular ‘smart’ drugs (methylphenidate, modafinil or dextroamphetamine) or a placebo. New research from the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne, published in Science Advances, shows neurotypical workers and students taking cognitive enhancers, or ‘smart’ drugs, may actually be inhibiting their performance and productivity.ĭrugs such as methylphenidate, sold under the brand name Ritalin among others, are commonly prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but are also taken by those without a diagnosis, in the belief that the drugs will enhance focus and cognitive performance.
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