Brain waves were fine-tuned over many thousands years of evolution.
Stuff which modifies them greatly as this study seems to show probably has some sort of side effects.
Otherwise nature would have boosted them already.
Stuff which modifies them greatly as this study seems to show probably has some sort of side effects.
Otherwise nature would have boosted them already.
A few thousand years is not a long time in evolutionary terms.
Like ... food? This is an amino acid, the building block of protein. Many amino acids have pronounced effect in the body or when lacking.
Our bodies are fine-tuned to be somewhat fault-tolerant, but evolution is extraordinarily slow. If our diets diverge over a few hundred years, there haven't been nearly enough evolutionary cycles to compensate for whatever effect that has; particularly if it's minor annoyances like getting jittery with coffee, which was consumed far less as far back as a few hundred years ago.
Wouldn't this entirely depend on selection pressure, rate of mutation, and turnover of, er, subjects? Certainly bacteria can evolve extremely rapidly and it's been noted in animals too, cf http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-l...
Certainly for the average office drone today, spear chucking muscles are atrophied, yet the thrill mood of hunting down and eliminating software bugs remains, pattern matching previous hunts, soaking in the environment, looking for signs, tracking, going in for the kill, the happy drudgery of dragging the kill back to the tribe or the paperwork of closing the bug out in the tribe's bug tracker and doing some git merges. Or tapping out calm tranquilized grind of endless lines of boilerplate java code feels like harvesting endless rows of cultivated berries. I wouldn't say the mood of labor has changed very much in some millennia, although the exact ratios of who's permitted the thrill of the hunt has varied over economic eras.