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Tak Modafinil as an example:

> The real problems with these drugs are addiction,

Not addictive.

> side effects,

Same as caffeine while active. Irritating comedown after.

> and the phenomenon where you have to take higher doses over time to get the same effect.

Abstaining during weekends helps. The real problem is lack of sleep it can somewhat mask.

> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides.

We already have it. It's called having good company and plenty of rest. The problem is not that we don't perform well in this environment, the problem is that we don't perform well IN THIS ENVIRONMENT.

And then we search for hacks.

If good company and plenty of rest solves the issue then the person doesn't really have ADHD. Even exercise itself is not enough for some poeple

Everyone responds differently to these medications. Some can become addicted or suicidal on one med while for others that same med can be a life changer

For about 30% of people these medications have no effect

I'm not saying sleep, exercise, and other psychotherapy aren't options but some people really benefit from medication

Never had any comedown off moda, even at high doses (400mg).

What comedown feelings did you experience?

keep in mind that you're not absorbing all 400mg if you take it all at once.

I noticed considerable difference splitting 200mg pills in two and waiting a while before consuming the second half when I used it years back.

I've had 4 or 5 different brands and some of them produce irregular side effects. Some of them work as you say with no comedown or issues whatsoever.

I would probably give Modafinil a try if I could just buy it over the counter at Walgreens.

AFIK the "main" use of study drugs is to be able to study longer not better.

General more studying isn't better the more you do it. You need to do it right and that involves having enough brakes to let your brain digest. In turn many situations where study drugs are used are such where the user already doesn't expect high efficiency.

I would argue that any situation where it's not uncommon for pre-university students to take study drugs are a fundamental failure of the education system/society. Often by a mixture of not properly teaching how to learn and also by forcing stupid forms of "homework" or "skill evaluation" which encourage bad learning practices and kill of any efficiency.

For university students the same should hold, the problem is that we have some areas where you will have problems getting around bad learning practices due to their nature. I believe with todays technology we could solve many of such problems (not even considering the new AI stuff) but in practice we have not. Anyway non of this applies to pre-university content.

EDIT: I disagree wrt. the caffein, it does hurt and has negative side effect on learning but as long as you don't compare quite long time periods without _any_ coffeine with coffein usage it's hard to notice.

That makes sense. My main experience with "study drugs" isn't in the academic system, it's with software engineers. It seems like the main effect isn't that they make you a much better programmer, it's that they make you much more able to keep programming for longer periods of time. Someone who normally gets distracted a lot and only gets a few hours of real work done in a day, maybe they would prefer to be able to spend 12 hours consecutively programming, even if it takes them down to 80% of their intellectual horsepower.

> I am not a supporter of study drugs, except for caffeine

> problems with these drugs are addiction, side effects, and the phenomenon where you have to take higher doses over time to get the same effect

Caffeine is terrible on all these points. I built up such a tolerance in my late teens that I was consuming something like 1000mg/day. The withdrawals were awful when I quit.

> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides. I think that could be a great boon to society. I don't think it exists yet though, or that we are even really making any progress.

Adderall (correctly dosed) is precisely this.

I can understand how people come to this conclusion.

Anecdotally, I know several people who regret ever using Adderall. To be fair, I also know a number of people who regret ever using caffeine. Compare to, for example, I don't think I know anyone who regrets taking Aleve for their headaches.

So I would categorize both Adderall and caffeine as "having some downsides". The main reason that I do support caffeine is that I know many people who happily drink coffee as part of their everyday life, and just a few who regret it, and I personally like to drink coffee. For Adderall my anecdotes are more mixed, closer to 70-30 against.

Obviously these are unscientific. I could be wrong. Perhaps in 50 years we will learn more and it will become clear that Adderall is good for the brain, or that caffeine is bad for it. But, right now, to me, the state of the science is such that I find it less convincing than anecdotes from my personal network.

Come on, you can’t honestly say Adderall has no side effects.

Correctly dosed it does not. Certainly not compared to coffee.

What are its side effects?

https://americanaddictioncenters.org/adderall/side-effects

short term? nothing. long term? stomach ulcers.

Adderall also has addictive properties, so users develop tolerance and habituation, so hitting the correct dosage is quite a challenge, and a real downside in my opinion, given the consequences of over-use.

>I don't find these studies to be convincing. You give people a pill, they don't know what it is. These people don't know what to expect, they've never taken study drugs before. They're solving some random logic puzzle they've never seen before. "Participants had to work out which items to put into a bag."

How do you propose then to isolate what may be the effect of the drug then vs the participant subconsciously trying to act out what they think the drug is supposed to make them do?

Personally I wouldn't want to isolate the effect of the drug from the effect of the participant knowing what the drug is supposed to do. If I am considering taking a study drug, I would know what it's supposed to do, right?

Compare to a less politically contentious human performance question, like, should a point guard do strength training to increase upper body strength? This is a topic where expert thinking has evolved during my lifetime. In the 80's many people thought that strength training would mess up shooting ability. Nowadays the consensus is that strength training is good, and that basically all NBA players should do it.

Nobody did studies where secretly one set of basketball players worked out and got stronger arms, and the other half did "placebo workouts" that didn't make them any stronger. It's just obviously impossible to do that sort of study. I think it's equally impossible to do a good study on Adderall with placebos. But we still learn over time, by having experts try out different things, analyze the results subjectively, and discuss and share the outcomes.

What I would like to see is making study drugs like Adderall and Modafinil legal, and for people to openly share their experiences, positive and negative. I think over time our society would learn from that and grow wiser, even if formal studies never quite worked.

Don't think there's a very good way to carry out these studies, this is just a catch-22. Either the participants are aware, and their bias could affect the results, or they're unaware, and they don't use the drug as real people do.

I don't really see the point in this being a lab experiment, just test the results from actual people who use study drugs (not saying naturalistic experiments aren't biased in many ways too, but seems like a better option).

Its best to look at overall scientific consensus across multiple studies instead of a single study. Maybe there could be some causal factors that we didn't think of when looking at a specific study?

> I think that could be a great boon to society.

Provided it uses all that additional brainpower effectively. Can we honestly say that currently all the smart people are realising their potential?

Also, could well be a curse instead. Imagine society only performing this well thanks to a steady supply of the stuff.

Actually, we already have that in the form of fossil fuels and while they enabled massive progress, their supply hinges on authoritarians having their way in some corners of the world.

It seems like a fairly reasonable study to me. I don't see how the study participants' possible lack of familiarity with the drugs diminishes the value of the data.

From the article: "Star performers during the placebo session fell to the bottom of the pack when they had taken the drugs."

That directly refutes your assertion they were doing a novel task for the first time.

I would suggest taking Ritalin every day for two weeks and then reporting back on the difference between day 1 and day 14.

You’ll have plenty of words to share! Probably a TON the first day, especially.

I would like to see that study too. I would consider the results of both studies valuable for different reasons.

Note that in addition to possibly having not experienced the drug before, they were given fairly high doses. Most therapeutic doses will start out with a small dose.

I'm not really arguing for or against drawing any particular conclusions from this paper. I just think it's an interesting study that gives further insight into a subject that could probably benefit from many more studies like it.

What dose?

> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides.

What's the closest we have today to an effective drug with "no real downsides", assuming that nutritional supplements don't count?

If such a drug exists, I want to know why the body hasn't evolved either to produce it by itself or to obtain the same effect in another way. (Possible answers include: it's something that would be very hard to synthesise in the body; the drug is only useful to humans in recent times; it was already present in people's diet until recently - but then I'd call it a "nutritional supplement" rather than a "drug"; it's only useful to people who have passed reproductive age - though such people may still have played a useful role in ancient societies.)

Not a mental drug. but simethicone has virtually no side effects. It relieves gas by lowering the surface tension of the bubbles in your gut (so you can burp them out easier). But I don't think there's enough evolutionary pressure for Good At Burping to become a favored human trait.

> If such a drug exists, I want to know why the body hasn't evolved either to produce it by itself or to obtain the same effect in another way

You're assuming evolution is perfect and that we have reached perfection already

Your question is also assuming that each drug impacts everyone the same way

Some people who take a certain psych med won't experience side effects, while others may experience severe side effects

E.g. most people who take Straterra experience benefits but some outliers may become extremely suicidal

I would say overall human science on drugs is primitive. I think to achieve what you are really thinking about will need a different overall approach to psych med development

I wouldn't overlook the potential for naturally found compounds either. Many indigenous peoples have or had vast knowledge on their pharmaceutical effects but often these were destroyed in genocides

You're essentially proposing that people have to learn how to do tasks in a new way when using study drugs.

That's a very far-fetched claim. Do you have any evidence other than personal anecdotes?

It doesn't fit with anything I've ever read or experienced with these drugs.

Sure. Tolerance builds up over extended use, so that’s one avenue. Another is knowing what causes bodily sensations. High caffeine for example can easily to nervousness if participants don’t know they got caffeine. Drugs like Ritalin can cause euphoria the first couple of times you use it. Ever drank alcohol? You have to learn to deal with that, the first time you’re drunk you are very different from the second time. And then we have the fact that they took random new puzzles; you study stuff you’ve already gone over in class, and study in a way you like.

Please don’t buy into any psychological research; there is a reason more than 2/3rd of all their research cannot even be replicated.

So I shouldn't buy into psychological research, but I should buy into a single person's theories with a sample size of zero and (I'm guessing) no pharmacological education?

I've had alcohol many times, and you know what it's nothing like? Ritalin.

> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides

Coffee.

And to your main point, if you took people who’d never drink coffee before and gave them a caffeine pill, guaranteed they’d perform worse.

Coffee has some very real downsides. Ironically to the GP’s point though, Adderall is like a super mega coffee without those downsides.

What downsides? I think it varies per person— but it’s a pretty ideal substance.

Could you drink a pot of coffee every few hours and still be functional? Most people would get the jitters, if not feel like their heart would explode, but that’s basically the value proposition of Adderall or Vyvanse, minus the severe side effects.

Long term coffee usage builds dependency and is linked to “chronic insomnia, constant anxiety, depression, and stomach problems.”

Meanwhile tons of people legitimately prescribed ADHD stimulant medication use it every day without developing an addiction or any of the above symptoms.

As someone who does both… why make the comparison “a pot of coffee every few hours” versus just “drinking coffee every few hours.” Personally, I can’t drink coffee after 2pm.

Long-term coffee usage is just fine. It is actually protective. Same with ADHD meds. Fewer heart problems, actually, on average.

Also, 15mg of adderall XR is enough to get someone pretty high if they haven't developed a tolerance for it. 15 mg of Adderall IR is probably going to feel like doing meth for someone who's never done it