Brain doping - Thinking better with a little help?
(April 18th 2008) Faster, further, higher - better! With limitless ambitions, athletes are often tempted to give Nature a helping hand in the form of drugs. But some scientists have also succumbed to the temptation, reports Melanie Estrella.
Doping stories are high profile news items, indissociable from cycle racing and the Olympic Games. However, muscles are not the only part of the body prone to pharmacological stimulation - so are brains! For scientists, in addition to the necessary fine feeling for the pipette and a worthwhile research topic, their brain is their most important capital. Thinking further and faster than one's rivals is a vital advantage in the publish-or-perish business. So why not help your cerebration a bit by swallowing cognition-enhancing pills? Indeed, why not....? think twenty percent of the 1400 participants in an informal online survey at "Nature Network", a web forum run by the British journal,
Nature.
The survey posted on April 9th focused on consumption of the drugs, Ritalin, Provigil, and beta-blockers. While Ritalin is normally prescribed to children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Provigil is used to treat sleeping disturbances, and beta-blockers to counteract cardiac arrhythmia. However, applied off-label, these drugs are also abused, respectively, to sharpen performance, banish weariness, and reduce anxiety.
Of the 288 scientists in the poll who admitted helping their minds along pharmacologically, 62 percent swear by Ritalin, 44 percent like Provigil, and 15 percent nibble beta-blockers. One fifth of these brain boosters said they intended "to strengthen their focus, concentration or memory." Drugs could be comfortably ordered over the internet by a third of the survey participants.
There was an even split between "brain junkies" taking pills daily/weekly/monthly, or no more than once a year. Additionally, 80 percent of the respondents ingest other drugs to enhance their mental activity, mostly Adderall, an amphetamine similar to the active substance, methylphenidate, contained in Ritalin.
The survey was initiated following a
Nature commentary in December - "Professor's Little Helper" - by the Cambridge University behavioural scientists, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir, who had investigated the consumption of cognition-enhancing drugs among their colleagues. They asked: "Would you, the reader, take a pill that would help you to better focus, plan or remember?" and received such a strong response that
Nature was prompted to conduct its own survey.
However, enhancing brain function is not an entirely new phenomenon in academia. For years, students on college campuses have been trying to improve their exams results with "study aids".
In the
Nature survey, this trend to artificially stimulate brain activity was reflected by the opinion of 80 percent of the respondents that healthy adults should be entitled to take neuroenhancing drugs if they wanted to. One-third said they would even feel urged to feed their kids such drugs if they knew other children at school were taking them.
Nevertheless, reading these numbers one should bear in mind that inspiring thoughts tend to strike whenever and wherever they please: think of Archimedes' Eureka! moment in the bathroom when he found how weight exerts buoyant force, or Jean Leray, Jean-Viktor Poncelet and André Weil who all made fundamental contributions to modern mathematics when prisoners of war. Or of an example perhaps better known to life scientists: Kekulé was sitting in a chair beside his fireplace, half asleep, when he envisioned the now familiar ring structure of benzene .
