The Rise and Rise of Neuro-Enhancers
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 9:42AM During the last couple of years there has been a silent revolution in the understanding and use of "off label" cognition enhancing prescription drugs, it began with students competing to improve their test scores and has expanded out to busy professors and executives in search of that professional edge. To some it's an extremely worrying trend and to others it's mearly a natural progression of medical technology...
Cosmetic Neurology?
Last year Nature, the scientific journal published the results of an informal online poll asking whether readers attempted to sharpen "their focus, concentration, or memory" by taking cognition enhancing drugs. One in five respondents said they did. The majority of the 1,400 readers who responded said that healthy adults should be permitted to take brain boosters for non-medical reasons which at the time was an incredibly brave finding for Nature to publish due to the resistance in mainstream society against prescription drug use in healthy people.
The discussion within the Nature article focused on the two main cognition enhancing drugs that are currently being used "off label" by some individuals in the hope of enhancing their performance and they are likely very familiar therapeutics to the majority of you, as they are used for the treatment of ADHD and Insomnia:
- Adderall
- Provigil
At the moment those embracing Nootropics, i.e. new chemicals or therapies to enhance their own cognition, are beginning to develop an interest in many of the experimental therapies that are being developed to treat cognitive decline in Alzheimer's and Dementia which include Ampakines and Cholinesterase inhibitors that have shown some promise within the clinic. We can all connect at least partially with the idea of striving to be better, faster, stronger and the idea of enhancing our own cognitive abilities can be seductive. However, it’s important to remember that our brains are finely balanced biochemical machines and by altering the concentration of certain chemicals and neurotransmitters within a healthy mind we run the risk of unexpected consequences, not least of which could result in classical mental illnesses or new dysfunctions.
For those of you on the bleeding edge of this fascinating Nootropic trend, I wish you the best of luck! Please make sure to tread carefully and let us know your thoughts in the comments section, as Forest Gump once said “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get!” Corny, I know!
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Reader Comments (3)
I fist tried Modafinil (Provigil) 3 years ago after reading it was a mind enhancing drug. It worked a treat. My focus was amazing, it improved my memory. I even found that the 'hangover' the next day meant I was more focused than normal. I also think that these effects lasted for a much longer time. After taking it a few times a week for a couple of months I found that I became naturally more focused at work. It was as if it had created the habit of being focused and through repetition it had sunk in and become my normal behavior. However, there are side effects too. Most notable was that it made me impatient with people. If someone tries to interupt me while I'm concentrating on something it's exceptionally annoying. It's best taken somewhere where you can work in peace, interuption free.
I also found that the good effects only work if you are interested in what you are working on. I could only focus if I wanted to be focused on. If I was bored of the work or found it dull, then it didn't help being on it at all.
It makes it hard to eat. I found I could if I make myself eat but generally didn't have the desire to stop working. One solution to this problem was to take it after eating. Then I found this to be far less of an issue.
Another strange side effect I encountered were sensations in my face - one of which is like when you've been wearing glasses for a long time, a kind of pinching sensation at the top of my nose. Other times I've had a sensation in my whole face that reminded me of the feeling you get if you've only had an hours' sleep.
They're also a fairly strong anti-depresant. Or at least they were. I took one last week for the first time in over 2 years and it wasn't very effective. I suspect my stash might have lost potency with age - it certainly didn't make me want to take them again in a hurry.
Another issue with the development of cognitive enhancers is that they must have a totally clean reproductive tox profile because of the potential for off label use (abuse?) by a younger population. Even if a drug is being developed for use only in the elderly (Alzheimer's patients, e.g), the risk that it could be used as a so-called "smart drug" (think: college kids studying for exams) is great enough that many a promising CE cannot continue in development with even a slight repro tox risk. Food for thought...
I bet there is a big potential market for memory enhancement or cognition improvement. So, impressive drugs may show up in the future.
When I read a Mattiew During's PNAS paper years ago, which was about memory enhancement of aged rats by delivering CREB gene by AAV, I was so impressed that I presented this paper in a journal club. One person said this was a kind of scary. I think this is a normal sense of some people. So, after efficient drugs that improve memory or cognition show up in the market, a controversy may occur.