The authors of the paper seem to have misinterpreted why many cognitively healthy students take ritalin/adderall. It's not to make you smarter or more able to solve complex problems, it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to. Basically, quantity over quality.
A much better test would have been to give all the study participants some new material requiring multiple hours of study to memorize & learn, then give them a test. The knapsack problem is fine to test some measure of "intelligence", but a bad choice to simulate academics.
“Smart drugs” is a poor choice of words to describe them. They are really “executive function support drugs”.
Even on them, a person will need to consciously make healthy choices. These drugs do not magically help you think smart. That still has to come from you.
If anything,
I feel ever so slightly “dumber” on them. They dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more fulfilling. Even if it’s a waste of my time but something I must do. The experience is more fulfilling. I reckon it’s the extra dopamine at play.
Regardless, xyz is still my decision and I can very much pick an unhealthy thing. Drugs don’t aid your prioritization skills. They don’t improve your communication. Those are skills that have to be learned. Maybe not, if you won an organized parent lottery. Then at least you will know what good looks like, and can learn to emulate that.
Agree. Amusingly, the authors found evidence that the drugs work: students spent more time focusing on even the easy version of the task. The impulse to "be done" with something and stop focusing on it is one of the things stimulants counteract.
I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others.
This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.
> If anything, I feel ever so slightly “dumber” on them. They dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more fulfilling. Even if it’s a waste of my time
I also feel "dumber" while on ritalin, but at the end of the day the job gets done. Also a lot of frustrating stuff, the kind of stuff that would easily derail me, just becomes easy to overcome.
Progress is just happens, but you can also be motivated to do dumb/useless work, for stimulants dosage is key.
I find they make me "smarter" at coding because of how important the ability to hold multiple contexts in your head is. Being able to focus unwaveringly while drilling through a bunch of nested function calls does make you a better programmer.
At some point during debugging you might throw your hands up and wonder who created this tangled web of complexity but adderall delays that moment for awhile.
Agree - as someone who took Adderall in highschool and college, and has started taking it again as an executive in my career, I always took it to be able to handle multitasking more efficiently with less distraction, and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating. A test in which you HAVE to get a job done and you're being monitored and timed - I wouldn't expect a large improvement in results with 'smart drugs'. I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity without knowing someone is looking over your shoulder.
Also notice as I take my "smart drugs" my ability to focus in meetings is increased, and therefore allows me to better recall information in subsequent days... vs when not on meds I'm constantly distracted and my memory is much more foggy, especially specifics or details.
> and to motivate an action to be performed vs procrastinating
I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them.
The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes.
The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state.
The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first.
A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
I get distracted easier if my diet is awful (which it has been in the past)... Refined carbs, sugar, tap water (fluoride in tap water is insane:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/) and highly processed foods. Switch to a diet high in nitric oxide and run and I'm a much better problem solver. And I have no desire to work "for fourteen straight hours" and I'll find another job if I'm being asked too.
> I think it would be much more interesting to watch study or work habits while under the influence of these smart drugs, measured in pages reviewed/written or emails sent or slides created or phone calls made, etc. True measures of productivity...
I think you've confused "productivity" with "bulk". Do you evaluate engineers by how many lines of source code they write in a day?
Yeah, exactly. I take modafinil, and it doesn't make me smarter in the sense of "fluid" intelligence, it just gives me the ability to last longer on mental tasks.
I used to be completely mentally exhausted after a single meeting, modafinil fixes that for me. It makes me smarter in the sense of "crystallized" intelligence as a consequence of accumulating more knowledge, experience, mental models etc.
There's also the problem of getting used to the drug. When I first started taking it, there were various side effects (including perceived worsened short term memory), which subsided with time.
I used to get great results from modafinil. But it slowed to the point of having no effect at all. Was concerned I was getting fake ones. So went to India where its made, bought from source and same thing. This was years after I had stopped already. But I'm grateful for the focus it gave me for 3 or 4 years.
The problem with these tests is that the students participating are likely already very motivated. School is something we do for the first ~20 years of our life, it's hard to replicate how fucking boring and unmotivating it is in a lab.
> it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to
Isn't the point of doing that to get better results?
I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy; but I actually learn more by doing the former than the latter - nobody taking study drugs is hoping to spend twice as long for worse results.
> I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up;
Many people using this kind of drugs normally lasted maybe 1 hour or so before giving up (without the drugs). And it often took a long ramp-up to even get to that 1 hour of focus.
> and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy
I guess this is maybe the case when your body isn't yet accustomed to the drug. I don't have any such issue after I got used to the drug (in my case modafinil).
I would replace the word "learn" with memorize here. You aren't rewarded in school for learning, you are rewarded for information regurgitation. The point of taking Ritalin is to improve this capacity. Learning is secondary to passing in school
Anecdotally: I never met failing or bottom-barrel students taking ADHD meds to boost their performance.
Obviously, I can't know if students from the bottom percentile also engaged in that, but all the students I knew that took drugs to perform better, were motivated students that wanted to maximize their grades. And they studied things that required lots of reading and memorization (law, medicine, and similar).
My take was that the kids that used those drugs, were the ones that wanted an extra push on the last 10% - to put it that way.
Makes sense since the entire point of school is to give you enough executive function to perform well in society. Learning can happen too, but school is obviously not optimized for that.
It's my feeling that stimulant use in healthy people is rarely functional at all. I've seen a fair amount of friends try this, and generally very little is gained. Often they end up focused on something completely different than they intended. E.g they wanted to start some music before studying, then they ended up spending 5 hours making The Perfect Playlist. Stimulants make you very distractable that way. It can be very hard to control what you end up focusing on.
In addition, when able to focus, the quality of work still suffers from several factors such as sleep deprivation and the fact that you forgot to eat or even drink for the last several hours.
I've never seen code written in one of these stimulant fueled all-nighters that didn't create more work than it took to write.
The only exception I've found is for doing housework and other mindless, repetitive tasks.
They did not misinterprete anything. They said it reduced the 'quality' of effort and increased the time to find a correct solution. It is you who misread the title as "Ritalin does not work for students".
> It's not to make you smarter or more able to solve complex problems, it's to let you focus and cram on large workloads for far longer than you otherwise would be able to. Basically, quantity over quality.
imo, that's kind of a dangerous assertion. I'm an adult in his thirties. I take Adderall because I have a genuine loss in executive function at times. A small dose of Adderall (read: less than 2mg) puts me back on track where I can deeply focus, understand, and interpret things. There's certainly people I've seen abuse the drug, but I don't think it's safe to say that the results of Adderall are quantity over quality and frankly the abuse of the drug often doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in people that aren't very substance aware in the first place.
You're right about the average user's mentality, but there's value in publishing this kind of research for anyone who didn't get the memo, e.g. Caroline Ellison, who once wrote: "Nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is" [0]. The implicit contrast to 'dumb' here is smart.
Someone should also do a study to see if using 'smart' drugs over time lowers the criminal inhibitions of chronic abusers. SBF, Caroline Ellison and that whole gang, that Razzlekhan lady. It's funny how they all seemed smart but were ultimately just building a house of cards. I wonder if that is also an effect of long-term use.
No one is taking these drugs to improve their performance on the knapsack problem. They're taking them so they can work for 15 hours straight without being distracted. It doesn't make any sense to say they don't work when the test is completely irrelevant.
Reading all this, it feels like these basically do the same thing as drinking an energy drink, minus the 20point blood pressure spike and tooth destruction. I am theoretically very much against all of this except in absolutely extreme cases.
> There’s also the differences in how children are brought up in America and in France. For example, French parents have set strict limits from the time they are born. The children are raised with limits such as not being allowed to snack whenever they want. They have four strict meal times and they know those are the times they are allowed to eat, not before. While they love their children just as much as others do, they do believe in forced strict limitations to help the children grow up in guidelines and feel safe and secure.
Change the person for the social environment, or change the social environment for the person. Very odd that in the US "land of the free" we chose to former.
> Numbers in America show that at least 9% of the children that are school-age are diagnosed with the disorder
That percentage seriously makes me think that we might be overdiagnosing based on personality type instead of just diagnosing based on underlying disorders. Either that or US schools are very different than French schools.
I take ADHD meds and find that it definitely dulls my thinking and creative problem solving, but it at least gives me the motivation to actually write code vs. do nothing.
Ideally, I’d have unmedicated days where I just sit and think through problems, and then medicated days where I’d work on the actual implementation. Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
> Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
I often wonder about this with me. I've got various hallmarks of ADHD (especially after my SO was diagnosed), but generally i'm productive.
In this specific case, i can't figure out if it's something like ADHD that drives this behavior _or_ just normal human avoidance of work i dislike.
Ie i of course don't have this problem when it's an interesting problem. I also tend not to have this problem after i get started, since most larger domains have interesting subdomains. Difficulty (read: vagueness, scope issues, etc) definitely lead to more of this for me though.
ADD is not the lack of focus, it's the lack of executive control over focus. You may have a fantastic, nearly inhuman amount of focus, but without any ability to direct it - if you have something engaging to work on you can work on it to the total exclusion of all else for 12 hours at a time, but if such an engagement isn't present you'll just be pulled in every direction at random. At least, that's how it is for me.
ADHD isn't so much as you are all over the place, its more along the lines of erradic attention. Hyperfocusing on a problem (especially one that is interesting) and being super productive is a common symptom.
Stimulants basically help regulate the dopamine levels so you can context switch easier and spread your attention to more things.
My work around for this is to take a walk without headphones. For me, it means that the only thing I can do is think (can't read, can't watch video, etc). And by the time I've finished a 30 mins walk, I've usually got a bunch of things that I'm enthused about working on.
> I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
The first times I tried stimulants, after 2-3 hours of euphoric productivity, the effects would wear off but the residual stimulation would be enough to make me continue working and I would always think "hey, I can do this no problem without the stimulants, I just need to push over the hump", but never seemed to work.
A few years in, and yes, I can do without stimulants on easy tasks, but not really on complex stuff.
I also can drive wile not on stimulants and not be a complete nervous mess afterwards, which is a big permanent gain for me.
Also the "OMG, OMG, I'm so screwed by this messup at work, they're going to find me, things are going to crash because of it" changed to "it's going to be ok, things always work out in the end"
the opposite for me, makes it easier for me to solve problem because i can cohesively hold multiple thoughts in my head for long enough for me to see the patterns to be able to understand them, along with the emotional regulation an increase in executive functioning ability that meds help with (which is what adhd really is, not just problems with motivation or bad at concentrating)
but i also work out 5-6 days a week and that + meds have been a huge boon than just meds because it keeps the depression down too, which is what you might be afflicted with because on my rare off days i still can do some work & be motivated
Im the same way. Days are not enough. You basically need to have like an umedicated week to gain your creativity back. I also (2xmicro)dose shrooms (i.e enough where I feel a very very slight trip but can still function).
Anecdote regarding 'smart drugs': The most interesting thing I observed in starting treatment of my ADHD as an adult is that it I think that it stimulated my brain such that I was better able to recognise my tiredness. I remember taking dexamphetamine while I was titrating in the afternoon and pulling over an hour later while driving because I felt I was too tired to safely drive. This was after what I had considered a 'normal' amount of sleep in the past.
When I spoke to people who took these drugs in university (almost all w/o ADHD) sleepiness or calmness never reported by them as a side effect. I avoided coffee and 'energy' drinks in the past because I had this effect, and didn't really understand how people took caffeine to keep themselves awake - I thought it was kind of a meme and I wouldn't understand why my coworkers would drink it during night shifts.
I don't think dehydration adequately explains these to me, as I do take care to try to stay hydrated.
I can relate. Various friends took them and I never bothered. They looked like crackheads and it scared me.
I was recently diagnosed with severe ADHD by several doctors (something I've been treating as anxiety/depression for my whole life), and was prescribed lisdexamfetamine.
It makes me super calm and my thoughts organized. When I'm tired, I feel tired. If I'm sleepy, I'm sleepy. My productivity isn't insane, it's just more stable and predictable now.
This is almost exactly my experience. I sat on my diagnosis for a number of years thinking it was wrong and 'this is just me', not really fully understanding the benefits I was giving up by foregoing meds.
After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore. Turns out being able to keep your shit together makes you less anxious. Who knew!
Paranoia about the cardiac side effects have led me in to caring a lot about my overall cardiac health, which has meant that I've largely countered side negative effects with the obsession over HIIT and less medication overall. Giving up alcohol has been kind of sad but I'm getting to the age where hangovers are starting to get brutal so maybe it's for the best.
It's also been nice to keep certain aspects of ADHD that I like, like my hyperfocus on certain subjects.
I wish I could tell teenage me to investigate this sooner.
Same story here, just with modafinil. All the signs were there since as far back as I was 7 years old.
I've been able to control my focus so much better which seems to make me less tired. When I sit to get work done and inevitably get distracted, I can recover instead of go down a spiral of unproductiveness. I'm also better at prioritizing my focus on the things that are important, such as a must-have feature for launch, rather than a nice-to-have that I just enjoy working on more.
And surprisingly, I've been getting some of the best sleep of my life so far on a pill designed to keep you awake. Who knew?
First: congrats on the progress! That sounds great!
I've been thinking about moving in the opposite direction, actually. ADHD meds like lisdexamfetamine/adderall have been moderately helpful.
But I am starting to think that I might do better treating this from an anxiety/depression angle. ADHD is so comingled with anxiety for me that I can't tell them apart. When I'm falling behind on tasks I get anxiety, which is the literal worst thing for my ADHD, so that exacerbates the ADHD, which increases the anxiety.
I'm curious (if you're open to sharing) if you're still treating the anxiety/depression side of things?
I had the same experience with amphetamine. I think it's an ADHD thing. My doctor started me off on a low dose and I was falling asleep when I took it. We bumped it up and I'm working harder to stick to a good sleep schedule. It's mostly subsided, but I do still need the occasional afternoon nap.
I didn't have that same experience with methylphenidate. That one was a much more pronounced effect. I felt pretty locked in and it was easy to focus. The downside was I was getting headaches, stomach cramps, I would sweat more and my heart was always racing like I had too much coffee.
The amphetamine feels much different. It's more of a chilled out effect where all the noise seems to go away. It doesn't make me feel any smarter, but I do feel less distracted and I'm able to complete boring routine tasks. I wonder if that's why I sometimes get sleepy with it. It's like a relaxation spa for my brain.
yeah that's how you know you legit have ADHD, when a cup or two of coffee makes you calm instead of wired. I do have a threshold where if I drink too much coffee I can't sleep, get jittery etc.
I think this is a vast simplification. People vary. Sometimes drastically. Sometimes even from day to day.
I have certain foods that seems to dramatically change the way stimulants like caffeine affect me. For whatever reason if I eat bananas and nut butter (maybe I have an allergy or food intolerance?) I find that caffeine makes me feel like I crash. When taken on an empty stomach I can get very "wired" but it also depends heavily on my sleep schedule and the time of day I take it.
I've noticed I can get an incredibly productive boost from caffeine when I take it at a time that disrupts my current circadian rhythm. I (used to) usually drink coffee in the morning and it rarely felt like it helped at all. I knew if I was desperate I could drink it around noon and see a big boost but then I wouldn't be able to go sleep on time and would pay for it the next day
Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine.
There is no published evidence that stimulants universally make people ADHD more tired or calm.
And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy.
It sucks that meds used to work this way for me, but now they just don't. They stopped working after a couple months, and never started working again, even after taking absolutely nothing for weeks. It's been almost a year since they've worked and I'm convinced my brain just patched a backdoor or something and just wants me to be useless and dysfunctional all the time.
> All of the drugs also increased the number of times the participants moved items in and out of the knapsack. “Thus, if one measures motivation in terms of time spent or number of items moved, drugs clearly enhanced motivation,” the team writes. However, on average, the drugs did not increase ‘effort quality’ or productivity, measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move. Productivity was lower in all three drug conditions, compared with placebo.
This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes sustained effort which is one of the increased behaviors. I'd like to see this done again with a different problem, a different metric, or simply their raw data.
> MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along with underlying data, can be found in the notebook “figures.mlx” and “SOM.mlx” of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).
This study is about the amphetamine stimulants methylphenidate, dextroamphetamine, and the eugeroic (wakefulness agent) modafinil, and not about nootropics. Though the term smart drug can be inclusive of all of them...
Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study showed (especially in a first time user).
Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in an EEG)...
See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man through the use of drugs"
"Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had significantly increased."
Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG"
"The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers, showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain functional processes."
Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm"
"U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons during cognitive steps of information processing."
The authors are rather unfair to modafinil, also, lumping it in with the other two even though the negative "effects" of modafinil were not statistically significant (except in the rather dubious case of the rank testing of "productivity deviations") and the mean deviation was very small. Also, the "value attained" is not available for modafinil specifically; for this criterion — which is the most believable, as it measures what participants actually tried to achieve — the drugs are all counted together, while on other measures they are listed separately. This is particularly disconcerting since the total value attained makes its way into the abstract and the press release yet gets shorted on the analysis.
Is piracetam still the goto for the nootropics community? I thought people were moving away from that for some reason, but I can’t remember why or where I heard that.
Noopept is a potential candidate for another replacement. It’s basically has a similar safety profile but it’s more potent and requires much less to achieve the desired effect.
It's not unusual for students to crush and snort ritalin before exams in the UK.
We have an interesting system - final year exams are essentially a one-shot thing in the UK. If you are lucky enough to able to retake a final exam, your mark is capped at 40% - a third class mark. An upper second class degree is required for PhD entry.
Little wonder people will do _anything_ to pass those exams.
My guess would be that it gives students the unfair advantage of more study time?
Where I studied (Norway), university students would regularly fail on purpose on the first exam, so that they could get two-ish months more time to read on the subject, as the re-take/postponed exam would be around August/September, or January/February - depending on semester.
It was/is called "strategic re-take", and unsurprisingly, you'd always see a bunch or A grades on the re-take.
Same thing happens in the high-school level. People that want to study wildly popular majors, like medicine, will spend YEARS re-taking HS classes/exams to polish their grades. Those studies are so competitive that you could get almost straight A's, but still not be good enough.
Good question. I suppose it's to penalise those who can't work under pressure to a very tight schedule and reward those who are prepared to risk brain-damage with performance enhancing drugs for the sake of recognition.
Modafinil is a great tool to have in one's toolbelt.
There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be very draining to work through if you need to load in the context every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great deal.
True. I remember I used this back in the day when I was a pro online poker player. I would like to try again in Software, maybe to kickstart an indie project ... food for thought.
How often do you use it and have you found any side effects? (or long term effects for that matter)
I use about 100mg (average amount) 2-4 days a week for the last 1.5 years, going through a very challenging project. I had a small stretch of time when my skin started drying up on the forehead and was peeling off in minor quantities, so i took a break for a month and it fixed it.
Some of the days I may not take it and not notice it, there's definitely no cravings. But during a break I felt slightly hazy when getting off it. I do notice an increase in typical stimulator tell-tale symptoms (like some jaw clenching), but i do have that from coffee as well (which i drink too). There can be days when i'm too wired up to fall asleep fast, so i may drop a 5-htp pill.
The upside is that there's a lot of times when I manage to really concentrate on some activities. Doing 8 hours shifts is trivial. People note that I am pretty responsive at the end of the working days. Quite often I manage to do some personal hobby work after a full working day too.
Modafinil doesn't have the ecstatic effects of Adderall and its friends, so working a lot can make me feel overly emotionally invested into some things that are not important in a grand picture. The stress can add up if not managed well. So I do not recommend working a lot for working's sake, there has to be a cause to pull heroic stunts like this. My excuse is to save up the money to enable myself to do other activites not related to programming later.
Shocker, your brain function is impaired while on a drug you've never taken before and you weren't prescribed.
In my experience, it doesn't matter if you have multiple psychological evaluations and 10+ years of success with a consistent dosage of an ADHD medication. Most doctors just won't write the prescription because of this sort of bunk.
I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic. I don't know exactly how they are used by those without a medical need, but I thought it was as temporary fixes, not taken habitually.
The article specifically says:
> More work will be needed to establish exactly why these drugs have these effects in those without a medical need for them, as well as to explore the potential impacts of other so-called smart drugs.
That is the point of the study, but in my non-scientific opinion it seems like a very poorly crafted study.
Nobody is going to have issues with attention/motivation during the one, short task they were assigned at some study. It's a very novel, motivating environment.
And then of course if you're feeling the effects of a new drug, you'll be "off" a bit.
This doesn't really prove anything about kids who take it for a few nights during exam week to study.
> I think this research is pointing out that using ADHD-like medication as "smart drugs" for school work in people without ADD/ADHD is problematic.
Yes, but the conclusions drawn by this study and others are frequently wielded against people who do have ADHD. The very term "smart drugs" comes from this mindset - the belief that these drugs don't paper over an ailment, rather they make the user "smarter."
Readit News
A much better test would have been to give all the study participants some new material requiring multiple hours of study to memorize & learn, then give them a test. The knapsack problem is fine to test some measure of "intelligence", but a bad choice to simulate academics.
Even on them, a person will need to consciously make healthy choices. These drugs do not magically help you think smart. That still has to come from you.
If anything, I feel ever so slightly “dumber” on them. They dull my creative thinking and in return, I gain a bit of motivation. It does nothing to my willpower. So I still need to want xyz thing bad, but it makes the act of doing that more fulfilling. Even if it’s a waste of my time but something I must do. The experience is more fulfilling. I reckon it’s the extra dopamine at play.
Regardless, xyz is still my decision and I can very much pick an unhealthy thing. Drugs don’t aid your prioritization skills. They don’t improve your communication. Those are skills that have to be learned. Maybe not, if you won an organized parent lottery. Then at least you will know what good looks like, and can learn to emulate that.
I'm also not a big fan on emphasizing the "cognitively healthy" part of the equation. My understanding is that stimulants do exactly the same thing in a person whether they're "cognitively healthy" or not; they're not the sort of drugs that target a deficiency or clear up some specific problem. The only difference is that some people have more of a need in this area than others.
This reminds me of an old article I read about how psychedelics don't actually "increase connectivity in the brain" like users thought, as though that had anything to do with why people use psychedelics.
I also feel "dumber" while on ritalin, but at the end of the day the job gets done. Also a lot of frustrating stuff, the kind of stuff that would easily derail me, just becomes easy to overcome.
Progress is just happens, but you can also be motivated to do dumb/useless work, for stimulants dosage is key.
I never considered motivation and willpower to be separate, but I think your breakdown makes a lot of sense.
At some point during debugging you might throw your hands up and wonder who created this tangled web of complexity but adderall delays that moment for awhile.
Also notice as I take my "smart drugs" my ability to focus in meetings is increased, and therefore allows me to better recall information in subsequent days... vs when not on meds I'm constantly distracted and my memory is much more foggy, especially specifics or details.
I’ve watched several peers go down the path of trying to use stimulants for motivation starting in college and again later in my career. There’s no denying that it works at first. They are stimulants, after all, and they stimulate people especially well when they first start taking them.
The problem is that the motivation from stimulants is famously prone to tolerance and rebound effects. It’s also very prone to habit-forming associations. I’ve noticed several people try to use prescription stimulants in an “as needed” fashion when they need to get a lot of work done quickly and they don’t really want to do it. It doesn’t take long before it’s obvious to their friends and coworkers when they’re having an off day or an on day, even though they might deny any rebound effect. It gets scary when they do this so long that they forget how to self-motivate without taking stimulants because they’ve built such a strong mental association between “I have a lot of work to do” being a trigger for “I should take another pill today” or even “I’ll save this work until tomorrow when I can take a pill”. It gets even scarier when tolerance sets in (to the motivating/stimulating effect, not so much the intended attention-enhancing effect) and they’re now flirting with escalating doses, double doses, combinations with ‘nootropics’ to boost effects or ‘reduce tolerance’ and other slippery slopes.
The short-term productivity boost shouldn’t be denied, but I think it’s also short-sighted to hold these drugs up as a free lunch productivity boost. Let’s be honest: A little experimenting here and there isn’t going to show tolerance, extensive rebound, psychological associations, or other effects, but that’s also what gets people in trouble when they start to think it’s a free lunch. There’s a reason the traditional ADHD treatment approach involves taking the same dose every day rather than encouraging the patient to build psychological associations between taking the drug to alter their mood state.
The strange part about this conversation is that if I wrote all of the above text about drinking 2 energy drinks at the start of a work day, few people would argue with it. The tolerance, rebound, and dependence effects of caffeine seem to be well known in pop culture. For some reason people with a little exposure to prescription stimulants seem to think that the normal rules don’t apply to them, at least at first.
A lot of people who have minimal or sporadic experience with stimulants seem to think they’re no-strings-attached productivity boosts, but there’s no free lunch. The brain will adapt over time.
I think you've confused "productivity" with "bulk". Do you evaluate engineers by how many lines of source code they write in a day?
I used to be completely mentally exhausted after a single meeting, modafinil fixes that for me. It makes me smarter in the sense of "crystallized" intelligence as a consequence of accumulating more knowledge, experience, mental models etc.
There's also the problem of getting used to the drug. When I first started taking it, there were various side effects (including perceived worsened short term memory), which subsided with time.
Isn't the point of doing that to get better results?
I mean, imagine if without drugs I can do a hard slog through the books for 6 hours before giving up; and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy; but I actually learn more by doing the former than the latter - nobody taking study drugs is hoping to spend twice as long for worse results.
Many people using this kind of drugs normally lasted maybe 1 hour or so before giving up (without the drugs). And it often took a long ramp-up to even get to that 1 hour of focus.
> and with drugs I can spend 12 hours anxiously bouncing between tasks and feeling very busy
I guess this is maybe the case when your body isn't yet accustomed to the drug. I don't have any such issue after I got used to the drug (in my case modafinil).
Say unaided, you can get to 85% proficiency in 6 hours and that's about all you can sustain.
With smart drugs, you only get to 75% proficiency in 6 hours but can keep going and will hit 95% in 9 hours.
Think of it like a pick up truck with two gas tanks. It is less efficient than a small car but because of the larger tank it has more range.
Obviously, I can't know if students from the bottom percentile also engaged in that, but all the students I knew that took drugs to perform better, were motivated students that wanted to maximize their grades. And they studied things that required lots of reading and memorization (law, medicine, and similar).
My take was that the kids that used those drugs, were the ones that wanted an extra push on the last 10% - to put it that way.
In addition, when able to focus, the quality of work still suffers from several factors such as sleep deprivation and the fact that you forgot to eat or even drink for the last several hours.
I've never seen code written in one of these stimulant fueled all-nighters that didn't create more work than it took to write.
The only exception I've found is for doing housework and other mindless, repetitive tasks.
imo, that's kind of a dangerous assertion. I'm an adult in his thirties. I take Adderall because I have a genuine loss in executive function at times. A small dose of Adderall (read: less than 2mg) puts me back on track where I can deeply focus, understand, and interpret things. There's certainly people I've seen abuse the drug, but I don't think it's safe to say that the results of Adderall are quantity over quality and frankly the abuse of the drug often doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in people that aren't very substance aware in the first place.
[0] https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/13790363463003054...
https://www.reynoldsclinic.com/why-french-kids-dont-have-adh....
> There’s also the differences in how children are brought up in America and in France. For example, French parents have set strict limits from the time they are born. The children are raised with limits such as not being allowed to snack whenever they want. They have four strict meal times and they know those are the times they are allowed to eat, not before. While they love their children just as much as others do, they do believe in forced strict limitations to help the children grow up in guidelines and feel safe and secure.
Really?
> Numbers in America show that at least 9% of the children that are school-age are diagnosed with the disorder
That percentage seriously makes me think that we might be overdiagnosing based on personality type instead of just diagnosing based on underlying disorders. Either that or US schools are very different than French schools.
Ideally, I’d have unmedicated days where I just sit and think through problems, and then medicated days where I’d work on the actual implementation. Unfortunately, I just spend all of my time on HN and youtube on my unmedicated days.
I often wonder about this with me. I've got various hallmarks of ADHD (especially after my SO was diagnosed), but generally i'm productive.
In this specific case, i can't figure out if it's something like ADHD that drives this behavior _or_ just normal human avoidance of work i dislike.
Ie i of course don't have this problem when it's an interesting problem. I also tend not to have this problem after i get started, since most larger domains have interesting subdomains. Difficulty (read: vagueness, scope issues, etc) definitely lead to more of this for me though.
Human brains are weird.
Stimulants basically help regulate the dopamine levels so you can context switch easier and spread your attention to more things.
Deleted Comment
The first times I tried stimulants, after 2-3 hours of euphoric productivity, the effects would wear off but the residual stimulation would be enough to make me continue working and I would always think "hey, I can do this no problem without the stimulants, I just need to push over the hump", but never seemed to work.
A few years in, and yes, I can do without stimulants on easy tasks, but not really on complex stuff.
I also can drive wile not on stimulants and not be a complete nervous mess afterwards, which is a big permanent gain for me.
Also the "OMG, OMG, I'm so screwed by this messup at work, they're going to find me, things are going to crash because of it" changed to "it's going to be ok, things always work out in the end"
but i also work out 5-6 days a week and that + meds have been a huge boon than just meds because it keeps the depression down too, which is what you might be afflicted with because on my rare off days i still can do some work & be motivated
When I spoke to people who took these drugs in university (almost all w/o ADHD) sleepiness or calmness never reported by them as a side effect. I avoided coffee and 'energy' drinks in the past because I had this effect, and didn't really understand how people took caffeine to keep themselves awake - I thought it was kind of a meme and I wouldn't understand why my coworkers would drink it during night shifts.
I don't think dehydration adequately explains these to me, as I do take care to try to stay hydrated.
I was recently diagnosed with severe ADHD by several doctors (something I've been treating as anxiety/depression for my whole life), and was prescribed lisdexamfetamine.
It makes me super calm and my thoughts organized. When I'm tired, I feel tired. If I'm sleepy, I'm sleepy. My productivity isn't insane, it's just more stable and predictable now.
I wish I had been diagnosed many decades ago.
After starting I really just didn't need my anxiety meds anymore. Turns out being able to keep your shit together makes you less anxious. Who knew!
Paranoia about the cardiac side effects have led me in to caring a lot about my overall cardiac health, which has meant that I've largely countered side negative effects with the obsession over HIIT and less medication overall. Giving up alcohol has been kind of sad but I'm getting to the age where hangovers are starting to get brutal so maybe it's for the best.
It's also been nice to keep certain aspects of ADHD that I like, like my hyperfocus on certain subjects.
I wish I could tell teenage me to investigate this sooner.
I've been able to control my focus so much better which seems to make me less tired. When I sit to get work done and inevitably get distracted, I can recover instead of go down a spiral of unproductiveness. I'm also better at prioritizing my focus on the things that are important, such as a must-have feature for launch, rather than a nice-to-have that I just enjoy working on more.
And surprisingly, I've been getting some of the best sleep of my life so far on a pill designed to keep you awake. Who knew?
I've been thinking about moving in the opposite direction, actually. ADHD meds like lisdexamfetamine/adderall have been moderately helpful.
But I am starting to think that I might do better treating this from an anxiety/depression angle. ADHD is so comingled with anxiety for me that I can't tell them apart. When I'm falling behind on tasks I get anxiety, which is the literal worst thing for my ADHD, so that exacerbates the ADHD, which increases the anxiety.
I'm curious (if you're open to sharing) if you're still treating the anxiety/depression side of things?
I didn't have that same experience with methylphenidate. That one was a much more pronounced effect. I felt pretty locked in and it was easy to focus. The downside was I was getting headaches, stomach cramps, I would sweat more and my heart was always racing like I had too much coffee.
The amphetamine feels much different. It's more of a chilled out effect where all the noise seems to go away. It doesn't make me feel any smarter, but I do feel less distracted and I'm able to complete boring routine tasks. I wonder if that's why I sometimes get sleepy with it. It's like a relaxation spa for my brain.
I have certain foods that seems to dramatically change the way stimulants like caffeine affect me. For whatever reason if I eat bananas and nut butter (maybe I have an allergy or food intolerance?) I find that caffeine makes me feel like I crash. When taken on an empty stomach I can get very "wired" but it also depends heavily on my sleep schedule and the time of day I take it.
I've noticed I can get an incredibly productive boost from caffeine when I take it at a time that disrupts my current circadian rhythm. I (used to) usually drink coffee in the morning and it rarely felt like it helped at all. I knew if I was desperate I could drink it around noon and see a big boost but then I wouldn't be able to go sleep on time and would pay for it the next day
Genetics, diet, microbiome, epigenetics, sleep habits, study habits, social health, seasonality, etc all likely play some role in the way people metabolize caffeine.
There is no published evidence that stimulants universally make people ADHD more tired or calm.
And personally I believe given the right conditions anyone might get to experience the effect of caffeine actually making them sleepy.
Deleted Comment
This "measured as the average gain in knapsack value per move" is an unusually chosen metric. Why would it not simply be the best/total score in the allotted time. This preemptively punishes sustained effort which is one of the increased behaviors. I'd like to see this done again with a different problem, a different metric, or simply their raw data.
Now that I think about it, all of these types of reports should include the raw data or GTFO. This one seems to provide some on the referenced https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.add4165
> MATLAB code that generates the statistics and figures, along with underlying data, can be found in the notebook “figures.mlx” and “SOM.mlx” of the GitHub repository bmmlab/PECO (https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/592775835).
Real smart drugs = nootropics = piracetam and piracetam-like molecules. Stimulants generally decrease performance, increase false positives, and lead to worse performance as this study showed (especially in a first time user).
Most nootropics take about 14 days to hit their stride and the effect isn't discernible immediately (though can be detected in an EEG)...
See study: "Increase in the power of human memory in normal man through the use of drugs"
"Nootropyl (Piracetam) a drug reported to facilitate learning in animals was tested for its effect on man by administering it to normal volunteers. The subjects were given 3x4 capsules at 400 mg per day, in a double blind study. Each subject learned series of words presented as stimuli upon a memory drum. No effects were observed after 7 days but after 14 days verbal learning had significantly increased."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/826948/
Study: "Single-dose piracetam effects on global complexity measures of human spontaneous multichannel EEG"
"The results indicate that a single dose of piracetam dose-dependently affects the spontaneous EEG in normal volunteers, showing effects at the lowest treatment level. The decreased EEG complexity is interpreted as increased cooperativity of brain functional processes."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10555876/
Study: "Single doses of piracetam affect 42-channel event-related potential microstate maps in a cognitive paradigm"
"U-shaped dose-dependent effects were found; they were strongest after 4.8 g piracetam. Since these particular ERP segments are recognized to be strongly correlated to cognitive functions, the present findings suggest that single medium doses of piracetam selectively activate differently located or oriented neurons during cognitive steps of information processing."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8272204/
We have an interesting system - final year exams are essentially a one-shot thing in the UK. If you are lucky enough to able to retake a final exam, your mark is capped at 40% - a third class mark. An upper second class degree is required for PhD entry.
Little wonder people will do _anything_ to pass those exams.
Where I studied (Norway), university students would regularly fail on purpose on the first exam, so that they could get two-ish months more time to read on the subject, as the re-take/postponed exam would be around August/September, or January/February - depending on semester.
It was/is called "strategic re-take", and unsurprisingly, you'd always see a bunch or A grades on the re-take.
Same thing happens in the high-school level. People that want to study wildly popular majors, like medicine, will spend YEARS re-taking HS classes/exams to polish their grades. Those studies are so competitive that you could get almost straight A's, but still not be good enough.
Deleted Comment
There're days and situations when having uninterrupted focus for 10-14 hours does make a big impact. Condensing certain workloads into one day can save a lot of time in a longer run. For example going through huge refactoring with a lot of moving parts can be very draining to work through if you need to load in the context every day. Striking the iron while it's hot can help a great deal.
How often do you use it and have you found any side effects? (or long term effects for that matter)
Some of the days I may not take it and not notice it, there's definitely no cravings. But during a break I felt slightly hazy when getting off it. I do notice an increase in typical stimulator tell-tale symptoms (like some jaw clenching), but i do have that from coffee as well (which i drink too). There can be days when i'm too wired up to fall asleep fast, so i may drop a 5-htp pill.
The upside is that there's a lot of times when I manage to really concentrate on some activities. Doing 8 hours shifts is trivial. People note that I am pretty responsive at the end of the working days. Quite often I manage to do some personal hobby work after a full working day too.
Modafinil doesn't have the ecstatic effects of Adderall and its friends, so working a lot can make me feel overly emotionally invested into some things that are not important in a grand picture. The stress can add up if not managed well. So I do not recommend working a lot for working's sake, there has to be a cause to pull heroic stunts like this. My excuse is to save up the money to enable myself to do other activites not related to programming later.
In my experience, it doesn't matter if you have multiple psychological evaluations and 10+ years of success with a consistent dosage of an ADHD medication. Most doctors just won't write the prescription because of this sort of bunk.
The article specifically says:
> More work will be needed to establish exactly why these drugs have these effects in those without a medical need for them, as well as to explore the potential impacts of other so-called smart drugs.
Nobody is going to have issues with attention/motivation during the one, short task they were assigned at some study. It's a very novel, motivating environment.
And then of course if you're feeling the effects of a new drug, you'll be "off" a bit.
This doesn't really prove anything about kids who take it for a few nights during exam week to study.
Yes, but the conclusions drawn by this study and others are frequently wielded against people who do have ADHD. The very term "smart drugs" comes from this mindset - the belief that these drugs don't paper over an ailment, rather they make the user "smarter."