Smart Drugs May Inhibit Performance in Common People

According to new research published in Science Advances by the Universities of Cambridge and Melbourne, neurotypical professionals and students taking cognitive enhancers, or smart drugs, may really be reducing their performance and productivity.

Methylphenidate, available under the brand name Ritalin among others, is often recommended for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but it is also taken by persons who do not have a diagnosis in the hope that the medicines may improve focus and cognitive ability.

The same 40 healthy individuals took one of three popular smart drugs (methylphenidate, modafinil, or dextroamphetamine) or a placebo in four double-blind, randomized studies in Melbourne, each a week apart. They were graded based on how well they did in a test meant to simulate the complicated decision-making and problem-solving that occurs in our daily lives.

Unlike prior research on the effects of smart drugs, which utilized simpler cognitive tasks aimed at memory or attention, the Melbourne trial used more computationally sophisticated activities that better simulated the tough nature of tasks people face in everyday life.

Participants were asked to perform the Knapsack Optimization Problem—or “knapsack task”—in which they were given a virtual knapsack with a fixed capacity and a selection of objects with varying weights and values. The players had to figure out how to effectively distribute goods to the bag in order to maximize the bag’s overall value.

Participants taking the medicines had small declines in accuracy and efficiency, as well as significant increases in time and effort, when compared to their results while not taking the drugs.

Participants took roughly 50% longer to solve the knapsack problem when given methylphenidate, which is commonly used to treat ADHD in youngsters but is increasingly being utilized by college students studying for exams.

Furthermore, participants who performed better in the placebo condition than the rest of the group tended to have a greater drop in performance and productivity after receiving a medication.

In terms of “productivity,” for example—the amount of progress made per item transferred into or out of the knapsack—participants who were in the top 25% with a placebo were frequently in the bottom 25% with methylphenidate.

Participants who performed poorly in a placebo condition, on the other hand, only infrequently showed a minor improvement after taking a medication.

Professor Peter Bossaerts, Leverhulme International Professor of Neuroeonomics at the University of Cambridge, says that additional research is needed to determine the impact of the medications on users who do not have ADHD.

“Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter,'” said Bossaerts. “Because of the dopamine the drugs induce, we expected to see increased motivation, and they do motivate one to try harder. However, we discovered that this exertion caused more erratic thinking—in ways that we could make precise because the knapsack task had been widely studied in computer science.”

“Performance did not generally increase, so questions remain about how the drugs are affecting people’s minds and their decision making.”

Dr. Elizabeth Bowman, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Brain, Mind, and Markets, stated that the findings show that we have yet to establish the effectiveness of pharmaceutical enhancers on our performance when used by neurotypical people to perform everyday complex tasks.

Our research shows drugs that are expected to improve cognitive performance in patients may actually be leading to healthy users working harder while producing a lower quality of work in a longer amount of time,” said Bowman.

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