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Cognitive Enhancement May Not be All It's Cracked Up To Be.

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 27 2015, @08:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the medication-must-be-the-answer dept.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Humans in 2015 have a small arsenal of tools available to at least temporarily upgrade our brains via the increasingly popular paradigm of "cognitive enhancement."

This is a different boost than that offered by sketchy as-seen-on-NPR brain training schemes, offering literal, physiological neuro-manipulations via either chemistry or electricity. It's no secret that drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are widely sought after among healthy populations looking for an extra push, while electronic stimulant headsets are seeing a somewhat quieter or at least less fretted-about rise. Do they really work? We mostly don't know, warns cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah in this week's issue of Science.

Original paper available here, or you can just read the vice.motherboard.com article.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:24AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:24AM (#255051) Journal

    Caffeine? No, it's not perfectly understood. But, it DOES have a lot of empirical data regarding it's use. Enough is known about caffeine that people can make intelligent, informed decisions about it's use. Both the upsides and the downsides are modestly well understood. That goes hand in hand with a long history of use and abuse - the early testing was performed in prehistory, and more testing has been done since then.

    The "enhancements" under discussion lack any body of empirical or other data. They are strictly experimental.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @03:41PM (#255138)

    I think if most people understood that anal leakage of stomach acid (roughly equivalent in potency to hydrochloric acid), colon cancer, irritable bowel, that sort of thing were side-effects of caffeine, they would be a little more cautious with it. Read the insert on some caffeine pills sometime. Or just download the MSDS....

    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QFjAAahUKEwjekZfa_eLIAhWDvhQKHRiXDak&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencelab.com%2Fmsds.php%3FmsdsId%3D9927475&usg=AFQjCNEUt8wW6_FvqTAFehxN5N5y7ApDvg&sig2=jrza7AEswJbhLrx9McaHoQ [google.com]

    Hazardous in case of skin contact (irritant), of eye contact (irritant), of ingestion, of inhalation.

    Seriously? It just gets better after that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @05:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @05:12PM (#255186)

      I think there is no substance that doesn't have "Hazardous in case of skin contact (irritant), of eye contact (irritant), of ingestion, of inhalation." in MSDS. Well maybe except DHMO and those that are corrosive.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @10:03PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @10:03PM (#255301)

        Ummm... with an LD50 of 192mg/KG in rats? This is an out and out poison. Alcohol, a substance many consider to be a poison and will not put in their body has an LD50 of 7060mg/KG, it is completely benign by comparison. Even bleach is safer, with an LD50 of 850mg/KG. Would you eat bleach?

        Caffeine is sold virtually without warning to an unsuspecting population and the results are catastrophic. It is a dangerous drug and a poison and yet I know some people who casually feed coffee to their children instead of breakfast. People just don't know about the dangers.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:20PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @11:20PM (#255331)

          Would I eat bleach? If 95 milligrams of it gave me all the perks of coffee, I'd sure eat 95 milligrams of it. Hell, I could go higher, since I'm diluting the 3 hundreths of an ounce of bleach in a few ounces of water at least, no problem.

          Comparing something to bleach is silly. Your visual is a giant bottle of bleach. Caffeine is not coffee. There is a tiny amount of caffeine in coffee by volume- of course it is potent. You are having decigrams of it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @04:03PM (#255151)

    picture of the web a spider made after getting dosed with caffeine and other psychoactive drugs:

    http://www.kscience.co.uk/resources/ks3/drugs/spider_experiments.htm [kscience.co.uk]