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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2015, @06:34PM
And get enough sleep. Very many people living "modern lifestyles" don't get enough sleep.
Just because you wake up after 4-5 hours doesn't mean it's time to start your waking life. Stay calm and go back to sleep again even if it takes a while: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783 [bbc.com]
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/ [nih.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_sleep_deprivation_on_cognitive_performance [wikipedia.org]