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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: 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.