‘Smart’ drugs won’t make smart people smarter, research conc

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‘Smart’ drugs won’t make smart people smarter, research conc

Post by cronus » Wed Nov 19, 2014 7:20 am

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 131954.htm

‘Smart’ drugs won’t make smart people smarter, research concludes

It is claimed one in five students have taken the 'smart' drug Modafinil to boost their ability to study and improve their chances of exam success. But new research into the effects of Modafinil has shown that healthy students could find their performance impaired by the drug.

The study carried out by Dr Ahmed Dahir Mohamed, in the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, and published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, showed the drug had negative effects in healthy people.

Dr Mohamed said: "We looked at how the drug acted when you are required to respond accurately and in a timely manner. Our findings were completely opposite to the results we expected."

In a randomised double blind study, 'Modafinil increases the latency of response in the Hayling Sentence Completion Test in Healthy Volunteers: A Randomised Controlled Trial', they administered 32 participants with the drug and 32 with a placebo. All the participants were given a famous neuropsychological task known as the Hayling Sentence Completion Test in which they were asked to respond both quickly and accurately. Dr Mohamed found the drug slowed down reaction times, impaired their ability to respond in a timely manner and failed to improve their performance of the task.

Dr Mohamed said: "It has been argued that Modafinil might improve your performance by delaying your ability to respond. It has been suggested this 'delay dependent improvement' might improve cognitive performance by making people less impulsive. We found no evidence to support those claims.

"Our research showed that when a task required instant reactions the drug just increased reaction times with no improvement to cognitive performance."

This backs up the findings of a previous study carried out by Dr Mohamed and published in September 2014 in The Journal of Creative Behaviour. The study: The Effects of Modafinil on Convergent and Divergent Thinking of Creativity: A Randomised Controlled Trial showed that the so called 'smart' drug impaired the participant's ability to respond in a creative way particularly when they were asked to respond laterally -- outside the box.

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Re: ‘Smart’ drugs won’t make smart people smarter, research

Post by JimC » Wed Nov 19, 2014 8:04 am

Gin, on the other hand...
Nurse, where the fuck's my cardigan?
And my gin!

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Re: ‘Smart’ drugs won’t make smart people smarter, research

Post by cronus » Wed Nov 19, 2014 8:09 am

JimC wrote:Gin, on the other hand...
Gin slows down what is already too fast....focus and especially over-focus doesn't come into the equation. :nono:
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