Thursday 14 January 2016

Get Smart - Nootropics!

    Ever since I was a student I wondered why some of my fellow students seemed to learn and digest knowledge so much more easily than the rest of us.  We certainly envied those few who sailed through their studies so effortlessly.  They seemed about as averagely smart as everyone else, and for the most part did not seem better informed about things in general than the rest of us.  Sometimes we even wondered if they had a special pill.  In those days there were multiple speculations about the almost miraculous benefits of amphetamines as a smart pill, that enabled both memory and alertness and I knew a few students who used dexedrine or benzadrine that they managed to cajole from a sympathetic druggist.  I was always too chicken to try that, particularly after I heard the apocryphal story of a user student who thought he had done brilliantly but had simply written his name over and over again on his exam paper.  That was enough to deter me permanently.
    From time to time one heard of drugs that were reputed to enhance mental abilities and there are a few drugs that are believed to improve some aspect of cognition. These drugs are known as 'nootropics' the title derived from Greek terms meaning 'mind' and 'turn' and coined as long ago as 1972.   This name covers the whole spectrum of drugs considered to have a beneficial effect on mental function.  It also covers food supplements and other neutraceuticals. Other names include, smart pills, memory enhancers, cognitive enhancers, intelligence enhancers.  Effects can include attention and memory improvements.
    So what are these drugs and supplements and do they work?
    The oldest and best known of these 'smart pills' fall into the stimulant group and after all, what is better than a little stimulation?  We are all familiar with caffeine and how endless cups of coffee (and cigarettes) encouraged generations of  students to get through the grueling preparations required to jump through the hoops that the system required of us to graduate.
     Stimulants were recognized by many to be useful in staying awake all night studying to pass your exam, or, if you were a truck driver, to drive your truck all night without falling asleep at the wheel.  Some medical students thought that drugs could help them to become a doctor or at least to pass their exams.  The sports world recognized that drugs could help them to become a 'champion' and despite a lot of blather, that seems to have become acceptable and not interfered with the exorbitant payouts for the 'heros'.   So that might be okay for a doctor, too, because such studies  as have been done seem to indicate that with careful dosage control, performance may be enhanced, not impaired, by a few drugs judicially used and  who does not want their doctors performance to be enhanced?
    There are drugs and neutraceuticals and supplements that look promising but are still lacking adequate evidence before being recommended for widespread use.  The question of whether this sort of human engineering is desirable is a question that has to be addressed.
     I find it fascinating that I may still have a chance to become brilliant and will continue to investigate this area.
     In the next couple of blogs I  will  share my findings with you!
    

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