Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results:
I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I'm thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn't noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn't stop or stumble once.Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich - and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn't any different; I wasn't high. My heart wasn't beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration - deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.
Once that article was finished, I wanted to do more. I wrote another article, all of it springing out of my mind effortlessly. Then I go to dinner with a few friends, and I decide not to tell them, to see if they notice anything. At the end of the dinner, my mate Jess turns to me and says, "You seem very thoughtful tonight."
If only intelligence were so easy. Before you run out a get an illicit supply of Provigil, let me remind you that the brain is a precisely equilibrated machine. Even drugs that don't appear to have any negative side-effects - who wouldn't want a more focused brain? - can actually have deleterious consequences.
In this case, the tradeoff involves creativity. Some of my friends who relied on crushed Ritalin during college used to joke about how the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination. It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task - like writing an article - requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas. (This might be why schizotypal subjects score higher on tests of creativity. They are less able to ignore those distracting thoughts, which largely arise from the right hemisphere.) Other scientists have looked at the aging brain which, because the prefrontal cortex degrades with time, becomes less able to focus:
"It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
"For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another."
Brain & Behavior
Comments (384)
Thanks for writing this! Out of the probably over 60 posts now indexed by technorati referencing Johann's anecdote, you're the only one to bring up his overly simplistic approach to intelligence. I've been making a similar point to yours, saying that speed is a tradeoff for depth. Are we really better off thinking faster but less deep?
Also objectionable to me was that he picked modafinil to write about, but didn't mention any of the easily available, over the counter, fairly well studied supplements that are also commonly used. Piracetam would be one example and Huperzine A would be another. They're all discussed in Smart Drugs and Nutrients. The heuristic that if it's effective, it's probably dangerous/banned just doesn't hold in this case, and his experience is way out of line with other accounts. I personally think he could have gotten similar results from a good night's sleep.
I do think the time has come for people to consider looking into possible enhancements, but as you say, this won't come without some sort of cost in another area. Potential health effects aren't the only area of concern.
Posted by: Mr. Gunn | May 20, 2008 11:22 AM