Ritalin
ddobbs | March 26, 2010
from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis
House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog.
Brain and Mind
Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning.
As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…
ddobbs | July 7, 2009Scientific American has a good story by Edmund S. Higgins suggesting that might be the case. As the story notes, the evidence for such a toll is still preliminary. But the story's opening, which tells of a parent seemingly overeager to medicate a child who didn't need it, gives an idea of why the question is more important than we might like.:
At the time of this visit, the boy was off the medication, and I conducted a series of cognitive and behavioral tests on him. He performed wonderfully. I also noticed that off the medication he was friendly and playful. On a previous casual encounter,…
amillikan | December 11, 2008A group of psychologists, ethicists and neuroscientists have added their voices to the growing debate over the merits and demerits of brain droping, the use of cognitive enhancement drugs like Adderall or Ritalin to improve mental performance. Their commentary, published online Sunday in Nature, argues that any adult in full mental health should be able to use the drugs at will. "Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers," they ask, "why draw the line here and say, thus far but no further?"