I'm wondering what the "side effects" of these drugs are, since I've never taken them. Does anybody out there know from first hand experience?

And what I'm wondering is, if everyone's on these "smart drugs" why isn't the culture getting any smarter? Maybe these substances are the culprit behind all the forms of behavior which have a tinny, paper-thin surface of "smartness" to them -- the endless petty-fact laden anecdotalism, the stiff-grinned, auto-chuckle "ironicalism" that suffuse so much quasi-intellectual commentary and analysis these days. Maybe what anxious pseudo-intellectual types find so relentlessly soothing about these drugs is the way they transform the irregularly organized, goofy rhythms of genuine human thought, what results from the deliberate effort of thinking out loud, into something smoother, more automatic and systematic, but also shallower, more tepid and, ultimately less original -- such as one finds with the greater part of the professional punditry in today's media.

crux of the problem, if a problem it is. These are mind altering drugs with lingering effects. Depending on what the 'brain' is taking it can require several months after stopping before one returns to one's normal thought patterns; the nominal base line, so to speak.

What some of them do is simply shut down the side bands of thought that become distracting. One can really focus, yes, but those frequently productive side bands or subconscious ghost thoughts are silenced. Effectively the wild thoughts of pure genius are silenced.

This is not automatically a bad thing however. Sometimes those ghost thoughts simply confuse the thinker and make him or her a bit crazy and unstable. There are far more unstable geniuses in this world than stable ones, and damn good reasons why many of them end up as total nutters.

So it's a trade off. Become reliably mentally stable but actually less erratically brilliant or remain erratically brilliant but perhaps suffer from bi-polar repercussions.

Of course I am talking of the twenty percent of the population that can think. Frankly I doubt that it much matters what the average college student does because he or she is never going to be cutting-edge brilliant anyway.

Most colleges, frankly, are turning out specialist technicians of various types -- even if we call them history majors or business majors or economic majors -- and true brilliance can be more of a debilitation in college and in post-college professional circles than if the student just learned how to network and blend in with the in-crowd. These drugs can therefore become true assets.

I see what you mean about the trade off -- it's like that bit that The Orb likes to sample in some of their weirder songs:
you've just had a heavy dose of electro-shock therapy; you're more alive than you've been in years; all those childhood traumas -- magically wiped away!! . . . . Along with most of your personality! . . .

The original question here was about side affects.

I dont know much about them but I do know that many psyco-active presecription drugs which are targetted at depression and bi-polar disorders have been known to cause suicidal thoughts-many of those drugs were taken off the market or the age to get them has been raised because it seems to be a less common side affect in older adults than kids and teens.

The point though is that this isnt about taking a drug and losing your sex drive or getting roid rage. A drug which can actually affect your thoughts is by nature a reason to be concerned if your thoughts are considered normal before hand. Lots of people can feel down when going through a bad spell and some doctors will hand out anti-depressents like aspirin-but thats a mistake. What was once a not so serious consideration of suicide suddenly becomes a realistic possibility to some people. And what was once a joke of a thought can become an entirely "real" thought such as one man in the US who killed his wife because she burned his dinner. These drugs are affecting your thought process and this means you are indeed neuro enhancing-for better and for worse.

Ritalin and adderall are amphetamines, plain and simple. They were originally diet drugs, re-packaged and marketed to hyper kids. Now you're re-marketing them as "neuroenhancers." I'm sure big pharm loves articles like this.

I used to take adderall (time-release ritalin) in college to write huge papers overnight. The stuff kept me up all night, full of energy, and made the experience of writing the paper ecstatic. However, I don't think it made my papers any better.

The side-effects were awful. Terrible taste in my mouth, jitters, sweating, general feeling of being dirty, and the worst part was that even after the crash your brain keeps going so it's hard to get to sleep.

Calling them "neuroenhancers" makes it sound like this is ginkobiloba, or worse, some new medical miracle. It's speed! It gets you high, and it changes who you are and what you think temporarily. Like any other amphetamine, extensive use can lead to psychosis.

Enjoy your "neuroenhancers!"

LOL, I"m glad the first poster has everyone all figured out and categorized!

I think the dangers of amphetamines are real, and that other neuro-transmitters will eventually provide a more 'focused' effect if you will. Ritalin, Adderall used to enhance attention focus is like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut - you'll crack the nut open but its not entirely what you were looking for.

I think eventually we will find a neuro-transmitter that wil enhance our abilities at memory recall, in some way strengthening our synaptic functions or even myelinization of the brains neurons (for better insulation and thus transmission). Believe it or not simple solutions offer a much more stable enhancement of the brains memory recall function - taking fish oils. Fish oils provide essential nutrients for the brain (analogous to an engile oil or lube), and most people note some appreciable effect on their memory recall during "alert periods" of consciousness.

A great resource for fans of neuro-science is Scientific American: Mind. Great articles, fun read.

that the people [some of them anyway] taking Ritalin/Adderall are playing with fire because they do not need them for a real mental condition.

They actually have the opposite effect on attention deficit, bi-polar, and naturally depressed people in that they merely cycle them up to 'normal' mental focus if they are attention deficit and to 'normal' mental and physcal speed if they are depressed and somehow moderate the swing cycles if they are bi-polar so that again they achieve something like the thought processes of 'normal' people.

While attention deficit individuals may or may not experience sleeplessness or sweats the other two types probably will not.

Unfortunately if one is also of the genius class of thinker as well as any of the other three classes of patients and taking these drugs then as a penalty for mental stability one definitely loses a certain degree of wild brilliance for however long one partakes. Pretty much the flashes of inspiration subside significantly or altogether vanish.

For these people they have a choice of lower level mental stability or higher level mental instability. Sometimes the choices simply suck.

For all of the scientifically based gobbledygook presented in regards to this drug, nobody really knows why precisely they work the way they do on the different types of patients.

But for people not needing them, for 'normal' people yeah they are just amphetamines, pure and simple.

WassabiCracker.

While I agree with the sledgehammer analogy [and consider it the methodology of Western medicine in general] the fact is that with some people, consuming fish oil by the gallon would make little difference. Some people need these harsh drugs. Unfortunately the attendant side effects are definitely not for the fainthearted.

I love the topic and the headfirst dives by everyone here into the issues. And I find myself agreeing with most opinions presented here.

My take: 99% of "neuro-corrective" medicines out there are band-aids that I think we might be better off in the long-run of doing without. Most, if not all, of them are symptomatic suppressants - they dilute or suppress SYMPTOMS (many of which are suspect in the first place IMHO) and rarely address root causes. I've had too many friends and family memberes in my life who've hopelessly jumped from one anti-depressant to the next, when there was a path to happiness (granted, a tough one) of behavioral changes that would have cured their symptoms.

When we are using short-term placators, we lose the ability to identify real sweeping problems in all sorts of larger institutions. Instead of giving students focus-enhancers, we should be making a curriculum that caters to their way of learning, addressing what environmental cues have changed their attention spans, altering early-stage nurturing to combat the underpinnings of ADHD etc, researching different pathways to our goal of raising well-balanced adults, or (call me radical) facing up to the fact that our culture and environment IS becoming a habitat of specialization where competition is driving individuals away from "the Renaissance man" model and towards the "one component, one function" model of social interconnectedness.

I believe in the trial and error nature of evolution, and so many people fail to see its workings in the present. But amongst all the differential idiosyncrasies, there is a trait that may be favored over the next thousand years in our species- and one "trait" that certainly is increasing is autism. How odd is it to think that, as evolution continues, a present-day genetic hindrance, may one day become a consensus model for our species. Sorry about the rambling nature of this post, but it is an extension that I always come to when considering how we medicate ourselves.

What an intriguing idea! but I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean autism in the strictly scientific sense, the inability to communicate through speech, or in some figural sense, maybe even a political sense, the loss of a common social language or context with(in) which to share information and experiences?

What I find interesting in the popular understanding of evolution is the way in which the most strident defenders of an amoral, non-anthropomorphisized objective understanding of the scientific theory fail to notice that the impulse behind the gravitation toward a "design" model of the universe is an ethical one, that people look to design as an explanatory device not in spite of the evolution's success, but because of it in the sense that the growing power of science gives people a yearning for limits to that power and a sense that it is being guided by concern for legitimate humanitarian purposes; they perceive that science itself is moving into the position long ascribed to divine being(s) -- with the ability to change the structure of the cosmos. change the weather, change the basic particles of human existence, alter the fates of individuals in seemingly whimsical ways -- just like the Olympian potentates of yore -- and they want to feel that there's some recognizably human impulse behind it all. "Evolution," seen as a personified force, may not act or have acted in the past like an ethical being, but they want the new gods in white lab coats to act with ethical concern aforethought as they assume the mantel of arbiter current divinity, altering genes, fixing the climate, etc. and this ethical yearning expresses itself in the ideolgical construct called ID.

MarkEHaag:

What an intriguing idea! but I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean autism in the strictly scientific sense, the inability to communicate through speech, or in some figural sense, maybe even a political sense, the loss of a common social language or context with(in) which to share information and experiences?

I meant it scientifically, figuratively, and politically. But I left out some important theories I have that help explain my "take" on autism scientifically (FYI, the theories are important to relating my ideas, not "important" among the scientific community - that's an "important" distinction). I have a zero-sum take on brain capability where we all have individual differences, but that is in application of brain functions, not quantity of them. I've studied abnormal psychology, and when reviewing cases, it always bothered me that patients were categorized in such a way as to implicate "fewer" brain functions. When we say that they are unable to communicate through speech, the natural impulse is to subtract that brain function - leaving us thinking they are minus-1 net. Truth is, they fail to communicate because other sections of their brain are so rapidly functioning, that verbal communication is impractical, or boring, or nearly impossible. These are the "Rainman" or savant-type scenarios, and there is nothing negative about their net brain capacity - yet we try our damndest to medicate and "fix" them. We try to generalize our species for what we see as the best model, meanwhile natural selection and our environment push our species towards a greater diversity a diversity that will afford us the greater probability of general survival - as we, as a species, have presided over the most mild and eventless swath of history that we know of, and that cannot last forever. Assuming it does last much longer, the figurative and political extrapolation of autism that I offered, works its way in as a possible design of humans that could fit within an improbable, and certainly Sci-Fi, structure of human civilization. Imagine if our lives continue to get busier, our jobs continue to become more specialized, and our communications fit within a wider range but on a lower echelon of personalization. Doesn't it eerily make sense that our brains shift functions to focus on others? Scientists strive to make computers more like humans, but is a small % of our population is already growing to meet computers halfway?

It is a crazy, improbable path that I am invoking for a little thought experiment. And I certainly have strayed far from the original topic - nerd doping. Look for my insane theory "Genetic Predisposition to Nicotine Addiction Today: Survival of the Fittest Dark Lungs in the Dusty, Smokey, Smoggy 'Mad Maxian' Future" somewhere soon. Probably a XX Fray reply to some quasi-feminist banter. :)