Many Academics Use Cognition Enhancing Drugs

The journal Nature just published the results of a survey it undertook in January about readers' use of drugs to enhance cognition, chemically stimulate, and reduce anxiety. Now, it sounds like this was an opt-in survey, meaning that it would be a self-selecting sample, and, as such, not one that is necessarily representative of even the journal's readers, let alone academia at large. There is a large geographic bias, with more than three-quarters of the respondents coming from the U.S. and U.K.; 64.5 percent said they work in either biology, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, engineering, medicine, physics, media, or education, with the remainder being "other," whatever that means. The group skews young, with nearly 65 percent being under 36.

But still the results are interesting. One in five admit to have taken modafinil (Provigil), methylphenidate (Ritalin), or beta blockers like propranolol (Inderal) "to improve concentration or cognition." And additional 13.5 percent said they had taken such drugs for a medically diagnosed condition.

If you know anything about these drugs, they're intended for daily use. However, the usage patterns admitted to split into daily, weekly, monthly, or once a year at most, with fairly even numbers in each.

Of the over 1,400 answering the survey, 1254 answered the question "Should healthy humans be allowed to use cognitive enhancing drugs if they want to?"; almost 80 percent said yes. And 1258 answered the question, "Accepting a normal risk of mild side effects, would you boost your brain power by taking a cognitive enhancing drug?"; almost 70 percent said yes. About a third would feel pressure to let their kids take such a drug if other children in the school were doing so.

Obviously many people in academia, research, and the sciences feel no problem about others taking cognitive-enhancing drugs. But why is that any different from athletes taking performance-enhancing substances? There is effectively a public competition, with research money and even public acclaim at times going to those who get the edge in results. But isn't this a form of cheating - using something to let you do what you might not ordinarily to gain an advantage? According to Nature, one respondant from the US wrote, "As a professional, it is my duty to use my resources to the greatest benefit of humanity. If 'enhancers' can contribute to this humane service, it is my duty to take them." But is it really for nothing but a humane gesture? What if suddenly there would be no possibility of person gain in tenure, money, or professional stature? Why shouldn't an athlete say he or she has a duty to move past the limits of normal performance for the good of his or her team and the fans of the team?

A Real Business Course

InsideHigherEd.com (via Slashdot.org) is reporting a brewing controversy at Hunter College in New York City: corporate sponsored courses. According to the report, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IAAC) - an organization of large corporations looking to reduce copyright infringement in the form of knock-off vendors pretending that their wares are major brand names - actually sponsored a course at the school last year, and that's resulted in the Faculty Senate getting involved:

According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real. So-called “guerrilla marketing” — in which consumers are unaware that they are being marketed — is the subject of some controversy in the marketing and public relations world. But even among advocates for the tactic, there are some who are disturbed about what happened at Hunter.

Students in the for-credit class did such things as paper campus with fake fliers from an imaginary student looking for a lost Coach bag and a blog supposedly about her realizations that the bag was a counterfeit. Although being called guerilla marketing, I don't think the term applies. Guerilla marketing generally means using low-cost methods for getting interest in a business, with a premium on unusual methods - but you generally know that you're looking at something sponsored by a company.

The irony here is that this version of deceit and propoganda is trying to trick people to take specific actions much the same way as producers of counterfeit products try to trick consumers. They play on people's associations, deliberately misleading them, to gain their own ends. It's a bad situation when your own words and actions end up supporting that which you claim to oppose.

Books That Make You Dumb

This is just too amusing not to share. Virgil Griffith is a computer science grad student at CalTech. He looked at the top 100 books that were popular at thousands of colleges, brought in the average SAT scores, and came up with an "average" SAT score for each of the books. The chart is at a site he created called Booksthatmakeyoudumb.