Exploring the current state of nootropics, what’s working, what’s not, and proposing a way forward.
Adderall (n): A prescription drug, an amphetamine with a popular black market on college campuses across America. A compound with addictive properties and unintended side effects that was never designed for everyday use by healthy adults.
Nootropic (n): A broad classification of drugs or compounds with cognitive enhancing properties with minimal side-effects appropriate for long-term use — the scientific nomenclature for “smart drugs.”
In a seminal 2008 piece in Nature, a group of policy and health experts from Stanford, Harvard, University of Manchester, and Cambridge wrote:
“We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function... Cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks.”
— Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.
What’s Working.
Smart is Getting Smarter
Humans have a long history of supplementation, and more generally, a long history of advancing our own ingenuity.
“If an alien were looking at humanity and asking “What is human nature?” one of the ingredients [would be] that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.” — Allen Buchanan
The myth of the pure human is just that, a myth. Humans are excellent at improving our tools and abilities to process the world — this drive is what us human.
No one would argue there will be less technology in the future.
Looking back in time, we see the paradigm shifts in humankind’s ability to transmit and process information. The written word. Numbers came later. Later came eyeglasses and telescopes. Later still, electric communication, then radio, then the internet, then mobile phones. Humans have been chasing better learning technologies for ages.
Are we smarter now than we were 100 years ago? The short answer is yes, we have gained about 3 IQ points per decade because of better education, better tools, and a better-networked society.
Makes you pretty excited about the future, doesn’t it?
One promising paradigm shift underway is widespread acceptance of nootropics, aka cognitive supplements.
There’s a lot of potential in nootropics. Just a week ago, Michael Pollan wrote a piece in the New Yorker about psilocybin, a psychedelic, and its promising results in treating anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression.
Modafinil, Ridalin, Adderall, Caffeine, THC — these have all been discovered or invented to help us gain control of our own psyche, and do indeed work when used in limited doses for specific ailments, under the direction of a medical doctor.
What’s Not Working
Mowing Your Lawn With A Machine Gun
While many of the cognitive supplements currently in vogue do show promise when used in a controlled environment under guidance of a physician, they were never intended for everyday use by healthy adults. Perhaps the worst culprit is Adderall.
Adderall, an amphetamine initially developed to treat people diagnosed with ADHD or narcolepsy, is in a heydey. One estimate states that at some colleges, one in four students has used Adderall, despite (or maybe due to) the fact that it’s a habit-forming prescription drug. Used in doses beyond what’s recommended under a doctor’s perscription, it can permanently affect your brain’s ability to produce and respond to neurotransmitters.
College administrators across the nation are scrambling to educate and counsel students to avoid an epidemic of abuse. It categorized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as a Schedule II drug, meaning it has “a high potential for abuse … with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence.” The Onion, perhaps the bellweather of our times, even published the headline Adderall Receives Honarary Degree from Harvard.
On top of this, Adderall creates an uneven playing field. It’s remarkably easy for some to get, remarkably hard for others. It’s prescription, it’s expensive, it’s dangerous, and buying/selling it casually is a crime in the US, punishable by prison. The key here is that the bulk of trading takes place among affluent people with a significant buffer from law enforcement. The game is rigged, as certain privileged groups have access, and others do not.
The premise of Adderall is exciting: pop a pill and plug in, and to that end, it’s been shown to be quite effective. The problem is that casual, non-prescription users are faced with a false choice: 0 or 100. There is no in between, no widely available supplement that works, that’s available over the counter, that’s not illegal and harmful.
Adderall is a rough “proof of concept” of a nootropic, but it misses the mark due to its adverse health effects and its potential to exacerbate an inequality.
A Way Forward
Measuring Smart
As the saying goes, measuring something is the first step towards improving it. So how do you know if a “smart drug” works?
(Why do people always write “smart drug” in quotes? I think it’s because “smart” is incredibly nuanced and immensely complex to measure. Creativity is different from focus is different from stamina is different from knowledge is different from habits. And for each trait, there’s a plethora of ways to measure it, some of which are more objective than others. So “smart” is hard fish to catch, but that makes it all the more exciting to pursue. The fact is, the term “smart pills” is a bit hokey, a bit sensationalist, like saying “information superhighway” instead of just saying the internet. A better term is cognitive supplement, or nootropic. No quotes. Much better, eh?)
Back to the question: what does it feel like to take, ahem, a nootropic?
One important capability of the human brain is what’s called “working memory,” which is the part of short-term memory that we use to process our conscious perceptions. One of the most highly cited papers in the field of psychology is the 1956 piece The Magical Number 7, Plus or Minus Two which states that the human brain is capable of handling 7 plus or minus 2 objects in working memory at once.
Now imagine if your 7 plus or minus 2 can become 8 or even 10 plus or minus 2? Sounds pretty good? Well it gets even better.
Steve Jobs said creativity is just “connecting the dots.”
If you have 5 objects, you can make 10 pairs between any two of those objects. If you double the number of objects to 10, the number of possible pairs jumps to 45. The gains scale quadratically, rather than linearly.
If you take a nootropic, or otherwise adjust your mindstate (find focus, enter flow state, block out distractions) such that you double your working memory capacity, it would mean more creativity, better decision making, and an easier time solving more complex problems.
To top it off, small productivity gains compound day over day, week over week, to make a huge difference over a year, over a career. It’s like compound interest on a savings account.
Now, granted, working memory is only one component of smartness, albeit an important one — it often is equated with “thinking more clearly.”
We’re better at understanding & measuring intelligence than ever before, and in turn we’re unlocking new innovations for enhancing our cognition.
A Bicycle of the Mind
Where Adderall falls short, there is opportunity for innovation.
If the main barriers to widespread Adderall use are 1) safety and 2) ease of access, that would suggest that there’s a market for something with less potential for abuse, something we can all use and afford.
A society that uses safe nootropics on a widespread basis may sound like fantastical sci-fi, but so too did the Information Superhighway not long ago. A 1995 piece in Newsweek magazine even said the internet as we know it would never happen, that the whole idea was “baloney.”
“All real innovation looks crazy at the time it’s made.” — Ben Horowitz
So then, what might the future look like?
A 2009 study done across 35 nations showed a statistically significant trend that “IQ correlated negatively with road-traffic accident fatalities.”
I’m not sure if this is an obvious, or insightful study. I was surprised when I first heard this, but then of course it makes sense — success behind the wheel, and success on an IQ test, both share several traits in common: the ability to asses a situation, match to patterns from prior experience, and make sound judgement. Smarter people can mean a better, safer society.
Imagine, for a second, a vision of the future that looks neither like 1984 (bleak, totalitarian, uniform) nor A Brave New World (an overly sedated, but happy & functional state).
Instead, imagine a world where nootropics are widely available, well understood, and publicly accepted. We’re not talking about Limitless or Lucy or other movies where the protagonist takes a super drug and gets unique mental prowess. As bioethicist (and advisor to Obama) Allen Buchanan puts it:
“One of the problems with Limitless was that it portrayed this guy by himself having much more developed cognitive capacities than other people, so it overlooked the fact that if lots of people have cognitive enhancements, there might be completely new forms of interaction, new kinds of social relationships, new forms of productivity and human flourishing, or new kinds of intrinsically enjoyable activities that we just don’t have access to now.”
Imagine a world where our policy-makers, cancer-researchers, and entrepreneurs are all realizing gains from cognitive enhancement.
To take it a step further — is cognition linked to morality? What if being smarter means being able to consider more evidence, hold a better understanding of history and the present, extrapolate the future better? Perhaps you would not only do better on your SAT, but also be a better person, and together we would be a better society.
Even animals eat psychoactive substances. It’s not accidental either- they do it on purpose. In fact, if we understand that certain drugs can expand consciousness, certain psychoactive substances may be part of the key of how certain primates made the leap to evolve into humans.
It’s not a matter of if, but of when nootropics will be commonplace. As noted by a journalist for The Atlantic, “Previous cognitive enhancement technologies, like literacy and mobile phones, have diffused rapidly across classes after some initial period of monopolization by elites.”
The present challenge is increasing access while mitigating safety concerns. There is quite likely a solution, but it’s quite likely the solution doesn’t yet exist.
Like technologies before it, nootropics will continue to develop in a way that fits the larger needs of society. Widespread use of safe cognitive supplements may seem to be at odds with the realities of the present day, but such is true of any glimpse we attempt to take into he future. Progress marches on, as we continue to explore our nature in our drive to reinvent and improve the human experience.
Nootropics will be mainstream, as widely available as protein powder or Tylenol, within 5 years.
Making It Happen
We are working on a safe & responsible alternative to Adderall. If you enjoyed this piece, or if it resonated with you in any way, please share this post and take a moment to check out our current crowd funding campaign, which unifies the thoughts here into a reasonable direction forward.
UPDATE: Our crowd funding campaign hit 50% on our first day! Thanks for all the support so far, please take a look and spread the word.
