23536
Bluelight Crew
Adderall, Ritalin and other "smart drugs" have become popular among college students and young professionals, who use them to enhance performance. The drugs are normally prescribed to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but healthy students use them to get a leg up in school, by improving focus, concentration and memory. The question is, do they work?
Maybe not, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania. Students who took Adderall didn't actually perform better on tests of cognitive function — they only thought they did. Casey Schwartz blogged about the findings on the Daily Beast:
The research team tested 47 subjects, all in their twenties, all without a diagnosis of ADHD, on a variety of cognitive functions, from working memory — how much information they could keep in mind and manipulate — to raw intelligence, to memories for specific events and faces. Each subject was tested both while on Adderall and on a placebo; in each condition, the subjects didn't know which kind of pill they were receiving.
The researchers did come up with one significant finding. The last question they asked their subjects was: "How and how much did the pill influence your performance on today's tests?" Those subjects who had been given Adderall were significantly more likely to report that the pill had caused them to do a better job on the tasks they'd been given, even though their performance did not show an improvement over that of those who had taken the placebo.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/...but-it-makes-you-think-you-are/#ixzz18ojaFqMq
Maybe not, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania. Students who took Adderall didn't actually perform better on tests of cognitive function — they only thought they did. Casey Schwartz blogged about the findings on the Daily Beast:
The research team tested 47 subjects, all in their twenties, all without a diagnosis of ADHD, on a variety of cognitive functions, from working memory — how much information they could keep in mind and manipulate — to raw intelligence, to memories for specific events and faces. Each subject was tested both while on Adderall and on a placebo; in each condition, the subjects didn't know which kind of pill they were receiving.
The researchers did come up with one significant finding. The last question they asked their subjects was: "How and how much did the pill influence your performance on today's tests?" Those subjects who had been given Adderall were significantly more likely to report that the pill had caused them to do a better job on the tasks they'd been given, even though their performance did not show an improvement over that of those who had taken the placebo.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/...but-it-makes-you-think-you-are/#ixzz18ojaFqMq
