Drugs That Make You Smarter Essay

Words: 707
Pages: 3

Tim Jenkins, Psy 375 Dr. Kroger Brain Story 15 “Drugs that make you smarter” 11-30-16 As pharmaceutical drugs become more potent and accessible, so too, has the use of “off-label” prescription drugs which are believed to be cognitive enhancers. These neuroenhancers are stimulants typically used to treat disorders like ADHD but taken without a diagnosis. Some of the advantages of these drugs as Alex states is that one can stay focused longer and be more productive. Many students such as Alex get drugs like Adderall by either faking symptoms of a diagnosis or by purchasing them from other students. There is increasing demand for these neuroenhacing drugs because they help with 3 different types of cognition; working memory, mental restraint and learning. Learning is essentially the ability to retain information such as in word-pairing studies in which participants are shown word pairs and then later only half of the pair and asked to state the other half. Adderall helped these participants with their retention abilities and they generally scored better on the tests. Working memory is the amount of information you can juggle in your brain to accomplish a task and was described like a legal …show more content…
The article explained this through the lens of dopamine receptors in the brain. In people at the lower end of the IQ spectrum typically have a gene that breaks down dopamine quicker, leaving a deficit and lower function as opposed to normal people. If one has too much dopamine, they feel overstimulated, which serves as a biological bell curve; aiding the lower people from a “40 to an 80” but not nearly as much in other patients. It is with this knowledge that researchers like Farah believe that these drugs could serve as a field leveler for people from lower SES places; if distributed