Boost Your Brain With Smart Pills?

The never-ending search goes on for new ways to boost our brainpower. From consuming caffeine, to popping ginkgo biloba pills or fighting to swallow fish oil capsules with omega-3 fatty acids, we do it all in hopes of gaining improved brain function. But where should we stop? Should healthy people have the right to boost their brains with drugs, such as those prescribed for hyperactive children and those used to treat memory impairments in the aging? According to one group of researchers, the answer is yes.

Henry Greely of Stanford Law School in California, Barbara Sahakian, a psychiatry professor from the University of Cambridge in Britain, along with several others argue that the use of brain boosting drugs in healthy adults is a reasonable method of improving brain power and just as legitimate as education, the use of the internet and other learning tools. The seven authors hail from the United States and Britain and include ethics experts and scientists, as well as the editor-in-chief of Nature. They voice their arguments in a provocative commentary recently published in the journal Nature. And, even some health experts agree that the issue deserves consideration.

In the commentary, the experts write, “We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,” and suggest that using pills to achieve this is no more ethically unacceptable than practicing healthy eating or being well rested. The group also notes that college students routinely take prescription stimulants like Ritalin illegally to help them improve their studies and that the demand for these types of drugs will just continue to grow elsewhere. The editorial suggests the need for more research and a broad array of steps to take for risk management.

One author, brain scientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, says that the demand for brain-boosting pills will most likely grow as more effective pills are developed, especially among middle-aged people looking to improve memory function and workers who need to multitask to keep track of demands. According to Farah, “Almost everybody is going to want to use it.”

The commentary cited a survey conducted in 2001, which included approximately 11,000 American college students and revealed that nearly 7 percent of the students have used prescription stimulants, and on some campuses, as many as 25 percent have used the drugs for non-therapeutic purposes.

Stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin are commonly prescribed for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, the commentary points out that they can also help other people focus their attention and manage information in their brains. The editorial states that although Provigil is approved for sleep disorders, it is also prescribed to healthy people needing to stay alert when sleep-deprived and lab studies have shown that the drug can also perk up the brains of well-rested people. In addition, some drugs used to treat Alzheimer's disease can also provide a modest memory boost.

The authors call for scientists to begin studying the long-term effects of these drugs on healthy people, and to explore the possibilities of risks for addiction. In addition, the authors acknowledge possible disadvantages of the ready availability of the drugs. One of these is that children could feel compelled to take the drugs through peer pressure. Another downside may be that the expense of the drugs could limit their use to people with higher incomes, thereby heightening social inequalities.

The researchers have made an appeal for doctors and educators as well as regulators and others to participate in the evaluation of risks and to develop policies to govern the use of the drugs.