When I was a child and teen I was a hyperactive, unstimulated, bored, D- student. Ritalin drastically changed that and I was getting A's and teachers described me as a whole different person. I would too: it made me antisocial and jittery and basically robbed me of my humanity. Since then I've found drug-free strategies to manage my intellectual/social Jekyll and Hyde.<p>The idea of performance enhancing drugs making their way into the workplace arena scares me a lot.
Love it - only half-joking. Take advantage of a large population of healthy young men under close medical supervision and government access to good LSD in order to run a good experiment to see if micro dosing has positive cognitive effects.
That purported Einstein quotation set off some red flags: “No problem can be solved from the same level of
consciousness that created it."<p>Seems that he never said it, if this Quora answer is to be believed (and it seems reasonable): <a href="https://www.quora.com/Einstein-said-that-you-cannot-solve-a-problem-from-the-same-level-of-consciousness-that-created-it-What-did-he-mean-with-it-Can-you-use-a-concrete-example/answer/Paul-Mainwood" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Einstein-said-that-you-cannot-solve-a-...</a>.
The British Marines tried this in Operation Moneybags.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WscQIp3Kac" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WscQIp3Kac</a>
Threads like this always make think that I think most of human society has the wrong frame of mind about performance enhancement. I think the "stock" performance of the human brain / body should not be blindly accepted. I want to outgrow my biological limitations and be a more effective version of myself.
The chart on page 3 suggests cannabis has roughly the same harm to others as tabacco? And steroids present harm to other individuals? I'd love to hear these arguments.
It's an open secret in the military that psychedelic use is fairly widespread. Unlike cocaine and weed, you can't really test for it. Kind of sad to see something like this published by the Marines though; basically content free "muh microdosing." I mean, does this even mean anything?<p><i>"Microdoses cause cortical functions
to be more fluid, leading researchers
to believe that psychedelics may help
certain brain areas work in increas-
ingly flexible and expansive ways."</i><p>If ever there was a meme elixir designed to punch holes in your pre-frontal cortex, microdosing is it. There's basically zero evidence such substances enhance anything. In my experience, and in my observations of others, it makes you <i>feel</i> like you're enhancing your noggin, but real world performance definitely, sometimes dramatically suffers.<p>Modafinil and amphetamines probably enhance performance on grinding tasks. Nature, concentration and lack of sleep definitely enhance performance on creative tasks. Caffeine works too, and nicotine and the racetams for keeping the cobwebs out and the acetylcholine high. Microdoses, yeah, nerd "muh microdoses" articles ain't gonna cut it for me: I've seen the effects and will stick with coffee and snus. Hell, simply looking at scientific or technological output pre and post civilizational psychedelic use: you can see it hasn't had any obvious benefit. People did more amazing things back when day drinking was common.