Drugs like ritalin, dexamphetamine decrease the quality of cognitive effort

To paraphrase, this paper says &quot;people who drank a triple espresso didn&#x27;t do as well at sudoku&quot;. They gave pretty high doses of stimulants to test subjects and then tried to peel them off the walls and have them solve a short, difficult cognitive task.<p>The more practical question of whether popping stimulants can help people get through mountains of undemanding, tedious work is left as scientifically unexplored territory. Hopefully the research team will get a line on some Adderall and knock out the necessary papers soon.

Students don&#x27;t use ritalin to achieve high quality cognitive effort, they use it to achieve high quantity cognitive effort. To pass a university exam I don&#x27;t need to be able to come up with some novel high quality reasoning about a topic, I need to regurgitate 12 weeks worth of lectures on demand. The only way I could do that is by sitting down for 10hrs a day and reading the shit out of those lecture notes, ritalin is quite useful for that.

They let participants solve the knapsack problem under the influence of common ADHD meds like ritalin, dexamphetamine, modafinil.<p>Interesting results were observed. Participants who performed below average while on placebo tended to improve on the task when on one of the drugs. Those that performed above average tended to have decreased performance on the task.

My experience with Modafinil is that it is helpful for dealing with tasks that have been sitting in my Todo List for months (my most procrastinated tasks). Not necessarily the most complex tasks, as I usually like doing those, but kind of tasks like cleaning my 3000 mails mailbox or writing a SOP for my business. The 1-day modafinil will clear up so much of my todolist that I&#x27;ll be free the next weeks&#x2F;months to tackle the most complex problems. And for solving complex problems, I find microdosing better as it gives different perspectives&#x2F;POVS

The study might be flawed, but there are lots of opinions here from a lot of people who don&#x27;t suffer from ADHD who really should reach out to us who do, and find out that it really is a &#x27;&quot;disorder&quot; or &quot;disability&quot; for the person experiencing it&#x27;<p>Ritalin fundamentally changes my approach to life, allows me to present and focused in ways I&#x27;ve never experienced before, and have since come to realise I&#x27;d been missing my whole life

&gt; single-dose trial of standard adult doses of the three drugs (30 mg of MPH, 15 mg of DEX, and 200 mg of MOD) and PLC, administered before being asked to solve eight instances of the knapsack task. Doses are at the high end of those administered in clinical practice, reflecting typical doses in nonmedical settings, where use tends to be occasional rather than chronic.<p>I’ve taken methylphenidate aka Ritalin (MPH) and dexteroampheramine aka Adderall (DEX) and my largest prescription was less than half of these doses.<p>If I take a dose of 15mg of MPH after a break of 10 days, I’ll be jittery, irritable, and a bit over-active. I imagine taking 30mg for someone neurotypical who’s never taken it before would be closer to a subdued but sustained hit of cocaine. I wouldn’t imagine anyone performing well in this trial, I probably wouldn’t either with a 30-day break beforehand. I don’t know where they’re getting this “typical adult dose for non-prescription use”… I have a neurotypical friend who takes 10mg of adderall as a <i>party drug</i> at raves.

My ex used to give her friends low doses of her ADHD medication for tech interviews and every one of them said the outcome was significantly better than they expected based on other interviews and preparation. I&#x27;m not sure what this says about the interview process, but it does indicate that for real-world applications it&#x27;s more complicated than &quot;stimulant = bad&quot;. They say they chose doses that &quot;reflect typical doses in nonmedical settings&quot;, but those doses don&#x27;t reflect what she gave her friends for performance _at all_. Let&#x27;s reproduce this experiment with starting doses rather than straw-man high doses and see what happens.

So normal individuals without diagnosed ADHD performed worse taking these medications but individuals with diagnosed ADHD performed less worse and or as equal as the individuals without ADHD when those individuals were not medicated....

What the authors completely forgot to measure or even so much as discuss is the effect of participants physical well-being on performance when under the influence of these drugs.<p>They solely focus on the patients cardiac profile, I&#x27;m assuming for safety as these drugs can raise blood pressure quite a bit. Also, the sample size is strikingly small for a 4 cohort study on the effects of a drug on behavior (n = 30, 17 males, 23 females, but subdivided into 4 groups).<p>Performance enhancing drugs can have a myriad of effects on physical well being. The amount dispensed to participants was at least for Ritalin strikingly high. 30mg is a dose you get after at least 1-2 months of raising the dosage from 10mg, and that&#x27; the _retarded_ pill. If these were unretarded tablets, no doubt the participants must have felt completely wired up. The results look to me as if you drugged a bunch of people, told them to do something and they performed worse, but not much worse, probably because they were complaining of side effects. I know that&#x27;s a polemic interpretation of the results, but I feel like I&#x27;m entitled to it, given the authors one sided discussion.

I have ADHD. I was given adderall. I found that my programming and mathematical skills suffered pretty badly while on it<p>I could clean my house like a mofo, though

....for people not suffering from ADHD.

They dropped high clinical doses of stimulants onto unacclimated subjects and had them do 8 knapsack problems, 4-minute limit each. There was an increase in number of moves, decrease in average score, chance of finding the optimal solution was the same.<p>In other words, if you get a random person high and hand them a puzzle, they do a little bit worse. I&#x27;m not surprised.<p>Anyone who is not neurotypical, plans to take more than one dose per lifetime, or is working longer than 32 minutes may want to question if this study applies to them.

I remember taking Adderall, it made me feel like I could do anything. However, when I went back and looked at the work product, it was like work done by a crazy person. I went through bad withdrawal, thinking I could not do my work or anything, unless I took Adderall. Then suddenly I took Adderall and I was smart again. A terrible false prophet.

The expectation is not necessarily to perform better on a test because of the medicine directly, but to be able to study more effectively and achieve a higher score as a result of being able to focus better on the required boring tasks. Of course it doesn&#x27;t make you smarter directly.

Totally fits with my experiences. I wrote large parts of my bachelor thesis on ritalin, as I lacked motivation otherwise. It resulted in high quantity, low quality content. The high quantity did offer a good starting point to refine the content while being sober.