The Impact and Individual Differences of Smart Drugs on Performance: New Research Findings

Smart drugs such as the ADHD drug Ritalin are popular as performance-enhancing drugs, but those who take them often do not improve their performance. Not only does the effect differ per person, it can even be counterproductive, according to new research.

After taking the drugs, test subjects did try harder on the experiments they had to perform. “But that extra effort yielded nothing, on the contrary,” says co-researcher Peter Bossaerts. “My personal advice would be not to use these drugs as aids, except in a medical context.”

For the study, the subjects were always given one of three drugs: methylphenidate (ritalin), dextroamphetamine and modafinil. These drugs are often prescribed for ADHD or insomnia, but are also often used by students in the hope of increasing their performance. In 2021, one in twenty students will use ADHD medication without a prescription, according to figures from the Trimbos Institute.

Particularly striking were the individual differences that emerged from the study. The subjects who scored the best without the drug performed worse with the drug. And vice versa. “The drugs made many of the differences between the test subjects disappear,” concludes Bossaerts. The research is published in the scientific journal Science Advances.

Neuroscientist Roshan Cools, who was not involved in the research himself, speaks of a good and interesting study. Cools conducts research at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen into the effect of smart drugs.

She recently showed that Ritalin only improves people’s performance improves if they have low dopamine levels in their brain. Dopamine is a substance that makes communication between brain cells possible.

Cools also found such individual differences in the field of working memory and creative thinking. “It may well be that the effects on the knapsack problem in the new study are due to a disturbance in working memory or creative thinking,” she suspects, “due to an excessively high dopamine level.”

So there are all kinds of factors that play a role. How good you are at something, what kind of problem you have to solve, how much dopamine you have in your brain: it all matters for the effect of smart drugs. That makes it almost impossible at the moment to determine who will benefit outside the medical context, and under what circumstances.

Cools and her team are working on developing a prediction model for this, but that is still in the early stages. Is there nothing at all that can be said with certainty about smart drugs? “Only on reaction tasks does everyone actually score better,” she concludes.

Another certainty is the risk you take by using them. For example, the possession and trade of many of these substances is prohibited. In addition, some of the users suffer from side effects such as insomnia, palpitations and nausea.