At a party in a rambling, million-dollar Victorian mansion in Atlanta’s hip Inman Park neighborhood, artists and lawyers, musicians and businesspeople mingle, talk, and imbibe that eternally popular feel-good drug, alcohol. The slightly pungent scent of marijuana drifts in from a room off the kitchen, where joints are passed among a dozen people, some of them old enough to have been smoking marijuana as a recreational drug since the 1960s. Despite the fears of their worried parents in the hippie heyday, most of these folks have ended up successful; they say that they are using pot to unwind, de-stress, and be more sociable.
Later I join some friends and head to a nearby tavern. Here we are, four middle-aged professionals (a physician, a neurology technician, a computer executive, and a writer) having beers and burgers, when the conversation turns to travel—and to a certain drug. Everyone but me is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this attention enhancer, which has become de rigueur for their far-flung travels abroad. Used routinely on trips that would normally leave people jet-lagged, the drug helps override weariness from disrupted circadian rhythms and broken sleep. The small pill, containing the compound modafinil and marketed as Provigil by the pharmaceutical company Cephalon, also makes my friends feel—perhaps actually be—more alert and focused when they return home. And taken in moderation, it doesn’t give them the jittery cardiac stimulation of amphetamines or, for that matter, too much caffeine.
Modafinil is the latest and most touted of a growing number of pharmaceuticals used to enhance cognition and mental performance in people without a diagnosis, disorder, or disease. The trend I observed on my party circuit has been documented in rigorous peer review: In a study published last year in Pharmacotherapy, researchers at the University of Maryland found that of 1,208 college students, 18 percent took ADHD medications like Ritalin and Adderall even though the drugs had not been prescribed. You might think the college students were taking stimulants mostly to party, but that is not what the researchers found. The students were taking the stimulants mainly to help with studying.
College students are not the only ones seeking that attention edge. According to an informal survey conducted by Nature last year, 20 percent of the more than 1,400 responding readers admitted to using cognition-enhancing prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons, mostly to “improve concentration.” Of those, some 50 percent said they did it daily or weekly. These were not just twentysomethings, either; nearly half of the respondents were over 35.
Drugs like modafinil, moreover, are just the leading edge of a growing trend. The potential for mind-boosting drugs and technologies has increased stunningly over the past decade as neuroscientists have unlocked the secrets of neuronal circuits, neurotransmitters, and specific molecular events triggering brain functions in three interconnected cognitive domains—attention, memory, and creativity. The resulting pharmaceutical products go by several names, including smart drugs, neuropharmaceuticals, or nootropics (from the Greek noos, for “mind,” and tropein, “going toward”). In applications where pharmaceuticals may not be viable, brain stimulation with magnetism and other mind-altering technologies are being studied instead.
