2023-06-22 04:00:21
High school students during the baccalaureate philosophy test, at the Lycée Pasteur in Strasbourg, June 18, 2018. FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP
They are called “cognitive dopants” or “psychostimulants”. As exams and competitions approach, many students are tempted by these substances, hoping to strengthen their memory, increase their concentration and boost their intellectual performance. These are often over-the-counter products (energy drinks, caffeine tablets, etc.). But it can also be prescription drugs, diverted here from their medical use, such as methylphenidate (Ritalin), prescribed for attention deficit disorder (ADD), or even modafinil, indicated for hypersomnia and narcolepsy.
Resorting to these psychostimulant drugs is not a good idea, however, reveals a study published on June 14 in the journal Science Advances. Their Anglo-Saxon nickname of smart drugs (“smart drugs”), in fact, appears to be largely usurped there.
Led by Peter Bossaerts of the University of Cambridge (UK), the authors recruited 40 volunteer participants (23 women, 17 men) aged 18-35. These people were randomly drawn to receive either a placebo, or methylphenidate, or modafinil or dextroamphetamine (a drug not authorized in France, used in some countries to treat hyperactivity or hypersomnia), at doses usual in their medical indication. Neither the experimenter nor the participants knew which group the latter belonged to during the tests, but all the participants tested each of the three drugs in turn.
One hour and thirty minutes after ingesting one of the three drugs or the placebo, the volunteers were subjected to a cognitive test, the “backpack optimization problem”. Put simply, they had to choose a number of items of varying weight and value that could fit into a backpack of a given capacity, while maximizing the total value of the contents of the bag. Either “a cognitive task with a complexity close to that of many situations of daily life”believes Lionel Naccache, neurologist at the Brain Institute (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris).
Results: When participants used one of these molecules, they spent more time on this task and tested more solutions, but these increased efforts did not increase their chances of finding the solution. Clearly, they deployed more effort for less success! Finally, these drugs reduced productivity, defined as the value of the response, related to the number of attempts.
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