However, after 24 hours, including a night of sleep, participants who had received the stimulant started performing much worse on working memory tasks than those who had received a placebo. In this case, the team found that at both the 75-minute and 12-hour points, the participants’ working memory performance was the same, regardless of whether they had received dextroamphetamine or a placebo. To learn about dextroamphetamine’s effects on sleep and working memory, the researchers analyzed the data from 46 healthy participants aged 18–39 years. “Our research suggests that the purported enhancement to executive function from psychostimulants in healthy populations may be somewhat exaggerated, as we found only minor daytime improvement in attention and no benefit to working memory,” says co-author Sara Mednick. However, at both 12 and 24 hours after taking this drug, participants no longer experienced any benefits. They also had better focus than they did at baseline. At 75 minutes after receiving the drug, the attentional performance of these participants was 4% better than that of those in the control group. People who received the stimulant did demonstrate better attention in the short term than those who had received the placebo. The team noticed that regardless of whether a participant had received the placebo or the dextroamphetamine, their attention tended to diminish throughout the day. In studying how the drug affects attention, the researchers analyzed the results that they had obtained from 43 healthy participants aged 18–35 years. The first, in the journal Cognition, focuses on the effects of dextroamphetamine on attention span, while the second, in Behavioural Brain Research, discusses the drug’s effects on sleep and working memory, The team published their findings in two separate study papers. A week later, they switched the treatments so that each participant had received both. The researchers gave the participants either a placebo or 20 milligrams of the psychostimulant dextroamphetamine, a substance that is present in Adderall. The first was to assess the effects of psychostimulants on cognitive performance, particularly focus, and the second was to see how these drugs would affect sleep and working memory, which is the type of memory that we use daily to make decisions.Īll of the participants received memory and attention tests at the beginning of the study so that the researchers could see how these baseline measurements would compare with the results at the end. The researchers recruited healthy adult participants and conducted two sets of experiments. “Our research shows that while psychostimulants may mildly curb natural attentional deterioration across the day, their use also disturbs sleep and post-sleep executive function.” “Healthy individuals who use psychostimulants for cognitive enhancement may incur unintended costs to cognitive processes that depend on good sleep,” warns lead author Lauren Whitehurst. The team found that in the long run, these drugs, in fact, negatively affect focus, working memory, and sleep quality, creating a vicious cycle. Yet, according to a new study by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, the nonmedical use of psychostimulants such as Adderall only brings short term benefits. Increasingly, however, healthy young people have started procuring and using this and similar drugs as a way of “hacking” their brains to enhance performance while working or studying.Ī 2016 study by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, found that in the United States, the nonprescribed use of Adderall had increased by 67% among young adults over approximately 6 years. The manufacturers of this drug created it to allow people with these conditions to remain alert and focused. “ Adderall and other stimulants are the perfect chemical accomplice in a society that prizes productivity above all else,” notes a short article that featured last year in The Lancet.Īdderall is an amphetamine based drug that doctors prescribe to individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD) or narcolepsy - a condition that causes people to fall asleep suddenly, even in the middle of the day. Share on Pinterest Taking focus enhancing drugs without a prescription could do more harm than good, new research shows.
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