Results from our survey on neuroenhancment
Brendan Maher
Friday, 04 April 2008 13:06 UTC
Credit: PHOTOTAKE/Alamy
In January, Nature launched an informal online survey into readers’ use of cognition-enhancing drugs. We received 1400 responses. Major highlights from those results were published in a 10 April news story. But because we couldn’t highlight all the data in our news coverage, we now give you a chance to take a look at all the results, and share your analysis. Click here to download the results for yourself (Note: you will be redirected to a third-party file sharing website that is not part of Nature Publishing Group). Here you’ll find a Summary document in adobe pdf; two Microsoft Excel files (Sheet 1 and Sheet 2) with full answers to all questions; and finally a single document (Sheet 3) with all the answers represented in numerical format for easier analysis.
Download them, take a look and use the commenting function below to tell us if you find anything interesting.
History- Much of our coverage of cognitive enhancement started with an editorial that ran last November.
- Taking a cue from the interest it generated, we published a commentary by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir that asked readers if they would take these kinds of drugs if minimal risks were involved.
- The commentary sparked much discussion in an online forum we created and among various news outlets and blogs.
We published two pages worth of letters we received.
Updated 09 April 2008 18:14 UTC
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Replies
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I have cross-posted this news over at the Nature Network neuroscience forum, and encouraged members to come over here to look at the survey results and to comment.
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I see a lot of people have downloaded the results, but no one’s posted any analysis. I thought I’d add some numbers that I ran in the course of reporting and writing the news story that appeared last week.
In the widespread news coverage of our poll results a lot of agencies referred to poll respondents as academics or scientists (or worse, e.g. boffins, brainiacs, I even heard a radio broadcaster I was talking to calling them nerdos). For the record, our poll didn’t parse out academics, or practicing scientists very thoroughly and the overall results can’t really be tied to scientists exactly. But our demographics do allow us to make some assumptions. We asked what category generally describes your field and included among the limited choices, Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Environmental Science, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, and Education. So if we assume those are ‘academic’ fields and academic respondents, we have 817 respondents out of a total 1,400 that fit that loose demographic. Of those we found that 106 (13%) used neuroenhancing-type drugs for medically prescribed reasons. And 159 (19%) used drugs for non-medical (i.e. cognition-enhancing) purposes. That’s pretty consistent with the overall distribution in the poll.
Incidentally, it’s impossible for us to say whether the respondents were or weren’t readers of Nature as some news reports stated. We first announced the poll in our pages and on a forum posting similar to this one. Then the New York Times wrote a story in which they provided a link to the poll.
Needless to say our responses more than tripled, and it’s likely that a Nature reading majority was lost. Still, just before the NYTimes story appeared, I peeked at the data to see what the trends were showing, and a similar number, around 18% of respondents said they had used cognitive enhancers. As a casual observer, I find the consistency of this nearly-one-in-five number striking and wonder if any brilliant statistician might explain whether it’s significant or some sort of fluke.
It suggests that while some folks in the media flubbed and fantasized a bit about scientists popping pills (none so much as “these guys”: http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/one_in_five_scientists_use_brain, of course), our numbers suggest that the conclusions they draw might be made from the numbers we’ve got, albeit at a stretch. Still this was a completely self selecting poll, unscientific, and biased for example toward people with internet connections who are presumably aware of the issues. To be fair, several reporters got that right. It’s a temperature taking exercise, hopefully something that will spur more discussion and well designed studies, and there’s likely more to be found in those data.
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