Reply from Brendan Maher

Brendan Maher — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:41:50 -0000

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.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:27:53 -0000

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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