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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First, I didn’t see the survey instructions – were respondents fully aware that the comments they submitted would be posted publicly beside their IP addresses? A few of them seem somewhat personal in nature.
On the study, I was disappointed that there was not more of a systematic breakdown of the negative side-effects of the drugs. Of course, this survey is only intended to determine whether people are using the drugs, not whether the drugs are effective or troublesome. I suppose subjective self-reports aren’t very reliable anyway when we consider what opiate and nicotine addicts or psychiatric patients on medication often say about the drugs they use.
My main methodological concern is that, as advertised, this was an informal survey. We really can’t know how people recruited one another online to come to the study page or whether they are representative.
Now for the broader issue. I am very pleased to see that legalization of drugs has been rehabilitated for consideration in polite society, but I am equally appalled to see a widespread belief, from survey comments to media reports, that there can be some mental panacea that can make the majority of people more intelligent or effective. I believe that we need to adopt a policy of drug legalization in order to fight crime and as a matter of compassion, but such a policy requires an educated, wary public.
It disturbs me that some have been painting a picture of amphetamines as a handy study aid and a good medicine for children while others draw lurid sketches of the ugly, demented methamphetamine addict. We need to develop a more coherent picture.
Few deny that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, presumably the product of recent strong positive selection for any allele that could boost general intelligence. I think that it follows that any single simple change in regulation that could be induced by a drug should already have been put to the test by evolution. Yes, there are some people more intelligent than others, but any schoolyard bully knows that being a “nerd” is not always without drawbacks. If a gene variant can make a person smarter, faster, a better worker, etc., it should have taken over the entire population – were it not for some hidden pitfall in at least some people who carry it. Drugs that regulate biochemical processes should face the same limitations.
Even for characteristics such as physical strength, in which humans are inferior to close evolutionary relatives, the purveyors of performance-enhancing drugs cannot promise that their treatments will not cause severe negative effects on health.
A disturbing parallel is the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome, in which over 150,000 of the toughest fighters in the world were laid low by (most likely) a seemingly harmless substance, pyridostigmine, that was intended to improve their performance in the event of exposure to nerve gas. Since one might guess that evolution never optimized humans for this trait at all, it would seem feasible to improve this performance without much risk. In reality, if it were so easy to avoid a poison with a simple change in allosteric regulation, this would long since have occurred to make a more robust genome. I cannot envision any simple, easy ways to improve an entire species with a pill, unless it contains something new, like an antibiotic or a rare trace element, that could not readily evolve.
Even so, coercion seems a very pressing worry, because it might be possible to extract a short-term advantage at the cost of long-term problems. How can a significant percentage of students or workers make use of a performance enhancing substance without coercing others to try the same thing to compete? Either the rules of competition must be strict, or its intensity must be weak, so that contestants are moved more by caution than pursuit of this advantage. Otherwise the minds of human beings may be used like Midwest farmland, eroded away by owners who must compete hard to survive until next year, and cannot afford to think about how the land will hold up a century from now.
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