Reducing Creativity With Psychostimulants May Debilitate Mental Health and Well-Being

Concept generation of cognitive enhancement: healthcare professionals' approach towards the impact and utilization of cognitive enhancers in academic context

Cognitive enhancers (CEs) encompass a wide range of drugs, including prescription medications for attention deficit disorders and pharmacological compounds for cognitive enhancement. It is well-documented that the students are the leading cohort of CEs users. Exploring how healthcare professionals perceive the use of CEs for academic accomplishments is significant to understand their encouragement of CE use. Hence, the purpose of the current study was to look at healthcare professionals' attitudes and perceived understanding about the usage of CEs in academic contexts. The study was a quantitative cross-sectional research design conducted in different healthcare and academic settings of Karachi. The respondents were approached either through social media platforms or the official email addresses of their working organizations. Data were collected through a web link of an online questionnaire that included four sections; inquiring about the respondents' demographics characteristics, their knowledge about CEs, their attitudes towards the use and impact of CEs, and their inclination to use a hypothetical prescription-only CE. The response rate of the study was 73.3%. The majority of the respondents negated to permit university students to using CEs for cognitive boost (n = 360, 67.1%), to concentrate (n = 406, 75.7%), to increase vigilance (n = 394, 73.5%) or to mitigate the effects of other medicines (n = 312, 58.2%). The pharmacists were more likely to refute that using CEs by the students is safe (pharmacists 10.8% vs. physicians 8.3%, p=<0.001), beneficial (pharmacists 12.7% vs. physicians 5.3%, p=<0.001), or necessary (pharmacists 17.6% vs. physicians 12.8%, p=<0.001). The major reasons for not encouraging the use of CEs were fear of misuse (n = 510, 95.1%), safety concerns (n = 495, 92.3%), and their consideration for CE as unnecessary medical intervention (n = 441, 82.2%). The findings indicated that overall, respondents have a clear consensus of not letting university students use CEs for cognitive improvement or any other purpose implying that cognitive enhancement is not yet a common or approved medical practice by the healthcare professionals in Pakistan.

A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of the Sex-Creativity Relationship in Childhood, Adolescence, and Emerging Adulthood: Findings of Mean and Variability Analyses

The relationship between sex and creativity remains an unresolved research question. The present study aimed to approach this question through the lens of the developmental theory of sex differences in intelligence, which posits a dynamic pattern of sex differences in intellectual abilities from female superiority in childhood and early adolescence to male superiority starting at 16 years of age. A total of 775 participants from three age groups (i.e., children, adolescents, and emerging adults) completed a 4-year longitudinal study comprising four assessments of creative thinking at 1-year intervals. Creative thinking was assessed with the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production. While the results revealed female superiority in childhood and early adolescence, male superiority was not found in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Rather, greater sex similarities and greater male variability were found based on mean and variability analyses, respectively. This study elucidated the link between sex and creativity by (1) taking a developmental perspective, (2) employing a 4-year longitudinal design in three age groups (i.e., children, adolescents, and emerging adults), and (3) analyzing sex differences based on both mean and variability analyses.

Novelty-seeking trait predicts the effect of methylphenidate on creativity

In recent years the use of psychostimulants for cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals with no psychiatric disorders has been on the rise. However, it is still unclear whether psychostimulants improve certain cognitive functions at the cost of others, and how these psychostimulants interact with individual personality differences. In the current study, we investigated whether the effect of one common stimulant, methylphenidate (MPH), on creativity is associated with novelty seeking. Thirty-six healthy adults, without attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptomology, were assigned randomly in a double-blind fashion to receive MPH or placebo. We found that the effect of MPH on creativity was dependent on novelty-seeking (NS) personality characteristics of the participants. MPH increased creativity in individuals with lower NS, while it reduced creativity levels in individuals with high NS. These findings highlight the role of the dopaminergic system in creativity, and indicate that among healthy individuals NS can be seen as a predictor of the effect of MPH on creativity.

Modafinil increases the latency of response in the Hayling Sentence Completion Test in healthy volunteers: a randomised controlled trial

Background

Modafinil is a medication licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy. However, it has been reported that healthy individuals without wakefulness disorders are using modafinil off-label to enhance cognitive functioning. Although some studies have reported that modafinil improves cognitive task performance in healthy volunteers, numerous other studies have failed to detect cognitive enhancing effects of modafinil on several well-established neuropsychological tasks. Interestingly, several clinical and preclinical studies have found that improved cognitive task performance by modafinil is accompanied by slower response times. This observation raises the question as to whether this slowing of response time in healthy volunteers is a necessary and sufficient condition for cognitive enhancement with modafinil. The aim of the current experiment was to explore this question by investigating the effects of modafinil on the Hayling Sentence Completion Test (HSCT).

Methodology

Sixty-four healthy volunteers received either a single dose (200 mg) of modafinil (n = 32) or placebo (n = 32) in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel group study in which the principal outcome measures were response latencies on the response initiation and response inhibition sections of the HSCT.

Principal Findings

Participants dosed with modafinil had significantly longer mean response latencies on the HSCT for both the response initiation and response inhibition compared to participants dosed with placebo. However, participants in both groups made a similar number of errors on each of these measures, indicating that modafinil did not enhance the accuracy of performance of the task relative to placebo.

Conclusions

This study demonstrated that administration of single 200 mg doses of modafinil to healthy individuals increased the latency of responses in the performance of the HSCT, a task that is highly sensitive to prefrontal executive function, without enhancing accuracy of performance. This finding may provide important clues to defining the limitations of modafinil as a putative cognitive enhancer.

Trial Registration

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02051153

Neuroethical issues in pharmacological cognitive enhancement

Neuroethics is an emerging field that in general deals with the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics. In particular, it is concerned with the ethical issues in the translation of neuroscience to clinical practice and in the public domain. Numerous ethical issues arise when healthy individuals use pharmacological substances known as pharmacological cognitive enhancers (PCEs) for non-medical purposes in order to boost higher-order cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and executive functions. However, information regarding their actual use, benefits, and harms to healthy individuals is currently lacking. Neuroethical issues that arise from their use include the unknown side effects that are associated with these drugs, concerns about the modification of authenticity and personhood, and as a result of inequality of access to these drugs, the lack of distributive justice and competitive fairness that they may cause in society. Healthy individuals might be coerced by social institutions that force them to take these drugs to function better. These drugs might enable or hinder healthy individuals to gain better moral and self-understanding and autonomy. However, how these drugs might achieve this still remains speculative and unknown. Hence, before concrete policy decisions are made, the cognitive effects of these drugs should be determined. The initiation of accurate surveys to determine the actual usage of these drugs by healthy individuals from different sections of the society is proposed. In addition, robust empirical research need to be conducted to delineate not only whether or not these drugs modify complex higher-order cognitive processes but also how they might alter important human virtues such as empathy, moral reasoning, creativity, and motivation in healthy individuals. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:533-549. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1306 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.