Almost 7% of American university students have used prescription stimulants.  Not to party all night, but to study.
The cast of characters here are familiar; Adderall, Ritalin and the newest sibling, Modafinil (aka Provigil). Smart drugs, developed for the treatment of the ill, are now finding homes in the medicine cabinets of the healthy. The question is: will they be in yours?

When I’ve told people that I’m a neuroscientist I occasionally get the response “you must be smart.” While flattered, I don’t necessarily believe this is the case. I’m just one guy who has a lot of knowledge and a lot of interest in one particular subject, in which case I’m no different than many, other, talented, people.

The real meaning behind the word “smart” lies in the fact that is relative. Are you smart? Odds are that you’re brighter than many people in your class/office. But the ego mangler is this: There are always going to be lots of people smarter than you.

A sobering thought, but it not really a big deal for most of us. But what if you are at school or in a cutthroat corporate environment, competing with all those bright sparks around you?

If you were challenging them in the sporting arena, at least you could go to the gym and practice more, but building up the old grey muscle doesn’t happen as easily or as fast as those attached to our skeleton. If only there was a shortcut.

Smart Drugs in action

Our understanding of the inner workings of the human brain has exploded over the last decade. And the drugs to treat many debilitating disorders like ADHD and narcolepsy have followed. But there are still huge gaps in our knowledge.

You may be surprised to hear that nobody really knows the exact mechanism for how the smart drugs I’ve mentioned work. We do have a general idea: Provigil and Ritalin are stimulants and slow the reabsorption, of dopamine and norepinephrine back into neurons after they are released. Retarding this re-cycling process has the effect of prolonging the actions of these neurotransmitters.

Actions which just happen to include maintaining attention and aiding the formation of new memories.

There’s always a catch though. Concurring with our lack of knowledge on how smart drugs act, is our lack of knowledge about long-term use and safety. Promisingly though, drugs like Provigil seem to be relatively innocuous –so far.

But we are just at the leading edge of the revolution in brain chemistry. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to see that the near future holds more, and better, cognition-enhancing drugs than the handful available now. Though this future is a given, now is the right time to think about how we should use these breakthroughs.

More human than human

Anyone with more than a passing interest in sports over the last 30 years will recognize this debate has happened before. The rise of steroids, EPO and other performance enhancing drugs is considered the scourge of the athletic world. But so far the smart drugs appear to be without the devastating physical side effects that characterize sports drugs. Also drugs in sport are unambiguously categorized as cheating while smart drugs are not. Does this change how we look at them?

Also the analogy breaks down completely when we move it to the workplace. The rise of cognitive-enhancing drugs stands to alter the way all of us live our lives, while the appeal of physical performance enhancing drugs is limited to the more athletic amongst us. A survey by researchers from Harvard, Yale and Princeton published last August seems to hint that smart drugs will see general acceptance – whether they are illegitimate or not. Worth noting though is that the people within the study were only keen to take smart drugs if it they didn’t alter things they considered to be fundamental aspects of their personality, like their sense of humor or emotions – basically any mood altering drugs like anti-depressants.

Unsurprisingly, smart drugs that increased concentration, wakefulness or memory were very appealing, as these traits aren’t often seen as fundamental to our personalities.

Take two, and call me in the future

As with all new discoveries the potential for advancement as well as abuse exists. But augmenting our brains brings up potential moral and medical dilemmas. Will tweaking our mental abilities have side effects that aren’t obvious yet?

And with the gap between rich and poor ever widening, and these drugs being expensive, are we on the cusp of a new social class, the Smart-class?

Neuroscience has only just begun to reveal some of the answers surrounding these drugs but that is still only half the story, the story of molecules. To see into the future of these medicines we need to look at a bigger scale. Much bigger.
Smart drugs are now out of our hands, the hands of the scientific community, and are in yours. The question of their use and abuse now lies with you, and society as a whole.

I’ll leave you with this scenario: Would you use cognition enhancing drugs? What if others in your class/office do – could you risk being less competitive?

Feel free to drop your answers (anonymously if you like) in the comments. To catch more neuroscience news, click to subscribe to Email or RSS updates from Very Evolved.

original image by destinysagent remixed by Patrick

Why do some people cheat while others don’t? It might be a black and white question about morals, but regular readers will know that when the human mind is involved, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. A great new study published this month shows that the behavior of those around us has a bigger influence on our honesty than we might like to admit, and that bad behavior might be contagious.

Bernie Madoff is the latest poster child for blatant dishonesty, perhaps successfully taking the crown from long time champions Enron. But these are just two prominent examples; we’ve all heard of someone who’s stolen from work, cheated on their taxes or of an athlete using illegal drugs.

But what’s this got to do with you? You’re a good person right? But what happens to you when you see someone behaving unethically and getting away with it?

That’s the question Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational fame asked in his recent paper examining the contagious nature of unethical behavior.

Cold assessment of risk versus reward

One of the classical attempts to explain bad behavior looks at it as a simple economic problem. When given the opportunity people will cheat up to the level they think they can get away with. Along this line of thinking, there is a conscious or unconscious calculation of risk vs. reward. For example, when stealing a pen from work you are unlikely to get caught, but the reward is small. But at the end of the day you still get paid your salary and also have a pen, so you are ahead of the game, having maximized your reward.

But as I’ve covered many times here on Very Evolved, the human brain is not a purely rational place especially when money is involved.

Also we are not alone. We never make decisions in a social vacuum – everything we do has consequences for those around us and this is factored into our decision making process. And vice-versa – observing how others behave lets us know how we should act if we want to fit in.

But does this extend to cheating and unethical behavior?

Honestly I’m trustworthy

The setup of the experiement involved asking several large groups of students to solve a series of 20 math problems within a certain time limit. The subjects were then instructed to write down how many they solved and then shred their answer sheet so it could not be checked. The researchers then paid out cash based upon how many problems people reported getting right.

The catch was that the time limit to do the problems was short enough that no one could realistically solve all of them.

Of course we’re not really interested in how good people are at mathematics under pressure, so the real test began when a planted subject loudly announced halfway through that he’d solved all of them and what he should do now.

Everyone in the study knew that this must be impossible given how little time they had, so this person was clearly an example of blatant cheating. At this point the plant takes all of the money and leaves without any penalty or shame.

The effect on the remaining people was unmistakable: the barefaced dishonesty caused a massive increase in cheating across the group.

Thinking this might conform to the cold calculation theory that people will assess the risk of getting caught and cheat up to that level, the experimenters changed one simple aspect of the study: the T-shirt of the blatant cheater.

When the shameless cheater was wearing a plain shirt like the rest of the students at the university where the test was being conducted, group cheating rose dramatically. But when the cheater wore the shirt of a rival university everything changed.

Seeing this outsider being brazenly unethical actually caused the levels of cheating to go down below normal.

Surprisingly, the identity of the cheater matters. Insiders, or those people on your team have a much greater influence over our perception of what is morally acceptable than strangers do. This also argues against the decision to cheat being based on a cold risk-reward calculation, otherwise seeing the rival university member cheating and getting away with it should have encouraged dishonesty as much as any in-group member.

Should we be looking for the next Bernie Madoff?

Given that Bernie’s portfolio always returned a profit year after year and never lost despite what the market was doing, it had to be clear to other fund mangers that this was impossible and some cheating was involved. So the question arises: How many followed Bernie’s example?
Knowing how people from the in-group respond to bad behavior of one of their own it seems likely that we haven’t seen the last of the unethical fund manger. Perhaps not on this scale or with the same scheme, but the contagious nature of bad behavior makes it likely that more unethical events are yet to be discovered, a conclusion that Ariely also considers possible.

Do you really want to cheat?

Fortunately there are two silver linings we can look to. First, now that Bernie has faced the consequences he is no longer like our T-shirt wearing cheater. Just as bad behavior can spread, seeing unethical actions punished may help to correct the ethical quagmire that Bernie helped create.

And the second comes from the final experiment from the study. This time the planted test taker doesn’t cheat, but merely asks loudly at the beginning “is it OK to cheat?” A bold question to be sure, but it the effect is to bring to the forefront of our minds the ethical considerations of what what we are about to do. The results? Everyone cheated less than normal. It seems that even without examples of good or bad behavior, just considering the ethics of the situation is often enough to keep our moral compass pointed in the right direction.

To use a well-worn phrase; the moral of the story is that individual acts of unethical behavior can have a very potent influence effect on the honesty of the whole group. So now you can ask yourself one question:

Are you setting the right example for your group?

I think a good example to set would be to encourage you to get instant updates to Very Evolved via Email or RSS.

A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience says now we can – with a little chemical help.

Unwinding the web of fear

Surprisingly the drug is a common one that’s already in use for managing blood pressure in people with heart conditions: Propranolol. It was previously observed in 2007 that people who had traumatic events like car accidents or assaults, had a reduced stress levels when remembering these memories if they had taken propranolol before recalling the event.

But very emotional and fearful memories are notoriously hard to vanquish, and often return even after extensive traditional therapy. From an evolutionary viewpoint it makes sense that very important events are vividly recorded and recalled – Saber tooth tigers mean danger, thunder means lighting is around and seeing our children makes us remember how important they are.

But anyone with a phobia is aware that these emotionally charged memories can be debilitating, causing more harm than benefit. If the emotional-physiological response could be removed or erased from these memories then it could be a treatment for difficult to manage symptoms like post traumatic stress disorder.

To examine if propranolol can eliminate the fear associated with specific memories, the researchers in the recent study showed people images of spiders while simultaneously shocking them with small electric charges. As expected, when these people were shown pictures of spiders in the future without a shock, they still exhibited signs of stress, showing they had become fear-conditioned to the sight of spiders.

After these people were fear-conditioned these people were given propranolol before being shown the spiders again. Intriguingly they weren’t startled or stressed. But even more amazingly, on future occasions when they were again shown spider images and shocked, they didn’t develop a fear association like they did previously. Even without any further doses of propranolol, it seems the fear response to spiders had been permanently broken.

I’ve touched briefly before on how your memories are not actually fixed and can change slightly every time you recall them in the context of nostalgia, but this holds true for all kinds of memories. Though it’s an over simplification, you can think of a memory not as a discrete chunk of data, but as a series of instructions on how to rebuild a memory when asked to recall it.  Altering the process of recalling it can therefore change the memory, and that’s where propranolol comes in.

Before we venture down the road of fanciful science fiction like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” let’s take a moment to avoid falling into the stupidly sloppy journalism floating around that thinks scientists are now able to erase specific memories. To illustrate why propranolol or any other drug can’t erase specific memories, lets take a quick look at how our brain actually forms and stores memories.

How memories work

When we learn or experience something new and we lay down a brand spanking new memory it’s because of the plasticity of individual neurons in our brain.

What this means is that each one of our billions of neurons is connected to tens of thousands of other neurons. That’s a lot of connections to consider, but it’s even more complicated than just a numbers game. Not all these connections are equal – some are strong and some are weak.
In a simplistic overview we can say when you form a memory you are tracing a path through this vast network. The more emotional the impact of the experience, the stronger or more permanent the connections become. In the case of a non-traumatic experience like learning a new skill, the increase in connection strength comes from repeated practice that refines the path and slowly solidifies the neuronal connections.

So at a molecular level our memories lie in the strength of the connections between neurons; everything from phobias to knowing how to ride a bike.

These connections are called synapses – the small gap between cells where one neuron releases a chemical signal called a neurotransmitter to pass an electrical signal along to the next neuron in the pathway. The strength of the connections can be directly modified by changing the number of proteins that help release neurotransmitters, and the number or receptors that sense them on the receiving neuron. Change the balance of these two systems and you can make any individual connection weaker or stronger. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good write up about synapses if you’re interested in getting into a more detailed view.

Of course each single neuron can be connected to many thousands of others and only some of these connections are made strong or weak depending on what you’re learning. Move onto the next neuron and repeat the process, and you can see pretty quickly why we can’t “see” into anyone’s head and say “ahh here’s his memory of how to ride a bike”, and why it’s impossible for anyone to erase a specific memory.

To make things even more complicated, these neurons and connections don’t seem to be localized to any defined region of the brain, but may instead be distributed across many regions.

Reinforcement of bad things

Our painful memories and phobias are probably encoded so strongly because of association with emotion during the traumatic event and the associated stresses that run throughout our body. When you recall that memory, the same systems kick in and cause stress hormones to cascade through your body once more. Apart from being unpleasant, this recall with stress helps to further reinforce the fear response and the phobia is formed.

While we don’t know for certain yet, propranolol may interfere with this reinforcement step by interfering with adrenaline receptors in the amygdala; the key hormone and key region that moderates the brain’s response to stress and emotion.

Cure?

Unfortunately this is only the early days of this line of research and many elements still remain to be tested. Pictures of spiders are not car accidents. It’s also unknown how long this removal of fear association will last as the study only tested people up to 3 days after the initial treatments.

Clearly though this is a line of investigation worth pursuing. Many millions of people suffer from debilitating emotional disorders and post traumatic stress so any advance, no matter how small, is a reason for optimism.

Perhaps this is a ray of sunshine for our spotless minds.

Don’t be afraid to get instant updates from veryevolved.com by getting the RSS or Email updates. No spiders I promise.

original image by shawncampbell remixed by Patrick

What would you think if I told you that the food you have in your cupboard contains either the preservative Hnegripitrom or Magnalroxate, and that one of these was dangerous? Unless you are a chemist, the answer reveals a lot about how your brain makes decisions when you don’t have a clue about the details.

The good news is that Hnegripitrom and Magnalroxate are not really food additives. In fact they aren’t even real words.

And yet we can form an opinion about these two pseudo-compounds and decide which one is more dangerous. But how do we decide this?

The fictional food additives are from a recent set of experiments where researchers presented their names to people and asked them to rate how dangerous they thought they were on a scale of 1 to 7. If you’re like most people with an English speaking background then you rated Hnegripitrom as more dangerous than Magnalroxate.

But if you are like most people then you don’t have an advanced degree in organic chemistry, so what are you basing your judgment on?

The researchers had a clue and designed this experiment to test one simple thing: The link between ease of pronunciation and how our brain judges risk.

They demonstrated that we tend to rate things that are hard to pronounce as more risky than things that are easy to pronounce. In this case the easier to pronounce chemical seemed less dangerous than the harder to pronounce one. At first glance this sounds rather silly, but a great example of this in the real world is a drug you have almost certainly taken before: N-acetyl-p-aminophenol.

This sounds like something you’d varnish a table with while wearing a facemask and gloves. It’s definitely hard to pronounce and it sounds way too dangerous to ask people to swallow it. Instead, you probably know this drug as Acetaminophen. That’s still kind of hard to pronounce though, so the pharmaceutical companies gave it the even easier and friendlier name of Tylenol.

But this odd decision-making process doesn’t just apply to judgments about drugs. Pushing the experiment further the researchers asked, “Do easy to pronounce rollercoaster rides seem less dangerous and/or less fun than hard to pronounce ones?”

The amusement park question offers a neat twist on the chemical conundrum we just looked at. We are still judging how risky we perceive the ride, but the outcome is a desirable one – we don’t want to go on the boring rollercoaster ride but at the same time we don’t want to throw up.

Surprisingly the results were the same: Hard to pronounce rides were rated as more dangerous (there’s a risk of getting sick) but also much more fun than the rides that easily rolled off the tongue. The conclusion we can draw from this is fascinating: It doesn’t matter if we want it to be dangerous or safe, the harder to pronounce words are always seen as being riskier.

So why does our brain feel more comfortable with smooth words when we don’t have any other information with which to make a decision?

Fake familiarity feels fine

The experiments above are in line with a long held observation that we tend to underestimate the risk involved with things that we are familiar with and to exaggerate the danger associated with things that we have little experience with.

But as the chemical conundrum demonstrates, you don’t even have to have real prior exposure to be “familiar” with one thing over another. The easier to pronounce words require less effort for our brain to process, memorize and understand. Because familiar things are also easier for the brain to process than unfamiliar things, when we encounter something new and it’s easy to comprehend we erroneously associate it with familiarity. We are more fluent with easily pronounced words than hard ones. Sit them side-by-side and we get a strong sense of fake familiarity.

Fluency = familiarity = frequency

Fake familiarity isn’t the only way our brains decide if something is dangerous or safe. What if we talk about something that’s not a chemical in our food, something that’s not immediately categorized as dangerous or safe? What if it’s kind of boring like laundry detergent?

Familiarity now becomes a simple numbers game. Repeated exposure to something neutral leads to a preference to choose that over anything new.

New things are associated with uncertainty and uncertainty requires more effort from our brain to understand. Stand this next to something familiar and it’s no mystery which one we think is more dangerous. As with fluency, our brain will choose the “less dangerous” path when we don’t have any other information, and the laundry detergent with the most TV ads wins the hearts and minds of the undecided.

This happens a lot with social communication too. Hearing advice or statements that are easy to understand are perceived as “common knowledge” and the feeling that you have heard this before, leading to the assumption that this is a popular view, and one that is true.

Fake it till you make it

Judging risk is often an intuitive process rather than an analytical one – especially when you don’t have a lot of information. It may seem shallow or frivolous to make decisions based on fake familiarity. But because our brain works this way it probably gave us an evolutionary edge. Our Stone Age cousins certainly didn’t have all the facts about which of the thousands of different rocks would make the best spear point. What do you do if you can’t find the type of stone you used last time? Stick to rocks that seem familiar and you are much more likely to build a spear as strong as the last one you made.

Of course familiarity isn’t the only way our brain makes decisions, just the one we’re discussing here. But you can forget the idea of the rational brain because purely rational decisions don’t exist. The only important thing is that we should always able to make a decision – good or bad. Being unable to decide what to do would be a crippling pathological condition: imagine if we spent a week dedicated to deciding what brand of laundry detergent to buy?

Our instincts and emotions are peppered throughout the decision-making process and are often the means to bring an end to our analysis.

Dangerous implications

It’s not just big sciencey sounding words and amusement park rides. It’s very likely that when presented with anything new that we make our first judgment based on how familiar we find it. Beyond words and language, we judge things with little information all the time. A strange looking building, a confusing drawing, charts with lots of difficult to understand information. The harder it is to process, the riskier it seems.

Are you preparing a presentation? Are you a marketer? Do you have a blog?

If you present new information to people, ask yourself one question: Are you showing people something safe or dangerous?

To keep up with the safest and easiest to pronounce information subscribe to the RSS or Email updates. No big sciencey words, I promise.

original image by iwouldstay remixed by Patrick. (You read the ingredients, right?)

Back in the 80’s I spent a lot of time in poorly ventilated, dark and greasy arcades. I pumped all of my allowance into Donkey Kong, Moon Buggy, pinball machines and Pac-man. I didn’t realize it then, but playing Pac-man had taught me more about how to succeed in life than I ever learnt from years of studying neuroscience.

Here are 3 things most important things we can all learn from our little pixel pal

Fail often and fail quickly

Pac-man isn’t a complicated game; left, right, up, down and yet the first time you play you aren’t going to beat the high score. Working out why we fail is by far the fastest way to learn. Biology has really perfected the process of “fail a lot and then discover what does work”, from evolution right through to the fundamental mechanism of how our brain learns and forms memories.

Think about how children learn to walk. They constantly fall over, they can’t coordinate moving their arms and legs, they fail and they get upset about it. But they try again almost immediately. If you have a difficult task in front of you, it’s easy to spend endless days planning, investigating and researching until you know everything there is to know before you start.

This of course, is rubbish. You will never have all the information ahead of time about anything you want to try in life. The best and fastest way to get the right information is just to start doing it. Write that silly blog post, prepare a boring seminar and make a poorly thought out plan. When you have it written down in front of you or once you’ve started your task, it’ll become obvious what doesn’t work and you can fix it. The right answer or strategy never jumps fully formed out of your head.

The most important thing to remember is it’s OK to get it wrong before you get it right.

Substance over style

Pac-man’s graphics are simplistic and the game play even more so, and yet it is addictive and fun. If you don’t care for Pac-man, we can say the same things about games like Solitaire, Tetris and Bejeweled. So why should I feel more of a connection to a yellow pie shaped circle than most of the slick graphically superior shoot-em-up’s out there? The connection in my case comes from being invested in my yellow friend’s fate for 3 key reasons.

The game is (1) easy to get into (2) hard to master and (3) at no point does it feel like it’s trying to be hard for the sake of being hard. It’s 3 principles you can carry over into everyday life. Whether you’re giving a presentation, writing a blog or trying to motivate your friends to do something, you can use the principles behind three points I’ve just mentioned:

1)    Start simple. There’ll be time later to go into the details about your ideas, right now you just want to present a hook that’s interesting and won’t take long to understand. Why does this work? Our brain (the frontal cortex in particular) is amazing in that we can process abstract concepts, like language. We can assign meaning to a string of wiggly lines on a screen, call them words and understand the meaning behind them. Pac-man may just be a crude blob of pixels on a screen, but when I look at the screen, I see a life or death struggle.

By starting simple you force others to use their imaginations to fill in the details. If the brain is working harder to understand something, then it processes the information as if was more important than information that is easily grasped.

2)    Give depth. Flesh out your ideas so you can show you have a plan or structure to what your trying to say. If all your ideas and writing are stuck at (1) simple, people will get bored and won’t even remember you exist by lunchtime tomorrow. Having a plan isn’t the end though – involve people in the process of exploring your ideas and see where they lead. Connection isn’t one way, you need to be receptive to those you’re talking to.

3)    Invite don’t force. You’re trying to communicate with people, not manipulate them. If the people listening to you talk or reading your articles feel even for a second that you’re trying to trick them into doing something they don’t want to do, then you’ve lost them forever. If the ghosts chasing Pac-man became too fast – up to the point where it wouldn’t ever be possible to win, then why should I bother playing again? Don’t ever make people feel like they don’t have any other option – they won’t do what you want; they’ll just resent you for trying to tell them what to do.

Generating an emotional response or connection can stimulate excitement and consequently new memory formation in the brain. Human brains are structured to make us social animals. In any task you want to under take ask yourself how can I make this compelling to others? If you want someone to read your blog post or listen to your ideas in a meeting at work, think about how you can present your case to be compelling. What would you want to hear if someone was trying to get your attention? And for that you don’t need fancy graphics, just substance.

Game Over: You’ve got to know when to change

As much fun as the game was I’m not playing it today. It can get repetitive and boring wandering around the maze, doing the same things over and over. So why should your goal in life be to get out of the same bed, travel the same road to work, navigate the same maze of office cubicles every day?

At least Pac-man offers a GAME OVER message to let you know it’s OK to stop now, to give you a break, to give you time to think about perusing something other than ghosts. Unfortunately if you’re doing work that doesn’t stimulate you, there isn’t a game over sign to wake you up. It’s an endless loop – in the back of your mind you’re expecting today to be different but without you actually doing anything different to make it so.

Think about it the same way I do when I’m doing a scientific experiment – if you don’t change the way you do it, why should you expect different results?

Got a routine? Break it. Talk to someone at work who you’ve not spoken to before. Eat lunch somewhere else, with someone else. Be active instead of reactive, seek out a new project. It doesn’t matter where you change things up, just remember: You’re not limited to up and down, left or right like our yellow friend.

Your brain didn’t evolve to automatically respond to the most realistic graphics or flashiest presentation. Flashy graphics and presentations can get our attention, but unless there is more to it than that, it can’t hold our attention. If it did, I’d still be busy picking up shiny rocks out of the river like our Stone Age ancestors rather than writing on this site.

Technology has come a long way since Pac-man, but what he taught me is timeless.

I like to think of my yellow friend as an 8-Bit philosopher.

Fact: You could easily fit all of the binary data that makes up Pac-man’s code into my RSS feed. He’s not actually wandering around in there, but why don’t you subscribe via RSS or Email anyway?

Original Image dougww remixed by Patrick