An Oxford study has shown that the drug modafinil, which is often referred to as the ‘smart drug’, does indeed enhance cognition especially planning and decision making abilities of a person.
The drug is licensed for treatment of narcolepsy (excessive sleeping), but people have been making an off-license use of modafinil as a brain function enhancer. Researchers at Oxford University set out to evaluate whether the drug actually increase cognitive abilities in people not suffering from narcolepsy and for that they evaluated all research papers on cognitive enhancement with modafinil from January 1990 to December 2014.
Dr Ruairidh Battleday and Dr Anna-Katharine Brem from the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School came across 24 studies dealing with different benefits associated with taking modafinil, including planning and decision making, flexibility, learning and memory, and creativity.
The duo found through their analysis that the drug did enhance cognition, but its capacity as a performance enhancer varied greatly according to the task. Researchers found that the drug didn’t make any difference to working memory or flexibility of thought, but improved the overall planning and decision-making abilities. Further, researchers found that people taking modafinil fared better at longer and more complex tasks.
As far as side effects were concerned, researchers didn’t find modafinil triggering mood disorders or other major side effects. There were cases of insomnia, headache, stomach ache or nausea, but they were reported by people on placebo as well.
Considering this review was a fist in about seven years, researchers were able to include a lot of recent data. Ruairidh McLennan Battleday said that the type of test used to assess modafinil’s cognitive benefits previously were more of basic cognition tests that were developed for neurologically-impaired individuals.
In contrast, more recent studies have, in general, used more complex tests: when these are used, it appears that modafinil more reliably enhances cognition: in particular ‘higher’ brain functions that rely on contribution from multiple simple cognitive processes.’
Anna-Katharine Brem, a researcher at both the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, said that there were two main conclusions from the study. First was that there were very few side effects in these controlled environments and modafinil did prove itself as a cognitive enhancer; and second, there is a need to figure out better ways of testing normal or even supra-normal cognition in a reliable manner.
