In other words, if you get a random person high and hand them a puzzle, they do a little bit worse. I'm not surprised.
Anyone who is not neurotypical, plans to take more than one dose per lifetime, or is working longer than 32 minutes may want to question if this study applies to them.
I think the point is to highlight that using these drugs as a one-off is not effective. To the surprise of no-one, poorly dosed medications perform poorly.
There's going to be very little crossover between 1) people who need to see this paper, and 2) people who are the types to read papers on dosage efficacy.
Sorry, but that's just attention grabbing nonsense. Should have said "for people undiagnosed with cognitive impairments".
I suppose it's a fair counterpoint to folks who take these drugs occasionally in pursuit of gains. Granted, their tasks take longer than thirty-two minutes--that's why they're popping Adderrall.
It might end up you're distracted more than anything because it's a new feeling.
Say you never drank alcohol in your life. Somebody gives you a beer. A beer doesn't have that strong an effect, but if you don't know what's coming your mind still might be very busy figuring out what's happening. And while you expect some drop in intellectual ability from alcohol, an experienced occasional user will probably not have as severe a drop from one beer as the person that never tried any.
The occasional user will know the experience after a while, but not have a tolerance. That's who's interesting to study.
Ritalin fundamentally changes my approach to life, allows me to present and focused in ways I've never experienced before, and have since come to realise I'd been missing my whole life
Your experience is a common one, and ADHD is both under-diagnosed and badly represented, making for a toxic perception which some of the crowd here doesn't seem immune to.
(The following is _my_ experience. So read it that way. I'm not going to prefix every sentence with "for me...".)
It's not some fun th--squirrel!--ing where you occasionally act a little quirky or get a little sidetracked.
Everything I tried to do every day felt like I was trying to break through a brick wall. Except if I _did_ manage to break through, there was just another brick wall. And another. And another. Getting _anything_ done was _exhausting_. Most days I could do _a_ thing, and then I was completely and utterly exhausted.
The thing is, it didn't matter _what_ that one thing was, how long it took, or anything else. Doing a load of laundry through to completion felt like about the same amount of effort as when the power went out for 8 days and I was trying to cobble together a solution to get the water (well + septic pumps) running again. The issue was not the task itself, but just the effort to force my brain into actually commanding my body to do it.
I want to really reiterate that... because it's not that "survival situation" comes easy to me. It's that simply trying to get a load of laundry through to completion felt the same to me as being in a situation where we my family and myself were lacking one of the basic requirements for human life.
Career-wise... people always note that when shit hits the fan I'm always the one that's calm and have my head screwed on straight. I'm pretty straightforward with everyone that it's because in my day-to-day life pretty much everything registers as a 9.5-10.0/10 on the stress scale, so this isn't anything new for me... navigating this situation is the same as trying to navigate basic life tasks for me.
The work impacts were fairly obvious as far as productivity due to inability to stay on task. The impacts in my personal life were much less obvious--it's not fair to my wife nor my kid that a simple thing like a day trip to a museum is eliciting basically a "someone has a gun pointed at me" response from me.
I'd fought through this for _decades_ before it finally caught up with me as far as my work and my wife getting fed up with my shit.
Got diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Got on an extremely low dose of Vyvanse. (Like, I'm a fully grown adult and started out at the dose they'd give to a child.)
Even just that though... Suddenly the layer after layer of brick wall I'd been dealing with turned to drywall. It was still something to push through, but after decades of banging my head against bricks... throwing myself through drywall felt like playing life on easy mode. I was happy in a way I don't remember ever being. My self control was through the roof not just in focus but in things like "not drinking excessively every night". I spent more than one consecutive night sober for the first time in decades.
After decades it finally became _very_ clear why I couldn't operate like other people. It wasn't a personal or moral failing, it was that I was playing the game on Death March difficulty and comparing my struggles with a lot of people playing on "Just the story!" mode. The decades of self-abuse and damage to my self-worth do not get undone easily.
In a sense I should be sad about the fact that I lived life so held back for so long. But bigger picture I'm grateful. Many people struggle more than I do or aren't quite as stubborn as I am and hit this point and have these epiphanies and have to look back at a life with little success or little happiness and wonder what could have been. I've done quite well for myself in spite of everything.
But I can tell you with a great deal of certainty that had this happened earlier I would have spent a lot of years much happier.
The more practical question of whether popping stimulants can help people get through mountains of undemanding, tedious work is left as scientifically unexplored territory. Hopefully the research team will get a line on some Adderall and knock out the necessary papers soon.
from the mayo clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/methylphenidate....
''' Adults—20 to 30 milligrams (mg) given in divided doses 2 or 3 times a day, taken 30 to 45 minutes before meals. Your doctor may adjust your dose as needed. However, the dose is usually not more than 60 mg per day. '''
I have never done worse than when I took an exam on Adderall. The exams required genuine creative thinking and problem-solving using the knowledge built over 15 weeks.
I could clean my house like a mofo, though
My HN problem gets worse on stimulants, though. I usually describe this as Ritalin making me "sticky" - as in, I'll happily continue doing whatever it is I'm doing when on it, whether it's productive work or commenting on HN.
Exactly, application of skills is often more important than skill level, and that's what a lot of people with ADHD struggle with. I do not get a sense of reward or accomplishment when I finish tasks, or at least I get very, very little of that feeling of pride. So give me something I'm intrinsically motivated at in the moment, and everything else shuts down and I can focus on it entirely. Once that intrinsic motivation goes away, difficult jumps up so much and pretty much the only motivator that consistently worked to cut through that was stress.
I was actually worried about losing some effectiveness at hyperfocusing when I started ritalin (which was not something I needed to be concerned about, but whatever), and the thing that got me over that was thinking, "hey, you could actually be quite a bit worse at programming, and if the benefit you got from that was that you actually finished any of your projects, you would still be way more productive and produce much better work overall."
People honestly overestimate the importance of skill. Even if ritalin did lower my programming skills (which it doesn't), not being able to do boring things is way more limiting than not being able to produce exceptional work all the time.
> I usually describe this as Ritalin making me "sticky" - as in, I'll happily continue doing whatever it is I'm doing when on it, whether it's productive work or commenting on HN.
This is another point in favor of "these drugs affect different people differently and it's not really useful to generalize too much."
I don't see this effect at all. My experience with ritalin is that it makes my executive dysfunction goes down but it has little to no impact on my distractability or how focused I am. I jump between tasks exactly the same, I still hyperfixate on things, I still have a hard time sticking to tasks that are unenjoyable -- it's just easier for me to respond to external stimuli I set up (timers, lists, etc) that help to keep me more on track. I know other people have very different experiences.
My feeling is that people sometimes look at downstream behavioral changes and they want to draw an exact cause and effect to "the drug makes you do X, it makes you worse at Y." No, the drug affects my dopamine reuptake receptors and other specific parts of my brain chemistry. Because of my experiences in life and because of how my brain has adapted to having bad regulation of those chemicals and because of the pathways it's formed to help it adapt to that bad regulation, that leads to individualized reactions/behavioral changes. But motivation and focus are extremely complicated. If I think of my brain like a car, tuning or altering one part of the engine so I can drive it better is not going to make it drive identically to everyone else's car, and changing the same part in two different cars that are tuned differently might have different effects on how the cars feel to drive.
Interesting results were observed. Participants who performed below average while on placebo tended to improve on the task when on one of the drugs. Those that performed above average tended to have decreased performance on the task.
It's relatively known/accepted that these drugs have a different effect on people with ADHD and people without.
Did they just diagnose a bunch of people with ADHD through treatment?
Seems so. Isn't this an open secret that by far the most cost-effective, accurate and immediate way of diagnosing ADHD is to put someone on low dose of stimulants and seeing what happens? The effect is usually apparent in hours.
As an example, while on adderal my chess score dropped from ~1000 down to ~700 and within two weeks of getting off of it it went right back up.
I’ve taken methylphenidate aka Ritalin (MPH) and dexteroampheramine aka Adderall (DEX) and my largest prescription was less than half of these doses.
If I take a dose of 15mg of MPH after a break of 10 days, I’ll be jittery, irritable, and a bit over-active. I imagine taking 30mg for someone neurotypical who’s never taken it before would be closer to a subdued but sustained hit of cocaine. I wouldn’t imagine anyone performing well in this trial, I probably wouldn’t either with a 30-day break beforehand. I don’t know where they’re getting this “typical adult dose for non-prescription use”… I have a neurotypical friend who takes 10mg of adderall as a party drug at raves.
They solely focus on the patients cardiac profile, I'm assuming for safety as these drugs can raise blood pressure quite a bit. Also, the sample size is strikingly small for a 4 cohort study on the effects of a drug on behavior (n = 30, 17 males, 23 females, but subdivided into 4 groups).
Performance enhancing drugs can have a myriad of effects on physical well being. The amount dispensed to participants was at least for Ritalin strikingly high. 30mg is a dose you get after at least 1-2 months of raising the dosage from 10mg, and that' the _retarded_ pill. If these were unretarded tablets, no doubt the participants must have felt completely wired up. The results look to me as if you drugged a bunch of people, told them to do something and they performed worse, but not much worse, probably because they were complaining of side effects. I know that's a polemic interpretation of the results, but I feel like I'm entitled to it, given the authors one sided discussion.
