Easy access to stimulants aided scientific progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
https://mastodon.social/@tef/112763581163648202
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Personality
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities
After his mother's death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that it impacted his performance: "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month."
https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/112764385284252961
They were called the "greatest generation" because they collectively had far easier access to stimulants than anyone before or since
Random showerthought time:
The war on drugs, medical skepticism, stigma, and other factors caused stimulants and medications, especially those useful for treating conditions such as ADHD, to become less accessible. This adversely affected the people who needed or would otherwise benefit from these stimulants and medications, and scientific progress and society more widely has suffered because of it.
It never occurred to me until now that people with ADHD centuries ago would probably tend to self-medicate with stimulants available at the time. That's what I apparently did with energy drinks long before I ever suspected I should seek a diagnosis. Imagine an age where you had access to meth dissolved in gin or whatever the Victorians were on.
I think the conversation about ADHD is really muddied by medical gatekeeping and moral attributes ascribed to drug use.
First, like most things, ADHD is a spectrum. I've struggled with executive function my entire life and finally got diagnosed a few years ago, but despite having horrible grades in school, I still managed to have a successful career.
There are people that are way worse off and cannot focus for the five minutes needed to write an email, and there are also people who would be labeled as "neurotypical" that still have some slight executive function issues. Like most human characteristics, a person's executive function capabilities follow a somewhat normal distribution, with some people that struggle to keep on task, some people having an insane superhuman ability to focus on anything they want to for hours, and most people sitting in the middle.
Secondly, there's an oft repeated fallacy that ADHD brain is somehow so fundementally different from a normal brain that stimulants affect it in a totally different way, and I've heard people even suggest that it's affected by some totally different mechanism.
This is obviously total bullshit to anyone who has been around college students that take Adderall to study for tests.
Stimulants benefit almost everyone when it comes to the ability to focus. People with executive function disorders just rely on them to lead a more normal life.
Without medication, I will on a daily basis, walk into a room with my mind set on a task, get there, then either forget why in there, or immediately get distracted for an hour before Im able to marshall my focus and do what I wanted to do. Not being on medication severely negatively impacts my life, and being on it lets me focus very well. It also helps people without ADHD focus very well though.
I do see a potential issue with flinging the floodgates open, making amphetamines widely available to anyone who wants them, because they're highly addictive, and they do have determental side effects, especially at high doses. I know personally, if I don't have my medication filled, it's really bad. Worse than it was before I was ever on the medication. I get horrible brain fog, can't focus on anything, am tired all the time, and I crave the drug. For me, the addiction is worth being able to live a happy, successful life.
If you make the drug so widely available that it feels like everyone is using it and you don't have a chance of being successful without being on it, we're basically forcing everyone in our society to develop a drug addiction, which may not be a road we want to go down.
I am not a doctor, but I don't believe you are at least completely correct from a medical stand point. The current medical understanding is that ADHD brains are affected differently by a properly titrated dose of stimulants. Not to say they are affected through a different mechanism, but that the effects they have on ADHD brains is different. So much so that a recent study has shown that stimulant use negatively impacts performance for a neurotypical brain. There is a second article based on the same study here. It doesn't draw this conclusion, but it raises the question: do stimulants actually provide a more ADHD like experience for the neurotypial brain? People without ADHD appear to have a tendency to either hyperfocus when using stimulants, or to constantly move from one subject to another.
On a most basic level, ADHD is the experience of having chronically low dopamine levels in the brain. An effective dose of stimulants like Adderall will increase dopamine levels in the brain to a neurotypical level. This is the sweet spot in which our brains are not overstimulated or understimulated, and they can guide their focus where they want to and engage for an appropriate amount of time. Many people with undiagnosed ADHD will attempt to do this themselves by starting arguments, by taking risks, working in high risk or fast paced jobs, by abusing alcohol, coffee, etc.
The addiction feeling doesn't happen for me. I just forget the meds and realise only after I reach my work why I'm so strongly showing symptoms.
Yeah I also don't remotely experience the "addiction" described. Stimulants taken for ADHD don't last long in your system and while you can build up a tolerance, going off for a week or two is all that's usually recommended. Withdrawal from them isn't really a thing at normal therapeutic doses. When I don't take mine on a given day I do struggle to focus and am generally very sleepy, but this is just a reoccurrence of my symptoms prior to starting medication, rather than any sort of extra withdrawal symptoms. And, like you, I do often just forget to take mine. If I were forced to live and work without them I wouldn't "crave" them, I'd just be generally less focused and go back to drinking way more coffee throughout the day.
The last research I read is that students who thought they took Adderall to help them prepare for the test felt like they did better, but there's no actual correlation in academic performance. They're just using a stimulant to stay awake and focus. Like drinking energy drinks. People with ADHD that take them do better on their tests and as you noted, maintaining a train of thought.
Anecdotally I can fall asleep easily after caffeine or taking my Rx Adderall so it is definitely doing something different in my brain than for a student trying to stay up later. (Also rates of abuse have remained pretty static in academic settings fwiw.) Probably it's giving me access to the dopamine I don't normally get but I get my neurotransmitters confused so it could be one of the other ones too.
I do also wonder if there are other folks who really benefit from taking Adderall due to a different cause of neurotransmitter fuckery despite not having ADHD itself.
One of my roommates in college had ADHD. He pretty much had to plan his entire weekly schedule based on when he would take his medication, how long it would last, and what he could (or could not) get done in that time. Full-time job, full-time student, lots of studying. He was a pro at managing his time and coping with his ADHD when he wasn't actively under the effect of Adderall.
One day, after he and I had some discussions about my own issues with executive function and time management, he offered me his last Adderall from his current refill. I refused because I would have felt like a massive asshole taking that from him (I don't remember the specific fucked up circumstances, but he had to drive like three hours every month for his refill).
Looking back, I should have tried the goddamn pill. At least then I would have known whether it was something that would work for me, and I would have been so much better prepared for discussions with a psychologist than I actually was.
Gods having to manage the medication is so frustrating. It's this constant game of "did I take it?" "Wait for it to kick in" "ok yeah I took it" "I won't eat food til dinner unless I make myself so do I have snacks?" "Why didn't I buy snacks last night?, oh because it was after my meds wore off." With actual work mixed around it.
On the plus side, this comment is what reminded me to take my Vyvanse today lol
I'm happy I helped 😂
I'm down to one Adderall so... Gonna carry it for emotional support because it's med check time
I have alarms set SO far in advance to go to the doctor and get the new prescription for mine but it still always comes down to the wire with me. Only so much the meds can change ig lol
Yeah I don't take mine regularly enough to always be on track for refills/meds when they're technically due. Which is a problem but also just adds to the frustration because I could have done this months ago.
The main thing I dislike about the medical gatekeeping is that I'm too cheap to pay someone for their labor to give me the certification for stims. That and an inability to care about scheduling future events.
I read a Sherlock Holmes book. In one "scene" to get ready for brainstorming Holmes drank a large amount of caffeine and smoked much nicotine.
There's another Sherlock Holmes story where he shoots up, can't remember if it's heroin or cocaine.
Huh, In the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC "Sherlock" series, there were times they mentioned that Sherlock could be a junkie. There was one episode where he was straight up high in a trap house, though it was supposedly for an investigation he was doing. Either way, I always thought that was a weird character flaw they gave him.
But having never read any of the original books, I didn't know that that's potentially a reference to the original material.
Yeah the nicotine patches in the first episode were a replacement for the cocaine use iirc too
He also got lost in opium dens in at least one story, if memory serves me correctly.
He's definitely injected a cocaine solution on page, but has also used morphine, and used opium, mostly to avoid his brain being too bored.
To be fair to Doyle, these were "miracle drugs" at the time of the beginning of the series, and Dr. Watson becomes more critical of Holmes' use of them as the series goes on and real life understanding of the drugs changed.
You don't have to go back too far either, taking regular breaks to smoke used to be the status quo and before that just smoking at your desk - chunking the day up into hour long bits of work supplemented by caffeine and nicotine? Yeah that's pretty ADHD friendly.
At least in the U.S. it is a public (maybe not in private for individuals) stigma for athletes who use performance enhancing drugs. Yet at the same time a large portion of the public uses caffeine everyday( there is also an epidemic of sleep issues ).
That's fair, but - and I say this as someone who is pro-anabolic steroids - the difference in danger and overall effect between caffeine and what we would traditionally consider PEDs1 is massive.
1I say "traditionally consider" to stave off any pedants who wish to argue that caffeine is a PED. It is, that's established, but it's not the same.
Worse for me, with caffeine, is how nearly every night owl uses it to stay awake and the world just assumes we all do this, meanwhile caffeine has no affect on me. Coffee is just a bitter drink, it does nothing. I survive off the other things in 5hr energy drinks to clear away the fog enough to work (often still have issues focusing tho).
Just for this, if other options were available (or if I could start work at noon), I'd be far more productive.
While I agree with your sentiment, and I am all for the decriminalization of drugs overall, I do think there is reason for caution. One thing I really want to avoid is a world in which people are forced to take them for socioeconomic means. Particularly I do not want to live in a world where the only way to stay competitive in your job is to be constantly on chemical stimulants. You can take most recreational drugs and be perfectly healthy (assuming you avoid addiction, of course), but when taking them becomes effectively mandatory, you're probably going to take them to the extent that it affects your overall health.
The scary thing is that this has already happened. Troops in World War II were often given meth and amphetamines. Sure, it probably made them more effective soldiers, but it probably wasn't great for their health, physical or mental, and there were certainly some who became addicted to them.
What we should do is to strive to achieve a healthy balance when it comes to drugs, because even the small common ones carry a penalty. There are tons of people who drink alcohol daily with no problems, but there are also alcoholics who can't control themselves and cause chaos. The caffeine in coffee is such a mild stimulant that helps people focus through their day, but it's also what gives them insomnia and contributes to burnout in the long run.
Chuckles nervously in ADHD I have bad news... (Of course it impacts my home life too but that's generally tied into the same things. I'm exhausted from work and then doing things at home feels even more impossible)
I do personally dream of a world where employment was flexible enough to accommodate people's needs automatically. I probably just need to read Monk and Robot again.
This kind of tracks with my own experience. Some time ago I was prescribed a medication that had a side-effect of heightening my ADHD symptoms. One of these symptoms was the heightened hyperfocus. It helped me greatly to focus on my work for reading and writing papers. It definitely impacted my work positively.
However, I was also miserable. That anxious, never-satisfied energy is not something I miss. It also led me to make stupid choices in other areas of my life. I'm not looking for a period like that ever again, and it was accidental, but silverlining is that it resulted in a nice paper.
Speaking on more empirical terms, for sure, the claim that a significant amount of the population going unmedicated would impact a population's scientific output is a reasonable hypothesis. Especially considering neurodivergent people are represented more in academia. However, there are very legit reasons that self-medication, especially with heavy drugs like amphetamines, is seen as harmful.
Medicinal drugs go through a lot of trials and regulations to make sure they are relatively safe. The doctors monitor a patient to make sure the correct drugs and in correct amounts are used. When you self-medicate, none of these apply. Especially with the kind of drugs that were circulating the markets back in 19th and 20th century, you are exposing yourself to a great deal of risk. I'm not saying OP is necessarily saying this, but I don't think it would be ethical to advocate for this in the name of scientific output.
There is also a bit in the post I take a lot of issue with.
This is an extraordinary claim. There are many great different things between then and now. There are much more pressing issues in academia that affect the quality of papers. Read a few papers about reproducibility crisis, and you will realize there are a lot of mentions of publish-or-perish culture. The way the system is built pressures and incentivizes people to publish as many articles as possible, because things like getting more grants, prestige, and positions are tied to this. This negatively affects the scientific output.
However, I still don't see any reason or evidence that shows current scientific output overall is worse than 18th or 19th century. Frankly, I see the opposite in some very important ways. Statistics and experimental design have come a long way since then. Whenever I read papers from the start of the 20th century, I find there a ton and ton of papers with awful experimental designs and statistical rigor. I can't even imagine the 19th century.
Another factor is that doing science was less costly and in some ways easier back then. They were discovering fundamental but more simple things. Today the atmosphere is much different. Most of the research is way specialized, because people are researching more advanced stuff. Techniques and practices have also come a long way, and you need much more resources to conduct studies.
Also, thanks to the internet (and sites like libgen and sci-hub), scientific research is much more accessible now to other scientists. This alone changes things enormously.
So, no, I don't think it can be reasonably said that "greatest generation" were better scientists. The much weaker claim is that they were better because they used drugs. And the much much much weaker claim that self-medicating with amphetamines is a good idea for the well-being of the said person.
Men gathering at coffee houses rather than taverns was a key factor in the beginning of the Enlightenment in England.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20201119-how-coffee-forever-changed-britain
That being said, coffee and caffeine consumption is a psychoactive compound that alters your mental state. It can help you do work that is boring and repetitive, suppress depression, and provide motivation to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. That may be a good thing if you can point yourself in the right direction, but a bad thing if you don’t know why you’re working so hard and end up using caffeine to feel better about your life. It can also make you feel productive while effectively spinning your wheels in-place.
Ad libitum caffeine consumption ruins your sleep and prevents you from focusing on the things that matter to actually improve your life.
That’s called a relapse. Quitting for a month
is not quittingdoesn’t prove you’re not addicted. I relapsed many times because of the lack of productivity and fog of depression that set in without coffee. I had to taper off caffeine for a year to stay off, and then stay off (less the occasional boba) for another year to start feeling normal again.Everybody’s addicted to this drug, and in denial about it.
Yeah, that quote from Erdős is classic. "I'm not an addict, but I can't function normally without it."