Doping for the brain – you can, you can…

Two news on the same topic at once:

British teenagers caught taking regular dementia medication

Copper newsAccording to the results of a survey commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, the largest British biomedical research charity, approximately one percent of the country's residents aged 14 to 18 years, which is approximately 38 thousand teenagers, regularly use medications commonly prescribed for Alzheimer's disease and hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder (ADHD) to activate their mental activity, writes The Guardian newspaper (Youngsters use dementia drugs to boost brain power, survey finds).

We are talking, in particular, about such drugs as "Ritalin", "Donepezil", "Provigil", "Adderal" and others.

A thousand British adults and 460 teenagers took part in the survey conducted on a representative random sample. At the same time, two percent of adults and one percent of young people admitted to taking these drugs regularly to enhance concentration, memory and cognitive abilities.

As the publication notes, the figures obtained for the first time reflect the real level of distribution of cognitive-enhancing drugs among the British population.

The results of previous surveys on this topic, conducted by Nature magazine in April 2008 and New Scientist magazine in November 2011, cannot be considered representative, since only readers of these journals took part in them. However, the figures obtained from these surveys are significantly higher than those obtained from the Wellcome Trust survey. So, among Nature readers, one in five survey participants admitted to using Ritalin or Provigil to sharpen their mental abilities, and among New Scientist readers, 38 percent turned out to be such.

There is nothing surprising in such a difference: the average Briton does not need to stimulate mental abilities, unlike participants in "unrepresentative" samples. But is it worth it without medical indications to spur the brain with pills and even electrical impulses? – VM.

Electric current improves mathematical abilities

Yuri Medvedev, Rossiyskaya GazetaBritish scientists from Oxford University, led by Roy Cohen Kadosh, claim that the effect on the brain by electric current pulses can improve a person's mathematical abilities, and the effect persists even after six months.

This conclusion was made based on the results of an experiment with a group of volunteers. Electrodes were placed on the frontal part of their brain, which, in particular, responds to thinking abilities, and a very weak electrical potential was supplied through them. After five sessions lasting forty minutes, the subjects began to solve arithmetic problems and memorize numerical information twice as fast.

What is the essence of the effect? As it turned out, it's all about oxygen. It began to flow more precisely into those parts of the brain that were "hammered" with electrical impulses. As a result, the activity of "thinking" neurons has sharply increased. But the main thing that scientists emphasize is that the amazing effect persists for a long time. In any case, this was confirmed by a check made six months after the experiment.

And although many scientists took these results of Cohen Kadosh's group with skepticism, he is confident that his discovery has a great future. "About 5-7 percent of the world's population suffers from an inability to study arithmetic to one degree or another, and 20 percent of schoolchildren do not work well with numbers. And all of them can be helped," Kadosh says. He already sees the classrooms of the future, where each desk is equipped with special helmets that help students "crack" mathematical puzzles. This cheap and non-invasive procedure, in his opinion, can be used in the rehabilitation of stroke survivors.

CommentSvyatoslav Medvedev, Director of the Human Brain Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician:

About 30 years ago, academician Natalia Bekhtereva conducted similar experiments. For example, normally an ordinary person is able to remember 7 objects lying on the table. And when exposed to an electric current on the brain, I already remembered 11-12. And similar works, which show how with the help of electrical stimulation it is possible to improve thinking abilities, and have a beneficial effect on the nervous system, and cause a lot of interesting effects, have been done a lot in the world. There is nothing new and complicated about this. Electrical stimulation is used to treat some brain diseases. But I emphasize – they are being treated, trying to return patients to normal, and do not apply this method to healthy people.

After all, in fact, this is a real doping. It must be understood that the brain is a very precisely balanced complex system. By acting with an electric current, you interfere with this stability and violate it. And nothing happens just like that, free cheese is only in a mousetrap. And the payback is obvious – this is an imbalance. And if, when treating with electrical stimulation, we try to return the patient to a normal level, to balance, then by applying it to a healthy person, we force him to pass this level. But this cannot be done for the same reason that doping is prohibited.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru20.05.2013