Great Blog on Positive Effects of Nicotine

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  • darkwing
    Member
    • Oct 2007
    • 415

    Great Blog on Positive Effects of Nicotine

    Mangan's
    Pedantic blather and general disdain. "L'enfer, c'est les Autres."
    Friday, December 28, 2007
    More performance enhancement

    Nicotine increases performance on IQ tests:
    Two experiments investigating the effects of nicotine on performance in the inspection time (IT) procedure are reported. Experiment 1 compared ITs in smoking (0.8 mg nicotine cigarette), sham-smoking, and no-smoking conditions. IT was significantly shorter in the smoking condition as compared to both the no-smoking or sham-smoking conditions, suggesting that nicotine enhances early information processing. This result is of particular interest because of the correlation between IT and IQ reported in previous experiments. The nicotine related decrease in IT raises the possibility that nicotine enhances at least a subset of the physiological processes underlying intellectual performance.
    Nicotine even increases scores on the Raven Progressive Matrices test.
    Nicotine has recently been shown to enhance measures of information processing speed including the decision time (DT) component of simple and choice reaction time and the string length measure of evoked potential waveform complexity. Both (DT and string length) have been previously demonstrated to correlate with performance on standard intelligence tests (IQ). We therefore hypothesised that nicotine is acting to improve intellectual performance on the elementary information processing correlates of IQ. In the current experiment we tested this hypothesis using the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) test. APM scores were significantly higher in the smoking session compared to the non-smoking session, suggesting that nicotine acts to enhance physiological processes underlying performance on intellectual tasks.
    Now, I'm not urging anyone to take up smoking. But there's a safe way to ingest nicotine, which is snus, the Swedish smokeless tobacco. At the link (which is the most popular post I've ever written, with scores of people coming by daily to read it), you can discover why snus is safe and delivers the required nicotine buzz.

    The writer Sir Compton Mackenzie once said, “The harder I work the more I need to smoke because tobacco is the handmaid of literature.” I wonder whether there's been any really great writer, other than those unfortunates who lived before the weed was discovered, who didn't smoke. Besides its pleasurable qualities, nicotine enhances the brain's activities, speeding up thought processes, and writers have known this for centuries. Kant smoked a pipe every morning; though he allowed himself only one pipe a day, his pipes got bigger over the years. And when Hobbes sat down to write, he had five pipes lined up, which he smoked one after the other. (By the way, all three of these men lived to a ripe old age.)
    Labels: Pharmacology, Tobacco


    posted by Dennis Mangan @ 1:57 PM
    1 comments

    1 Comments:
    At 12/28/2007 03:23:00 PM, Les said...
    Significantly higher? What's that, 1, 2 or even 3 extra IQ points?


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  • phish
    Member
    • Jan 2007
    • 265

    #2
    Very interesting, I always snus more when I'm working and If Kant and Hobbes did it then who are we to stop

    There is another paper titled "Smoking and academic performance"

    Smokers and nonsmokers were compared on three aspects of academic achievement. Although exactly the same percentage of smokers and nonsmokers passed the first-year university examination, smokers obtained significantly higher marks. Similarly, smokers achieved significantly higher marks in their final year examinations in comparison with nonsmokers. Finally, a comparison of the tutorial essay marks of the smokers and nonsmokers again showed that smokers obtained significantly higher marks than nonsmokers. These data are consistent with the idea that ambitious students adopt smoking in the belief that it will help them study and sustain concentration.

    Comment

    • darkwing
      Member
      • Oct 2007
      • 415

      #3
      Phish, do you have a reference for that article? This is interesting stuff indeed.

      Comment

      • phish
        Member
        • Jan 2007
        • 265

        #4
        http://www.springerlink.com/content/67j4874v202p5r70/

        It is quite an old paper but there is a newer one of a similar topic titled "Function of cigarette smoking in relation to examinations". You can look at them both on that page (as long as you have an Athens account or similar)

        The results from the study show that in higher education students perform better if they smoke but this (of course!) does not mean smoking causes better grades it may be down to personality traits of smokers (i.e. people that are attracted to smoking tend to be higher achievers)

        I did a search on a few journal archives and there are many papers on similar subjects....oh well thats my day wasted

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