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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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?
Post a Comment
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