Staying Awake

With the increasing prevalence of stimulant medications (e.g. Adderall) on college campuses and the rise of ADHD diagnoses fueling stimulant supply, dextroampheatmine, the main active ingredient in Adderall, has never been easier to come by. But if you need to stay up late, for studying or just for fun, what drug is the best choice? Thankfully, some curious scientists have given us the answer.

A study in the journal Sleep last year compared the efficacy of caffeine, dextroamphetamine, and modafinil on maintaining executive function in sleep deprivation. Here executive function refers to an individual's ability to make decisions, gather information, and mentally manipulate that information. The results were somewhat surprising: none of the drugs tested was superior in all tests of executive functioning. Different drugs were better suited to different tests.

In one test, called the Tower of London, participants had to arrange beads on a computer screen to fit a specified pattern while following a few simple rules; here, dextroamphetamine and modafinil showed superiority to both placebo and caffeine. Yet in solving the famous Tower of Hanoi problem, caffeine was superior to both placebo and the other two drugs tested.

The researchers summarized these findings by suggesting that modafinil and dextroamphetamine excel at maintaining spatial memory and problem solving skills during sleep deprivation and that caffeine is superior in tasks requiring inhibition and "the ability to focus on achieving multistep subgoals to achieve a larger goal."

The results are subject to interpretation, certainly, but it is not a great leap to suggest that caffeine may be more effective at imporoving performance on longer, more extensive endeavours, such as writing a paper, assembling a presentation, or pounding out code. In contrast, dextroamphetamine (or Adderall) and modafinil may be more effective for solving complex individual problems, as in a mathematical, scientific, or computer-oriented task. The differences between the drugs are not extreme, but if already augmenting one's intellectual prowess with psychoactive drugs, you might as well do it optimally.