It is unfortunately very difficult to get unbiased information on seemingly anything in today’s society. Everybody has an agenda. Of course, sometimes there is also a lot of incompetence at play. A good example is the discussion surrounding methylphenidate (MPH), not just in society but also in science. A fair amount of college students use this drug in order to gain an edge over their competition. Some openly admit it, while others keep their usage private. It is not always clear how these people get their drugs if they do not have an ADHD diagnosis, but I am hearing that having a family member who is diagnosed with ADHD, or, even better, having a strong personal connection to a medical doctor helps a lot.

Obviously, there are widespread delusions. Robert Malone spoke of “mass formation psychosis” in the context of the vaxx, i.e. people believing incredible nonsense as a result of relentless brainwashing via mass media. This is not happening with MPH, however. Instead, it is a drug people use and normally do not talk about. Quite certainly, these people would not keep using it if it had no effect. However, as MPH usage is apparently more common among students who are among the most competitive anyway, they may not have much of an incentive to promote their little secret. There are also people who use cocaine in order to be able to pull all-nighters in politics or banking, and these people also do not draw attention to it.

My impression is that there is a lot of dishonesty around MPH. Supposedly it does not really help, yet a lot of people use it. Some psychiatrists may even claim that this drug does not really help all that much. I came across articles written by psychiatrists which stated that you should get proper sleep and study regularly, and if you do that then MPH will not have any effect. This reminds me of steroids. Supposedly absolutely nobody is using them and even if, they are technically superfluous. Even people who show all the side-effects of roiding are claimed to be “naturals”. There are also absurd claims about known roiders themselves that they do not need to take steroids at all, and that their physique is attainable even without it. Even effing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the most obvious roider in all of Hollywood, apparently got his physique because of hard work and eating copious amounts of chicken-breast fillets, and not because of gear. This is nothing but nonsense. Steroids work, and MPH also works.

The other day, I came across an incredibly dishonest scientific study on MPH. It claims that this drug does not enhance cognitive performance in healthy, young people. Feel free to have a look at the study first before you continue with my article. (I will wait.) As you may have noticed, the definition of “cognitive performance” the authors use is highly misleading. They used two IQ test, WAIS-R and Raven. These are excellent IQ test. However, I do not think that people claim that MPH makes them smarter. Instead, it increases their ability to focus. You can perhaps call it intellectual endurance. Have you ever experienced getting so engrossed in a book, a game, or some research, that you forgot everything around yourself, and hours just went by? If this is too abstract, think back spending time with a woman you were really into! In such situations, you do not notice anything else around you. On MPH, doing your taxes is as captivating as the best movie you have ever watched or a 10/10 chick you have crush on who is sitting on your bed naked, with her legs spread.

IQ test hardly stress endurance. You go through a sequence of brief exercise, e.g. ten times ten sets of questions, and each set of questions may take no longer than 90 seconds or two minutes. Even longer tests, like Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, do not allot a lot of time to each single question. In terms of endurance, these are not taxing tests. They are designed to quickly get your to your cognitive limit but not keep you there. In contrast, a four-hour exam in a proof-based mathematics course is an entirely different beast, putting a much higher demand on your ability to focus, at least if you are not so far ahead of the level that was taught that you can solve the problems with ease.

MPH does not make you smarter, but it enables you to perform at a consistently high level. If you get distracted easily, then there is the cost of task switching, and you may find it difficult to get a lot done. In contrast, if you pop an MPH pill, you can go for four hours straight at peak performance. Tasks that used to take me two hours I can do in 45 minutes. Here, I should add that my baseline is already very high. My output without MPH is at a level not many people can match and this surely includes less intelligent people on MPH. With MPH, my days are effectively a few hours longer.

To go back to the study mentioned above: if the researchers really wanted to measure the impact of MPH, they should have come up with an IQ test similar to Raven’s that takes two or three hours. Even a simpler test, like going through twenty densely printed pages full of t’s and (very few) i’s, with the task of circling all i’s, should probably suffice to demonstrate the difference in performance. This is a simple task but it requires to maintain your attention for an extended amount of time. Probably anybody will hit their limit sooner without MPH, no matter what their baseline performance may be, and exceed that limit with MPH.