Part 16 Brain Boost
This month I’m going to take you on a tour of just what your brain is capable of, especially when you add the right and wrong ingredients to the mix.
Performance enhancing drugs like steroids have become synonymous with cheating athletes just like Pro Plus and Red Bull have developed a symbiotic relationship with students during periods of exam stress. But what do these additives actually do to your body and what are the implications as a new generation of designer drugs hit the streets?
Statistically one in four of you reading this right now will be drinking a cup of tea, coffee, Coca Cola or a beverage that contains caffeine. Caffeine therefore seems like a logical place to begin this discussion, so what exactly does this xanthine alkaloid compound do to the human body?
Caffeine
Like most drugs the response caffeine provokes in the human body differs and depends on the physiology of the individual. If you have 1-3mg of caffeine before or during exercise your performance might be improved. However caffeine also impedes healthy exercise because it causes increased levels of dehydration. The same principle of stimulation applies for exam performance but when you rely on caffeine to stimulate your brain cells you also run the risk of hitting a low during a critical period.
Roughly speaking, an adult should not consume more than 450 mg of caffeine per day. That works out as three cups of brewed coffee.
If you ingest one tablet of Pro Plus your body takes in 50mg of caffeine which is approximately the same amount of caffeine as half a cup of coffee. In other words a sixth of your daily allowance.
In one can of Red Bull you have 80 mg of caffeine so you could have five in one day and not exceed your maximum intake. However five cans in my experience, generally makes you feel faster than time.
Coffee is the worst culprit when it comes to clocking up those milligrams of caffeine because in one serving you can find at least 100 mg of caffeine.
The Negative Effects
This doesn’t happen to everyone, especially seasoned caffeine addicts like Yorkshire born Copy Editors, but the negative side effects of too much caffeine in your diet can include tremors, an increased heart rate, headaches and the oh so lovely diarrhea.
Excessive doses of caffeine can be lethal.
Other side effects include nausea, irritability, insomnia, nervousness, peptic ulceration, delirious seizures, coma and sperventricular and ventricular arrhythmias. Even worse, excessive doses of caffeine can be lethal.
So going over board with coffee is bad but what about the next generation of mind motivators?
Cognition enhancing drugs have been splashed all over the press in recent months and they are already widely available in the United States. But what do they do and who uses them?
Modafinil is one of the most popular drugs available and was originally developed to treat people who fall asleep involuntarily. Now it’s being used to improve performance in the workplace and the classroom.
When the drug was tested on volunteers in Britain it produced particularly strong improvements in performance, especially during difficult situations. As problems got harder, performance improved, accuracy increased and the memory was enhanced.
Professor Gary Lynch, from the University of California, Irvine, helped invent another class of similar drugs called Ampakines. These are used to improve memory and cognition.
If these super pills do exactly what they say on the tin, then it might well be possible to re-wire your brain and push your IQ into the levels of genius.
However like all good things, there is a trade off. The long term impacts are not yet known and the social implications are massive.
Individuals who choose not to take them or who cannot afford to take them will be at a disadvantage. Worse still the implications of deploying these mind altering drugs among the armed forces could mean a whole new level of international terrorism and counter measures.
But what do you think? Would or have you ever taken these drugs and what did they do to you? E-mail me at submissions@st-christophers.co.uk and we’ll get some good old fashioned debates going in the new St Christopher’s community.
