Comment by tokenadult
12 years ago
So far the IQ boost from any known drug intervention is very modest. All of the possible environmental interventions on IQ combined appear, from longitudinal studies of IQ in national populations, to have a fairly strong effect, but many of those environmental influences are still very poorly understood. A recent review article,
Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: new findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67(2), 130.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
by a group of all-star IQ researchers who on the whole are optimistic about environmental interventions, lays out some of the current research and shows what is still unknown.
> So far the IQ boost from any known drug intervention is very modest.
Absolutely; if you look at some of my other pages, you can see for yourself how little I think of most claims to improve intelligence...
I take this unreplicated study as being more evidence for the stimulating effect of nicotine rather than any genuine peak intelligence boost, in the same way that monetary payment can increase peoples' scores on IQ tests - you wouldn't say 'the promise of money makes people smarter', but rather, 'the promise of money "enables" people to work harder'.
FWIW, I think the Nisbett review is drastically optimistic in some areas (I've criticized it on HN in the past, although I can't quite seem to find a link to my old comment in Google), so the true picture for IQ interventions is worse.
Thank you, that looks worth a read.