Series: Drugs Uncovered: Part 16 Of 17

FEED YOUR BRAIN

Most people take illegal drugs to get 'high' but some use them to improve
their intelligence. Can 'smart drugs' really boost brainpower?

For a brief period in the early 1990s, 'smart drugs' were the talk of the
rave scene and in theory they made perfect sense. After all, the dumb drugs
had been working fantastically well for several years: if people could be
made happy with pills, who was to say they couldn't also be made clever?

Suddenly, the shelves of alternative boutiques from Manchester to Brighton
were brimming with potions that claimed to lubricate thought, and wildly
differing accounts of their efficacy were circulating. Now science is
suggesting that the ravers might have been on to something: that it may be
possible to have a more agile mind without the tedium involved in acquiring
one by traditional means. Can it be true, I wondered?

The story starts with Dr Ward Dean and John Morgenthaler's 1990 book, Smart
Drugs & Nutrients. One US Food and Drug Administration official
characterised this as a 'dirty little book', because it aimed to lend
scientific credibility to a range of supposed 'cognitive enhancers', from
ginseng and gingko biloba to thyroid hormone and pharmaceutical drugs like
piracetam, which is normally used to treat conditions such as alcoholism
and Alzheimer's. Since 1990, however, our accelerated understanding of how
the brain functions has drawn many more researchers into the field and new
'smart drugs' are being touted by the week.

I consult some experts and choose a combination which seems promising. On
the natural side, gingko biloba is thought to boost blood flow and increase
glucose metabolism. This is important, because the brain has a design
fault: it runs on glucose, but doesn't store it, which is a bit like having
a car with no petrol tank or a Prime Minister with no, er, defining
political philosophy.

Vitamin E is also considered to have a protective effect on neurons, while
amino acids like glutamine, acetyl-L-carnitine and phenylalanine
theoretically provide the body with the necessary elements for creating
neurotransmitters, the brain's main chemical messengers. These have the
added benefit that an ability to correctly pronounce them by the end of the
experiment will constitute proof that they've worked.

Newer areas of interest gather around co-enzymes such as NADH, which plays
a key role in the energy production of every cell in the body and is
claimed to stimulate the production of neurotransmitters, leading to
greater physical and mental capacity; and DHEA, a steroid hormone and
chemical precursor of both oestrogen and testosterone, which is said to
have some steroid-like properties, without undesirable side-effects like
turning male users into women and vice versa. In the pharmaceutical arena,
there is the aforementioned piracetam, which is said to have a demonstrable
therapeutic effect on sick people and is claimed by some to improve memory
function in healthy ones.

The only problem is acquiring my drugs cocktail might bring me into
conflict with the law. Some, such as vitamin E, choline and the amino
acids, are available in UK health food shops. Others, such as NADH and
DHEA, are not legally available here, so I'm going to have to get murky. As
for piracetam, I track down a north London company who will be delighted to
sell me some without a prescription, but only if I live in a foreign
country. 'No problem - I'm based in south London,' I offer hopefully, only
to be told that this isn't quite foreign enough.

Eventually, we establish that I can ask my brother in Denver to buy some
over the net, then post it back to me, along with the NADH and DHEA which
he has tracked down. The ensuing transatlantic emails about 'deals',
'scores' and 'stashes' are most amusing until we start to hear stories
about the FBI and MI5's shiny new email monitoring centres, which are being
directed squarely at the international drugs trade.

When they're assembled, the battery of bottles is intimidating and it's
taken a couple of weeks to feel ready for my month-long regime. Even before
I begin, this looks exhausting. With breakfast, there'll be one capsule
each of vitamin E, gingko biloba, L-glutamine, choline, DHEA,
acetyl-L-carnitine and piracetam. After a break, there will be
L-phenylalanine, followed by further doses of choline, piracetam and gingko
with lunch and dinner.

A week in, I will find that the big challenge is remembering to take all
this bloody stuff and that a kind of smart-drug catch-22 exists: if you
need them, you're probably not intelligent enough to remember to take them.
I throw down the first fistful and we're away.

I've assembled some tests to help me gauge whether the drugs are working,
adding more as I go along. One involves picking a number at random and
seeing how many times I can double it in a minute; another, looking at a
page of randomly chosen words for a minute, then trying to recall as many
as possible. The day before starting, I chose the number nine and managed
20 generations of doubling, and remembered 12 of 20 words.

Gore Vidal once said: 'Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.'
We'd better address this. The term 'intelligence' has only been in common
usage for just over a century. We know what we mean by it, but have trouble
defining it. Psychologists want to peg intelligence as an ability to do
well in intelligence tests, but this is a cyclical argument. The most
important thing I'll want to ask at the end of my month of pills is 'do I
feel smarter?'

At the end of the second night, I'm trying to convince myself that I do
feel smarter. I thrash my five-year-old at Pokemon card snap and win an
argument as to why I shouldn't change the sheets on the bed with unusual
ease. But when I choose a number and double it, I only get to a pathetic 15
generations, including several stupid mistakes.

I finish by watching Jean Eustache's 1973 French film La Maman et la Putain
and Truffaut's Jules et Jim to see if I can identify the genius which all
my friends tell me they represent, but the pills haven't helped: they still
look tiresome to me. I go to bed feeling depressed.

No significant advance in my test results, but it's still early days. I
decide to unwrap my secret weapon, NADH, which I've been saving in the
belief that it might actually work. Today, there's a story in the paper
describing how a researcher at the University of Northumbria improved his
students' mental agility and ability to concentrate by giving them gingko
biloba and pure oxygen.

I decide to boost my programme with some regular exercise. I also visit the
'HiQ' websites of organisations like the Mega Foundation, which is run by
Christopher Langan, who reckons to have an IQ of over 200 and styles
himself as 'the smartest man in America'. I'm not sure that I've ever seen
anything duller or with less apparent point. For the first time I wonder
whether I want the drugs to work.

A story in this morning's paper reports that 'the "wonder herb" gingko
biloba has been found to have serious side effects' and can, in fact, be
dangerous. Oh dear. Another one, in a different paper, claims that
researchers at the University of California improved the memories of rats
by feeding them acetyl-L-carnitine.

Whether their appreciation of French New Wave cinema improved was not
stated. I suddenly realise: these are drugs that I'm taking. They're real.
And the regime is starting to bore and irritate me. Nevertheless, today I
managed to double the number seven 24 times in a minute and remember 15 of
the 20 words I've been set. And it gets better.

Three days ago, I chose a phone number at random from my local newsagent's
window and tried to recall it at the end of the day, but failed. Today it
seems to pop back into my head, with a neon clarity. To test it, I dial,
and a woman answers. My heart leaps.

'What can I do for you love?'

'Is this Tina? In Sydenham?'

'Yes love. What were you looking for? Prices start at UKP40...'

Fantastic! Something has happened. Is it the drugs? Or is it the exercise?
My bouts of cycling always leave me feeling uncharacteristically
clear-headed. Add to this the fact that I spent several hours at the
coalface of my accounts last night, doing long and odious sums, and my
confusion deepens. Is it just a matter of practice making perfect? Can
unlocking the mind be so banal?

I had a dream last night. In it, I was being chased by a big, leering,
orange and white capsule. This is torture. Today I try all the tests again
and seem to be back where I started. I can't explain this, although several
disturbed nights do mean that I'm feeling tired and haven't had time to do
any exercise.

Life is destroying my intelligence and a woman from Mensa explains to me
that this is not unusual. After a holiday, she says, it takes most of us
three weeks to recover just 70 per cent of our normal mental agility. The
brain is like the rest of our bodies: if we use it well, it gets strong; if
we don't it goes all lardy-arsed.

That's it. No more pills. I might stick with the gingko, just in case it
helped, and I do think that the NADH might help increase my physical energy
levels... but I don't feel any more intelligent. My partner says that my
everyday memory has improved, but then she always said that very few of my
mental lapses around things like dental appointments and deadlines couldn't
have been prevented with the help of a red-hot poker.

Of course, it might be that, with all this thinking about memory and
intelligence, I'm paying more attention.

I suppose that what we want from smart drugs, as with all 'lifestyle'
drugs, is a shortcut to somewhere we could go anyway if we were prepared to
apply ourselves and be patient. And, of course, in taking the shortcut, we
miss the process of getting there, which is where we learn to use what
we're seeking.

As a final test, I watch The Usual Suspects one more time and still can't
work out what's gone on by the time the credits roll. The thing is, I quite
like it that way.