The Study Drug and Our Studies

If you want to become smarter and more focused, you might try meditation, ample sleep, and intensive study. Other people, particularly and increasingly college students, are substituting the first two recommendations with amphetamines. And they are studying harder than ever… maybe. It seems as though society doesn’t know the actual effects of amphetamines like Adderall and Ritalin, but instead assumes they are akin to Bradley Cooper’s experience in Limitless. Here is some of what we know about the ways amphetamines work on the molecular, psychophysical, and social level.

What are amphetamines and how do they work?

The short answer is that they kinda look like neurotransmitters and they determine the amount of free-floating dopamine in the brain. If the reader would prefer to skip the technical explanation (which we have tried to make as straightforward as possible), do you really? Are you sure? Fine, then there is no need to read this section.

For the long answer, let’s first talk about neurotransmitters. Many categories of neurotransmitters exist. Dopamine, which falls under the category of monoamine, is known by some as the “happy hormone” because of its regulation of positive emotion. For the sake of this article, the reader need not concern themselves with the other categories or the chemical characteristics of them. What is worth…