There’s no pill that makes you smarter

“A pill that makes you smarter,” is enough of a proposition to buy in.

If developing any cognitive ability, almost from early childhood, demands some commitment to effort from us, any shortcut is welcome. Yet this hides a tragedy: we tend to value knowledge more than the act of learning. Or, as Dolina puts it: “I have a hunch that people don’t want to read; they want to have read.”

Believe it or not, there are still people today who repeat that “we only use ten percent of our brain capacity.” The possibility of pharmacologically “unlocking” the other ninety percent is, more or less, the plot of the movie Limitless (2011), based on a novel by Alan Glynn, which presents an experimental little pill that turns a failed writer into a genius capable of mastering any language, surfing the market like a champ, and writing a novel in one sitting. Since its release, interest in pills and supplements that promise similar effects has multiplied alarmingly.

These substances are often grouped under the term “nootropics,” coined in 1972 by the Romanian psychologist and chemist Corneliu Giurgea, who defined them as capable of enhancing learning and memory, protecting the brain from injury, and, crucially, being non-toxic and lacking significant side effects. The word comes from ancient Greek νόος (nóos, “mind”) and τροπέω (tropéō, “to turn,” “to change”), and the idea was to “change” the mind toward a better state. Predictably, the term was hijacked by marketing and today applies to anything: from mushroom coffee to a concoction of herbs, minerals, and vitamins, not to mention our beloved and well-known yerba mate.

Glynn himself attributes this renewed interest in “enhancing the brain” to advances in neuroscience (and the exaggeration of its findings) and a better understanding of how the brain works, but mainly to the expansion of a market built on outsized promises of cognitive enhancement: greater focus, mental clarity, boundless energy, creativity, and even the reversal of aging. Many of these products even brand themselves as the “real-life Limitless pill.”

There is nothing even remotely close to what these products promise, but as countless social media comments and irresponsible headlines attest, the most popular candidate for that imaginary throne is modafinil.

This drug was discovered almost by accident in France in the 1970s during the search for new painkillers. A derivative of adrafinil, it was tested in the early 1980s on patients with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that, due to its low prevalence, had been little studied and largely neglected by the industry. In these trials, a drastic reduction in sleepiness was observed, without the typical adverse effects of amphetamines. Unlike adrafinil, whose results had been inconsistent, modafinil was markedly more predictable and effective.

If a drug could improve cognitive performance (in this case, the ability to stay awake) in people with narcolepsy, it would likely have a similar effect in sleep-deprived individuals, such as military personnel. During a press conference at a NATO meeting in March 1987, Michel Jouvet, one of its discoverers, stated that modafinil “could keep an army on its feet and fighting for three days and three nights without significant side effects.”

This week some speculated that the B-2 pilots who dropped bombs on Iran a few days ago after a 37-hour flight managed it thanks to modafinil; there’s no evidence for this, nor is it necessary: the flights are practically autonomous, and the pilots can sleep in shifts. While the use of modafinil in fighter pilots is documented, it doesn’t solve the problem of fatigue, whose ideal solution is simply to rest.

Extreme exhaustion is one of the great challenges in warfare, and the use of amphetamines to counteract it played an important role during World War II, though not so much for their usefulness against fatigue but for their mood-altering effects, which lead to increased aggression and a certain “boost in morale.” In other words, when you’re really wired, you have no problem waging war on whoever comes along.

Modafinil, by comparison, had a lower risk of tolerance and dependence, and it wasn’t long before the French military conducted its first tests during the Gulf War in the early 1990s. In June 1992, it was officially approved for the treatment of narcolepsy in France.

A decade later, its “off-label” or non-prescription use began to spread, mainly among students, programmers, and any professional subjected to the tyranny of productivity — a category that today excludes practically no one. After Limitless, the idea that “these drugs surely exist (and if they exist, the military surely has them)” — along with the emergence of the slippery category misleadingly named “smart drugs” — took hold in the popular imagination as the shortcut (or the only recourse) to achieve what would otherwise (with a reasonable lifestyle) have been impossible.

While in 2004, a study estimated that 4.1% of U.S. college students had used prescription stimulants like methylphenidate (Ritalin) or dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine and Adderall) without a prescription, by 2017, a global survey put that figure at 30%. Unlike modafinil, Adderall and Ritalin — prescribed for attention disorders — have greater addictive potential and more pronounced side effects. Ritalin increases dopamine and acts on the prefrontal cortex, affecting attention, decision-making, and impulse control. Its most common side effects include nervousness, insomnia, headache, and loss of appetite.

If only a magic little pill existed, but if what we’re after is one that makes us brighter, the scientific evidence has left the chat.

There is no evidence that conclusively supports the idea that these “smart drugs” actually improve our intelligence. Outside their effectiveness for specific medical conditions, their non-prescription use in healthy individuals generally does not improve complex cognitive performance or intelligence. Instead, a growing number of studies suggest they may worsen productivity and efficiency, regardless of the subjective and anecdotal perception that users triumphantly recount on Twitter or Reddit. Even though they feel smarter or more productive, the evidence betrays them.

A true nootropic should enhance intelligence, not just allow us to exert more effort. In other words, not just work harder, but work smarter. But the ability to perform boring, repetitive tasks for longer without falling asleep doesn’t necessarily mean we’re seeing the Matrix.

Modafinil’s main effect is simple: it keeps us awake. While some studies suggest it may offer a modest advantage in specific tasks, especially in people with lower initial cognitive performance, it has also been shown to reduce creativity and cognitive flexibility. It speeds us up, but then makes us less productive. As described in a 2023 study, participants who took these drugs showed more enthusiasm and spent more time solving a problem, but their results were more erratic. The worst of both worlds.

As neuroscientist Elizabeth Bowman, author of that last study, explains: “You know, they take a pill to try and stay up to write an essay all night and end up cleaning the bathroom.”

The pharmacologically irrelevant but no less interesting question is where all this interest comes from. The answer points less to cognition and more to motivation — or, better yet, to the desire to artificially bolster willpower: modafinil doesn’t necessarily help generate new ideas; it makes the most tedious tasks feel absorbing, if not downright fascinating. What would be monotonous, alienating work dissolves into a delicious torrent of dopamine.

This is rooted in narratives about “hacking the brain” to achieve a certain “personal optimization” that fits perfectly in a world that demands we function like machines. Hustle culture, which glorifies productivity at the cost of stress and guilt, creates the problem and entrenches it until it seems inevitable, then sells us the solution in a capsule or some supplement.

But this unbridled interest in tinkering with our chemistry not only condemns us to a strange emotional disconnection — love for work that flourishes at the expense of love for people, as a Vice journalist described it — there are concrete risks. Although modafinil is not directly addictive, it does increase dopamine levels in a similar way to other stimulant drugs, so there is some concern about its potential for abuse and dependence; it can reduce the effectiveness of hormonal contraceptives by increasing enzyme activity, causing them to break down in the body faster than usual; and it is associated with a higher risk of birth defects if taken during pregnancy. Add to this that we know very little about its long-term effects and that it’s often bought without a prescription, many times on illegal markets with no quality control, and the combination is a recipe for disaster. (He said it! He said it!)

Though all of the above raises concerns that could well be set aside in favor of freely choosing what we put into our bodies, there remain some ethical considerations that aren’t terribly mysterious either. We can start with unfairness: if the drugs provide an advantage, their use is a form of academic or professional doping. But there are those who propose the opposite view: if the drugs benefit those who start from a lower cognitive level most, they could act as “levelers” of intelligence if distributed equitably.

In geopolitical terms, it becomes imaginable a world where, in countries with looser regulations, their use becomes normalized, while in others the fear of falling behind forces their adoption so as not to lose productivity. It’s easier to imagine the invisible hand of the market dropping pills onto our tongues so we can maintain the inhuman pace of our lives than to entertain the possibility of acknowledging the physiological needs of our species and, just maybe, finally making the importance of doing nothing fashionable.

The greatest risk isn’t competition, but conformity. By relying on an external tool to generate the interest we can’t find on our own, we run the risk of losing something fundamental: just as we delegate to artificial intelligence tools the effort and the friction — often the most formative part of the work — our artificial willpower supplements, rather than tricking us about our capabilities, trick us about our desires. By making us enjoy what we don’t like, we lose the opportunity to question why that is. They help us adapt to a broken system instead of changing it.

Contrary to what the “personal optimization” market promotes with its fantasies of quick, neatly packaged solutions, the evidence seems to point toward other genuinely effective ways to enhance cognition. The trouble is, they have nothing to do with the risky promises of a pill, but rather with a broader, multifactorial understanding of brain health. As Daniel George and Peter Whitehouse argue, this industry is built on a reductionist approach that isolates the brain from its context and ignores the myriad factors that influence brain health over a lifetime, such as diet, lifestyle, exposure to neurotoxins, stress, learning opportunities, access to healthcare, and head injuries.

But that pill is a harder one to swallow.

A scene from Limitless (2011), which popularized the idea that there are pills that make you smart(er).

This text was originally published in 2025 in Spanish.