Meta analysis by independent researcher shows that Nicotine is strong nootropic

[Hitsu]

Preface:

One of the reasons tobacco became so popular in the 1600s, along with tea & coffee (for their caffeine), was that nicotine is a powerful stimulant. Obvious enough; it affects tons of systems. Less obvious is that nicotine has many beneficial effects (and these benefits may be related to anomalous smoking results1); the infamous deadliness of smoking would seem to be almost solely from the smoke, not the nicotine. Even less obvious is that nicotine itself may not be especially addictive, and its addictiveness is genetically modulated2.

All of the harm seems to stem from tobacco, and tobacco smoking in particular; this is not necessarily obvious because almost everyone casually conflates tobacco with nicotine (especially public education programs3), treating them as a single synonymous evil I dub “nicbacco”. When someone or something says that “nicotine” is harmful and you drill down to the original references for their claims, the references often turn out to actually be talking about tobacco rather than nicotine gums or patches45. Other methodological issues include comparing to current smokers rather than former smokers or failing to control for the subjects being the sort of people who would begin such a societally-disapproved activity like smoking; the studies typically aren’t designed properly even for showing an effect: you need a study which finds deficits in smokers but not in non-smokers or former smokers (eg. Heffernan et al 2011 or Sabia et al 2008/Sabia et al 2012 although neither enables nicotine inferences since there was no nicotine-only control group).

_http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Just look at Performance

_http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#performance

Performance

If you’ve read through this page and also read the Wikipedia page on nicotine, your eye was probably caught by the mention that nicotine affects the cholinergic system - the same system piracetam affects. (This might make nicotine redundant with piracetam or other nootropics that affect acetylcholine or acetylcholinesterase, such as huperzine-A, but it’s been argued against.11)

Indeed, the research literature is full of results connecting nicotine with improved mental performance:

• nicotine boosted IQ scores in a small sample of smokers, specifically scores on the RAPM12 (possibly related to its increasing global connectivity since IQ is being increasingly reified as measuring the global connectivity of multiple brain subsystems)
• reaction time is improved, as is inspection time and visual search (but perhaps due solely to faster motor reaction?)
• pilots’ performance enhanced 4/5 as much as donepezil does; improves late-day piloting
• driving performance enhanced
• overnight performance on various memory & attention13 tasks (“These data suggest that when performance is being measured overnight, smokers show little or no impairment, whilst the performance of non-smokers showed performance decrements.”)
• faster performance on Stroop and word classification
• “acute nicotine administration may exert direct beneficial effects on novelty detection and subsequent memory recognition”
• in smokers, improved prospective memory (things one intends to do); Rusted et al 2005
• can improve handwriting
• helps ADHD (Conners et al 1996; or Levin et al 1996 - as well as OCD, see previous footnote): “Results indicate significant clinician-rated global improvement, self-rated vigor and concentration, and improved performance on chronometric measures of attention and timing accuracy.”
• may help depression1415
• may help symptoms of schizophrenia via increased synthesis of GABA & increased effectiveness of cognitive training (see Wikipedia), and protect against Parkinson’s & Alzheimers, see Fratiglioni & Wang 200016 (or just general cognitive impairment in the elderly)
• A meta-analysis of nicotine studies reports results similar to older literature reviews (eg. Warburton 1992, Newhouse et al 2004):

  There were sufficient effect size data to conduct meta-analyses on nine performance domains, including motor abilities, alerting17 and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory. We found significant positive effects of nicotine or smoking on six domains: fine motor, alerting attention-accuracy and response time (RT), orienting attention-RT, short-term episodic memory-accuracy, and working memory-RT (effect size range = 0.16 to 0.44).

• A 2011 ADHD review18 covers nicotine:

  Dozens of studies have assessed the effects of nicotine on cognition in healthy, nicotine-naïve samples including studies of memory (McClernon et al., 2003), attention (Froeliger et al., 2009) and inhibitory control (Potter and Newhouse, 2004). In a recent meta-analysis of 48 studies in which nicotine was administered to non-smokers or only minimally deprived smokers (Heishman et al., 2010), nicotine was shown to have positive effects on multiple domains including attention and working memory. Twenty-nine studies specifically assessed non-smokers and among those, positive effects were observed for reaction time on tests of sustained (or alerting) attention and working memory.
  
  Studies of the effects of nicotine on inhibitory control were not included in the meta-analysis, but a handful of studies suggest potential positive effects of nicotine on this domain. Two small studies have observed acute (Levin et al., 1998) and chronic (McClernon et al., 2006) transdermal nicotine administration to result in trends toward decreases in errors of commission on a CPT task. Moreover, nicotine has been shown to reduce CPT commission errors in nonsmokers with schizophrenia (Barr et al., 2007), non-smokers low in attentiveness (Poltavski and Petros, 2006); and decrease stop signal reaction time in adolescents nonsmokers with ADHD (Potter and Newhouse, 2004). Despite these findings, nicotine was not shown to improve response inhibition in adults with ADHD as measured with a CPT task (Levin et al., 2001).

• nicotine confirmed to have short-term boosts to “attention and memory”19; similar results (with one negative20):
  [list type=decimal]
• Kumari et al 2003, “Cognitive effects of nicotine in humans: an fMRI study”,
• Foulds et al 1996, “Cognitive performance effects of subcutaneous nicotine in smokers and never-smokers”
• Heishman et al 1994. “Nicotine and smoking: a review of effects of human performance”
• Le Houezec et al 1994 “A low dose of subcutaneous nicotine improves information-processing in non-smokers” and “Effects of cotinine on information processing in nonsmokers” (cotinine is a nicotine metabolite with effects of its own)

[*]during withdrawal, performance returns to baseline (but not below; in tension with Ernst 2011, and see also a similar possible example with neuroplasticity)
[*] In non-humans, mice learn faster on low doses (see also Levin et al 1998, “Nicotinic acetylcholine involvement in cognitive function in animals”)
[*] One amusing result - nicotine can apparently reduce bad cholesterol (in addition to its famous weight-loss properties)
[*]perhaps unsurprisingly given all this, nicotine has been found helpful in the elderly; see “Nicotine treatment of mild cognitive impairment: A 6-month double-blind pilot clinical trial” (slides; mention no withdrawal symptoms)21 and its citations. (In keeping with our usual nicotine vs smoking dichotomy, note that smoking may be bad for mental functioning in the elderly22.)
[*]expectancies don’t seem to be a large part of the effect
[*]but doses past 14mg seem to harm performance in Poltavski et al 2012
[/list]


Notice that many of these results are recent, and postdate the victorious war on tobacco. The question of whether positive results are tainted by tobacco money has been examined; Anders Sandberg notes that there is pretty clear evidence of funding bias - but the independent researchers still turned up their fair share of positive results.

Anecdotally, a great many Imminst posters report a positive experience which is similar to, but better than, the extremely popular amphetamine formulation Adderall; a few also favorably compare it to caffeine. (These anecdotes are supported by a historical survey which reports that the 2 highest rates of hourly consumption were during work hours, and that “Of these three groups [surveyed], 86% of the clinic group, 83% of the students, and 59% of the hospital workers agreed with the statement that ‘smoking helps me think and concentrate’.”)

Soo Nicotine is strong nootropic and most harm is done from 'tobacco' (mainstream one?).

Interesting points highlighted :)

• nicotine boosted IQ scores in a small sample of smokers, specifically scores on the RAPM12 (possibly related to its increasing global connectivity since IQ is being increasingly reified as measuring the global connectivity of multiple brain subsystems)
• faster performance on Stroop and word classification
  
• may help symptoms of schizophrenia via increased synthesis of GABA & increased effectiveness of cognitive training (see Wikipedia), and protect against Parkinson’s & Alzheimers, see Fratiglioni & Wang 200016 (or just general cognitive impairment in the elderly)
• during withdrawal, performance returns to baseline (but not below; in tension with Ernst 2011, and see also a similar possible example with neuroplasticity)
• but doses past 14mg seem to harm performance in Poltavski et al 2012