Provigil - Modafinil

Barbara Sahakian, also at Cambridge, describes modafinil as the "first true smart drug". In a lab at the University of Cambridge, Danielle Turner is turning ordinary Joes into masterminds. She gets them to perform a test called the one-touch Tower of London planning task, which measures one aspect of intelligence (see Diagram). The harder the task, the more mistakes her volunteers make, but when she gives them a dose of the drug modafinil they suddenly find it easier. "You see quite a dramatic improvement in their performance, particularly when the problem gets more difficult," she says.

Modafinil was not developed to make people smarter. It is sold as a prescription-only "wakefulness promoter" for people with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders, but it has a remarkable effect on normal cognition: it improves not only planning but also decision-making and verbal and visual memory. This has made it the latest drug of choice among people looking for a mental b