According to White & Batty’s recent correlations, you may already have.

High childhood IQ may increase the risk of illegal drug use in adolescence and adulthood.

By looking at a pile of data from nearly 8,000 British participants in the early ’70s, the authors identified that men with verified high IQ scores at age 5 were roughly 50% more likely to have tried amphetamines, ecstasy, and other hard drugs by age 25. The effect was even stronger for women.

IQ scores at age 10 showed a similar yet weaker correlation, with adult drug use showing itself most clearly around age 30. Of the men and women surveyed, 30% of men and 15% of women had tried cannabis by 30, which is often considered to be a stepping stone to stronger drugs.

These data included self-reported measures of socioeconomic status, financial worry, parental functioning, and psychological distress, though adding those factors didn’t seem to explain any additional part of the IQ-drug relationship. The authors suppose that children with higher IQs are more eager than their peers to seek novel stimulation; put simply, illicit substances may be seen as a coping mechanism for pervasive boredom.

It’s interesting to consider that these data were pulled from children in the 1970′s, as they grew up in a society particularly soaked in musical, social, and political revolution—many of the revolutionary trends of the 60′s continued well into the 70′s, no doubt leaving indelible marks on the children from whom these data were collected. If a higher intelligence quotient is associated with a desire to learn more about the world, current events, and people of interest, then perhaps it isn’t too surprising that the apt children from that era were particularly curious about the substances associated with truly unique stimulation, championed (or at least tolerated) by many of the well-known personalities of the day.

This is not to suggest that experimenting with illicit substances is somehow a defining characteristic of those with higher IQs; In just 2008, overdoses on hard drugs accounted for over 36,000 deaths in the US alone. Prescription drugs including oxycodone, methadone, and hydrocodone have since surpassed those numbers. Surely there are myriad reasons why one might abuse substances. Alcohol abuse, for example, is also strongly related to higher childhood IQ, as noted by the authors.

“…other studies have linked higher childhood IQ scores to excess alcohol intake and alcohol dependency in adulthood.”

Understanding that a correlation exists between childhood intelligence quotient and drug use is a necessary facet of mapping the reasons why one might begin using drugs in the first place. Surely social factors are equally important, illustrating why repeated studies with data pulled from different countries, and during different eras, can only help reveal the subtleties of the IQ-drug relationship.

Regardless of opinion, we live in a world where LSD alone has sparked our understanding of advanced molecular biology methodology, and helped shape the early worldview of the late founder and CEO of one of America’s strongest consumer technology companies. If a better understanding of the motivation to use illicit substances might curb the sacrifices often associated with them, this line of research could be remarkable indeed.

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James White, G. David Batty. Intelligence across childhood in relation to illegal drug use in adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 2011; DOI: 10.1136/jech-2011-200252. URL: http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/28/jech-2011-200252

Prescription painkillers outpace heroin, cocaine in OD deaths (via CDC). LA Times (2011). URL: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/01/news/la-heb-prescription-drug-overdose-deaths-20111101

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic has caused over 25 million deaths since its formal discovery in 1981. HIV leads to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), whereby one’s helper T cells diminish to the point of considerable vulnerability to opportunistic infection. AIDS-related death — for several reasons — has been disproportionately high in Africa, though its effect is undeniable worldwide and made notorious by its transmission vectors of choice, including needle sharing, unprotected sex, blood transfusion, and perinatal infection.

Global HIV infection prevalence, 2007

Once diagnosed, antiviral therapy can be effective in reducing and delaying the severity of AIDS-related symptoms, though this varies from person to person. Similarly, the genetic resistance described by this study only lends its protection to a fraction of the (mostly European) population.

CCR5-delta 32 is a genetic mutation that runs interception against oncoming HIV presence, preventing the virus from squatting inside targeted helper T cells. This mutation has been identified in the past, but its very presence has been puzzling. Why would this mutation be so much higher in Scandanavian areas yet so much lower outside of the Mediterranean?

Remember, too, that HIV was formally diagnosed in 1981 — far too recent for a complex mutation to selectively spread through an area based on this virus alone.

Duncan and Scott suggest that this mutation actually formed out of response to severe illnesses of the past — including, chiefly, smallpox. “The plagues were confined to Europe, persisted for more than 300 years and had a 100% case mortality,” Duncan explains.

In 2004, the authors investigated the nature of and mechanisms by which the historic plagues of Europe wrought such considerable destruction. The various epidemics of years past — most a variant of viral, hemorrhagic (and always lethal) fever — used CCR5, the non-mutated counterpart, as a method of infection. Given the lethality of these plagues (along with sophisticated computer modeling), it makes sense that this mutation grew from 1 in 20,000 people (historically) to closer to 1 in 10 today.

It’s less clear whether this possible viral history — or the nature of the genetic mutation itself — will lend itself particularly well to future preventative medications, but in the case of lethal viral infections, knowing is half the battle.

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University Of Liverpool (2005, April 3). Biologists Discover Why 10 Percent Of Europeans Are Safe From HIV Infection. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 24, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.htm

Global HIV Prevalence map (2001). World Health Organization. Retrieved May 24, 2011, from http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/app/searchResults.aspx

HIV virus spreading from infected CD4 cell (cover image). Retrieved May 24, 2011, from http://hiv.boehringer-ingelheim.com/com/HIV/Information_material/Images3.jsp

Ryan Shelby
Ph.D in Cognitive Science (UCSC)
B.S. In Cognitive Science (UCSD)

Ryan designs UIs and herds cats at FileMaker, Inc. He has studied epistemic priming, distributed cognition, and statistical modeling. His dissertation spent 5 weeks at the top of the New York Times’ bestsellers chart. He occasionally teaches classes in statistics, perception, and exaggeration.

Despite its ubiquity, we’re still learning new details about this behavior that shed light upon the mechanisms that demand shut eye, and the mechanisms that suffer when we don’t get enough of it. Longitudinal research in Sleep suggests that large enough changes from a baseline amount of sleep are commensurate to cognitive decline later on in life (Ferrie, J, et al., 2011).  Specifically, when you routinely get fewer than 6 or greater than 8 hours of sleep each night, you lose your cognitive edge a bit faster.

Insomnia can lead to difficulty sleeping

Cognitive ability was assessed using a battery of standardized tests, measuring memory, reasoning, vocabulary, phonemic fluency, semantic fluency, and global cognitive status. The same men and women interviewed and tested in the late 90’s came back roughly five years later to revisit these word problems, puzzles, and other assorted paper-based quests. 5,431 participants in total provided data for the reported analysis.  That’s an impressive number of data points, matched in significance only by the sheer challenge that corralling those individuals over a five year period must be.

Now, it should come as no surprise that people naturally differ in their performance on the standardized tests used in this study. Ferrie et al. realized this too, yet still saw a significant relationship between less-than-ideal sleep cycles and reduced performance. In their participant pool of mostly white-collar workers, job title, salary, and educational history didn’t explain much of the story. Surely there are other confounding qualities that could explain why someone performed better or worse across the two testing periods, but for the time being, targeting sleeping habits seems compelling.  Sleep habits are, after all, a pretty universal aspect of everyone’s lives.

It’s important to remember that whatever decline in cognitive performance described by this study is closely associated with natural “cognitive softening” at a later age, hence the authors’ conclusion that abnormal sleeping patterns accelerate cognitive aging. Whether or not said decline would be appreciable during one’s day to day activities is another question altogether.

Regardless of how old you are, you’ve probably found yourself at odds with the time you have set aside for sleep, and the other time that you wish you could add for the same purpose. Luckily, there are a lot of simple behavioral tricks you can try before resorting to medicine (and at that point, the implications of this article might not apply anyway).

Quite possibly the most obvious strategy to try fist is to force yourself to go to bed, and to get up, during the hours that guarantee you between 6 and 8 hours of sleep (ladies, shoot for 7 — the reduction in cognitive performance seems to affect the fairer sex sooner when this target number is missed, for reasons not explained here). After a couple of weeks, this becomes habit.

Of course, that can be easier said than done, especially for teenagers, since biological changes coax the body into preferring sleeping and waking later. It’s not uncommon for this condition to follow one into adulthood — it’s called delayed sleep-phase syndrome. Being a night owl even encourages this, obviously.

Reasonable counter-measures involve ceasing caffeine intake around noon (it has a half-life of nearly 6 hours, leaving it in your body well into the evening hours if consumed in the afternoon), dimming lights a couple of hours before bedtime (thereby fostering a “farm environment” that speaks to the melatonin system in your body), and purposefully tiring yourself when you’re ready for shut-eye. Reading in bed seems to work wonders for many.

And if you find yourself a victim of “monkey brain” (see, scientists have a sense of humor, too!) whereby sleep won’t come because you’re thinking too much about it, get up and do something tiring, then return and try nodding off again.

The battle for enough (but not too much) sleep isn’t one that’s easily won thanks to the waking demands that receive frequently-higher prioritization. That’s okay, though — as we continue to unlock more of the universal mystery that is sleep, we arm ourselves by learning when enough is truly enough, and by knowing the sacrifices that skimping may entail.

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Ferrie JE; Shipley MJ; Akbaraly TN; Marmot MG; Kivimäki M; Singh-Manoux A. Change in sleep duration and cognitive function: findings from the Whitehall II study. Sleep, 2011; 34 (5): 565-573.

Verma, N; Pinola, M. End your insomnia, snoring, and other sleep problems with these expert tips. Lifehacker. Retrieved May 6th, 2011, from http://lifehacker.com/5798884/end-your-insomnia-snoring-and-other-common-sleep-problems-with-these-expert-tips

Image retrieved from http://www.drarmentano.com/images/sleep.jpg