These three drugs may boost your thinking skills, but may cost you time-wise

For the cognitively ambitious among us, there are always new debates to win, tests to ace, and feats of intellect to accomplish. And just as for the athletically gifted, the lure of performance-enhancing drugs is hard to resist. The question is, can drugs boost intellectual performance? New research shows that for tournament-level chess players, they can. In a series of experiments, researchers found that caffeine, the stimulant Ritalin and the stay-awake drug modafinil ever-so-slightly improved players' chances of winning a game against a computer program set to their skill level.