Perhaps the only attribute I'd avoid enhancing is my resistance to envy. Even though I sort of envy those who think and feel they are quite good enough without enhancements. Seriously, I tend to remain open-minded on the subject. I can name any number of qualities I'd like to take a pill to improve (focus, the ability to feel heights of joy, for quick examples). Of course, side effects currently outweigh the benefit of many such pills. I wish the medical and pharmaceutical professions were more scientific in their record-keeping, so that the rest of us could truly learn by trial-and-error (other people's) what works, what doesn't, and what works at too high a mental and physical cost.

Well I like myself with all my weaknesses. I wouldn't want to be anybody else.

Except the case that I have to take a drug that makes me superhuman to save the world and humanity. In that case I would probably take the drug.

I guess I feel a lot like HEM does. What's nice about coffee, which I've never taken to excess - 2 or 3 cups a day, when I need the boost, mostly in the AM - is that it's a kind of global enhancer. That is, since what it enhances is your alertness, it allows you to function better generally.

And it does this without any side effects that I've detected other than that it helps relieve a headache if I take it with aspirin.

PS: I like your math questions very much. If they'd had more like those when I was in school, I could have done well in that subject...

Interesting "research" but i can't help shake the feeling that all the inferences made here are on the basis of one survey... i feel like there is a significant element of "desired response bias" among the respondents, ... in the way the traits from the survey stack up, with the sorts of questions being asked, it would seem to me respondents would tend to maneuvre to protect their self-concept, their notions of who they are... but perhaps that's just the shrewd marketing researcher in me. clearly the publicist in me sees this as big pharma propaganda coupled with big moral propaganda (these drugs are bad m'kay, but THESE DRUGS are good!)

Regardless, a far better methodology for investigating deep-seated feelings and emotions would have had more basis in observation and perhaps even experimentation. The conclusions arrived at here are entirely premature, and seem to me to be very possibly biased, both w.r.t. scientific methodology, as well as perhaps, the vested interests of the researchers.

The trade off is in the aftermath. A parable:
I spin poi. I'm actually rather good at it and I don't hit myself often. When I had some adderall as part of a "dear god get me through these projects" time, I was brilliant, I'd tapped into bit of myself that I didn't know were possible. I was accomplishing things I had put off for months, years.

Amazing.

Then I stopped as life slowed, and like Flowers for Algernon, I lost it all and then some. Even to the point where I couldn't spin poi. I kept hitting myself. My relapse- went as far as affecting my muscles, and ability to move in a cognitive way. My brain memory and my muscle memory failed.

This was utter misery.

And I am horribly terrified of the stuff, because while I know it is all brain chemistry, and balance eventually comes, if I were to take it for a long time, would I be dumbstruck for also a long time? Because I'd need equal amounts of prozac and whatever other cocktails to pull me out of that depression.

Completely agree with su, there is almost no scientific basis behind any of this.

Additionally, is there really a difference one can point out between caffeine and another stimulant (ie. adderall). They both make you awake, the silly argument of "natural vs. non-natural" aside, what is so ethically wrong about enhancing yourself via adderall when it is perfectly fine to do so with caffeine?