Purpose Prescription stimulant use as “cognitive enhancers” has been described among undergraduate college students. However, the use of prescription stimulants among future health care professionals is not well characterized. This study was designed to determine the prevalence of prescription stimulant misuse among students at an academic health sciences center. -/- Method Electronic surveys were e-mailed to 621 medical, pharmacy, and respiratory therapy students at East Tennessee State University for four consecutive weeks in fall 2011. Completing the survey was voluntary and (...) anonymous. Surveys asked about reasons for, frequency of, and side effects of nonprescription misuse of prescription stimulants. Given the sensitive material, an opportunity to win one of ten $50 gift cards was used as an incentive. -/- Results Three hundred seventy-two (59.9%) students completed the survey from three disciplines (47.6% medical, 70.5% pharmacy, and 57.6% respiratory therapy). Overall, 11.3% of responders admitted to misusing prescription stimulants. There was more misuse by respiratory therapy students, although this was not statistically significant (10.9% medicine, 9.7% pharmacy, 26.3% respiratory therapy; P = .087). Reasons for prescription stimulant misuse included to enhance alertness/ energy (65.9%), to improve academic performance (56.7%), to experiment (18.2%), and to use recreationally/get high (4.5%). -/- Conclusions Prescription stimulant misuse was prevalent among participating students, but further research is needed to describe prevalence among future health care workers more generally. The implications and consequences of such misuse require further study across professions with emphasis on investigating issues of academic dishonesty (e.g., “cognitive enhancement”), educational quality, and patient safety or health care quality. (shrink)

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive (...) system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:242 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY asks questions like these: What is there in favor of calling green a primary color, and not a blend of blue and yellow? (1, 6) or, Why can something be transparent green but not transparent white? (1, 19). The effect of such questions is to force us to realize that our concept of color is more complex than we might have realized, or would want (...) it to be if we are committed to epistemologicaI theories in which color experience counts as basic. Other questions make us aware that the simple contrast of conceptual and empirical turns out to be hopelessly inadequate, and that this immensely complicates, if it does not vitiate, the task of drawing a comprehensive map of knowledge. We understand, in a way, what Wittgenstein is doing, but come to think we do not, since the effect of reading these remarks is to unsettle us about beliefs we had thought we could safely assume. The difficulties of Wittgenstein's questions pass over into the Companion, as was the case with Max Black's Companion to the "Tractatus" as well. Both works fortify standard ventures at interpretation, and both frustrate by leaving untouched one's worst perplexities. But perhaps one sweeping thought can be ventured. Wittgenstein once remarked that the present age is a time for popular science, and therefore not a time for philosophy. 6 Reading Wittgenstein, or his Companion, restores vitality to ways of thought and speech more primitive, and more basic, than science. Surely the typical object of his therapy is the muddle we get into by borrowing the language and method of science to describe and explain the relation of the perceiver to the world, or the agent to influences on his conduct. Moreover, the language of thought, act, and agency is presupposed in a description of how scientists can and do proceed. The temptations of a religious picture of the world for this point of view are strong--and reflected in the positive interest Wittgenstein evinced for religious thinkers. For religion expresses the limits of science by means of imagery that is not alien to a description of the world in terms of things and processes. But to say this is to come to a halt before the apparatus of language games and deep grammar as one comes to exegetical dead ends before Plato's Forms or Spinoza's infinite attributes. They are the imperfect means of communicating essentially private visions. One final cavil: The reader is sometimes teased rather than appeased by numbered citations referring to unpublished manuscripts. To quote them in full would of course have made the Companion impossibly tong. But for many readers Hallett's citations wilt be, at best, promissory notes to be cashed only when it suits Wittgenstein's executors to publish this material. It is to be hoped that when that day arrives it will be possible to correlate the manuscripts with Hallett's citations. As the Remarks on Colour show, however, we cannot be too sanguine. Would it not be wiser to publish the manuscripts as they were written, rather than to select passages which in the editor's judgment are related by theme? Such a policy would better serve future students of Wittgenstein, who from now on will go to the texts Hallett in hand. ALFRED LOUCH Clarement Graduate School Martin Heidegger. The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger. Translated, with notes and commentary, by James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Pp. xi + 212. The possible significance of Martin Heidegger's works for theology and for religious faith has long been a question as intriguing as it is complex. Since the first appearance of Being and Time about life," which, Professor Anscombe promises, "will appear elsewhere." The translation, by Linda L. McAlister and Margaret Schuttle, is up to the expected standard of accuracy and lucidity. Normal Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein:A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 73. BOOK REVIEWS 243 in 1927 Catholic and Protestant theologians have sought to appropriate Heidegger for their own understandingof Christianity. With the publicationof his many later works over the last fifty years, the controversy over Heidegger's... (shrink)

There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities. These range from Schr¨odinger’s suggestion that quantum fluctuations produce mutations, to Hameroff and Penrose’s conjecture that quantum coherence in microtubules is linked to consciousness. I review some of these claims in this paper, and discuss the serious problem of decoherence. I advance some further (...) conjectures about quantum information processing in bio-systems. Some possible experiments are suggested. © 2004 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 3fS. received 28th August 1970, in final revised form 1st July 1971..