Talk:Neuroenhancement

Student editing - Üsküdar University, December 2023-January 2024

Hello fellow Wikipediaes, I am Mustafa Bishara, I'm a molecular biology master degree student, and editing this page was given to me as an assignment for Recent Developments in Biotechnology (MLC501/1) I participate as a student editor. Moos beshara (talk) 16:54, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Dear Wikipedia colleagues, My name is Lina Qadan, and I am a Neuroscience Masters Student. I would like to edit the following article Neuroenhancement as an assignment for my one of my university courses: Recent Developments in Biotechnology (MLC501) I will participate as a student editor.

References

Dear Wikipedia colleagues, My name is Büşra GÜLER, and I am a Molecular Biology Masters Student. I would like to edit the following article Neuroenhancement as an assignment for my one of my university courses: Recent Developments in Biotechnology (MLC501)I will participate as a student editor.

References

WELCOME! Hi there. Welcome to Wikipedia in English! This is an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. Feel free to ignore the comment from another user below if you find it discouraging and offensive. Please visit the WikiProject Medicine talk page to get help and guidance from the many friendly editors of our project :) Happy editing!

Welcome to Wikipedia!

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--Dustfreeworld (talk) 17:36, 8 January 2024 (UTC) 02:09, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

COMMENT- students from the Üsküdar University in Turkey do not appear to have permission or supervision from the Wiki Education Foundation to be editing the English Wikipedia on this topic. Who is your instructor and where are the course outlines?

Comments made by students on this talk page indicate your knowledge of English grammar is poor. There is a Wikipedia in Turkish. Please edit there, not here. Zefr (talk) 16:48, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Student editing, Dec 2023

Students of Üsküdar University, Turkey, are adding primary research, WP:PRIMARY, to a medical topic without attention to the guide for medical sourcing, WP:MEDRS. There appears to be no instructor supervision of what content and sources are being added, and no announcement here on the talk page that this course is an approved part of Wiki Ed; notifying Ian (Wiki Ed) for review.

The additions are controversial and in most cases ineligible for the encyclopedia because the content and sources do not represent established clinical procedures for improving brain function. As the editors are students and not experts in the clinical field of neurology, topics should be introduced first for discussion and consensus among editors here on the talk page, WP:CON. Until then, primary research and conjecture about what procedures represent established facts and clinical practices of 'neuroenhancement' may be removed. Zefr (talk) 18:03, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 20 December 2023

I wanted to add additional references to the dietary components and supplements section. For polyphenols this includes:

For omega 3:

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), is not mentioned in the neurostimulation section, it should be mentioned as follows:

Although TMS is not researched as frequently as tDCS, due to cost and technical demand, recent research that suggests transcranial magnetic stimulation benefits individuals with cognitive decline. Studies exhibit delays in cognitive decline in AD patients Lqadan (talk) 22:56, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

 Not done - none of the sources offered meet WP:MEDRS and none of the supposed practices are used as standard clinical procedure. The main problem with all of the sources is that the underlying studies included were of low quality in design and results, as mentioned in some of the abstracts. A review or meta-analysis of low-quality research remains a low-quality source.

Sources 1 and 2 are supposed dietary factors, but there are no "magic bullets" for neuroenhancement by any food or component; the journals cited are notably poor quality. The article is highly misleading on this topic and needs major revision.

Sources 3-6 are research efforts far outside conventional clinical practice, and the journals cited are weak. It is a stretch to include these topics as 'enhancement' when the methods are experimental and the pathologies remain untreatable. Again, the article misinforms readers on these research initiatives, and an extensive overhaul is needed.

This topic falls within WP:MED which requires a high standard among Wikipedia articles. The article is not a good choice by novice student editors fulfilling a short-term course requirement. Zefr (talk) 04:33, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

References

Article is a mess of speculation and misinformation from primary research

'Neuroenhancement' is a new, non-standard term based only on preliminary research with few reviews published, leading to speculative enhancement methods, many of which are are not used in clinical practice. As written, the article is based almost entirely on primary research, with extensive over-interpretation, misleading content, and overciting.

Some 82% of the article was created by one editor during a 10 day blitz in March 2023 (see history). The article needs extensive pruning with remaining content based on WP:MEDRS sources. Zefr (talk) 05:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

There was some problematic content in the article but that wasn't what I added who you're referring to here. For things that concern pharmacological interventions I took care to only cite WP:MEDRS reviews. You seem to assume this entire article is about a medical subject but it clearly isn't but only contains sections that are. For instance the section on Education that you just removed isn't a medical subject. It's even debatable if this article is within scope of WikiProject Medicine at all since it's not about medicine but enhancement of healthy people (I'd say it is since some methods involve medical substances). Moreover, the chart about studies with neuroenhancement in abstract or title show it's not a new term but you just removed that too before making this false claim here.

It's fine that you work on a purist idealistic assumptions that for everything anyhow in scope of WikiProject Medicine there are or will be high-standards-meeting large-scale reviews, but you went overboard with deleting most of the article where such were either used (often citing multiple reviews you dismiss as "overciting") or it wasn't about a medical subject. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:10, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Any Wikipedia article involving the term neuro in the context of cognitive effects is a medical topic. The concept of neuroenhancement is rare and non-standard in most of the world's clinical terminology, except apparently in Germany and Switzerland which account for 90%+ of term use. Most of the reviews/authors remaining in the article - Antal, Repantis, Weiergräber, Daubner, Sattler and others - are German. I found no reputable, national clinical organization recognizing the term or recommending its methods as therapy; see WP:MEDASSESS, top of left pyramid. The term does not satisfy MEDRS sourcing, justifying removal of your edits and sources.

Responses:

1. You claim to have used MEDRS reviews, but there are fewer than 10 systematic reviews or meta-analyses published on neuroenhancement in the medical literature over the past decade. This translates to sourcing opinion articles, hypotheses, or primary research (represented in the graph of PubMed results you provided), which you used extensively in your March 2023 editing. I removed the content and sources as primary research, conjecture, and synthesis of concepts not generally accepted in neuroscience.

2. Your suggestion that neuroenhancement is for healthy people is purely hypothetical, anecdotal, and medically unsupportable, as no reputable clinical organization or MEDRS source endorses such a concept.

3. You claim neuroenhancement is a term used in education, but this is a disguised, isolated term not present in the disciplines, domains, and methods of established Wikipedia articles on educational science and affiliated topics. If your content had merit, it may be usable in education articles.

4. Nearly all of your March 2023 editing was verbose opinion, original research (WP:OR), and synthesis of weakly-related and offtopic concepts (WP:SYNTH), often citing sources more than 5 years old; see WP:MEDDATE. It seems likely your additions were excerpts of a university degree thesis or alternate publication where exaggerated discussion of peripheral topics is allowable. But such synthesis is not scientifically-accepted fact or encyclopedic content, WP:NOTJOURNAL #6-7. Perhaps, you could reveal the origin of the material you used. Zefr (talk) 20:03, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

• This doesn't seem to be the case; see for example Cognitive effects of bilingualism or Neurolaw which btw are subjects this article touched.
• That concept is not rare which the removed charts about the number of studies mentioning it in the abstract or title should have made clear. And I've been saying it's not a clinical subject but maybe that means you do agree on that now.
• This reads like you discriminate against uses in Germany and Switzerland. ENWP is a global project and not limited to subjects that are very large subjects in the U.S. only. However, this is a global large phenomenon, or if coffee consumption is included, a very large phenomenon.
• You can't remove most of the article largely indiscriminately and then argue based on what you subjectively left standing. And even if you could the country origin of those authors is nothing but irrelevant.
• Again, because it's not a clinical topic.
• You removed lots of WP:MEDRS reviews and also sections that are not related to medical therapies such as the one about Education or importance of healthy diet.
• Parts of it were about informing what research is investigating very similar to the Nanorobotics article for instance where no such overt removals take place just because it's only largely informing about ongoing research rather than heavily established proven medical applications. This is still valuable and encyclopedic.
• The article was a mess before I came to it and was like that for years. It prominently featured Memantine as if it was a big thing in neuroenhancement and even without any section hatnote, made the entire article exclusively about pharmacological and brain stimulation tech while leaving out other methods, had citicoline and Bacopa monnieri in the lead without even refs. I fixed all of these issues and closed gaps or unbalanced excluding focus on arbitrary things then suddenly you shrink this article to nearly nothing and to basically 'cognitive enhancement is Modafinil and Ritalin; that's all'.
• Neuroenhancement is giant phenomenon with millions of nootropics users (when excluding coffee consumption) – the Nootropics subsite on reddit for instance has almost 400k readers and it's similar for other indicators of popularity. Your actions mean people only have biased flawed marketing rather than neutral balanced comprehensive information on this subject.
• 1. They don't necessarily have neuroenhancement in the title but it's good that you at least admit that there are some even with that. I think there are more than 10 and more than that were used so you seem to be ignoring some. Neuroenhancement is kind of short for 'neurological enhancement' or 'cognitive enhancement' (alternative title and synonym for this article); and that just refers to 'enhancing' cognition or neurology in deliberate ways. Maybe what was needed to clarify is that 'enhancing' generally refers to extending or similar and not 'therapy'. When people consume coffee they don't do so to heal some disease or disorder. Nevertheless, I do see how neurological effects of coffee should have MEDRS-standards-meeting sources, which is one of the reasons I overhauled the article.
• 1. No, the chart showed both primary studies and reviews separately. Maybe what you describe fits to many of your edits but I think only few where you removed content I added. I usually used not just one MEDRS review but multiple reviews so maybe you removed parts where one of the multiple refs was a nonMEDRS one.
• 1. Regarding "concepts not generally accepted in neuroscience" those were in parts of the page that informed about which research is being done and still had MEDRS sources. An idea would be to split these off into a Research about neuroenhancement or Neuroscientific research about cognitive enhancement. There it would be even clearer that these / this is a subject of research albeit that was also clarified in the text of this article. An issue is that even when it comes to coffee consumption, neuroenhancement is a research subject that is widely practiced but not having established conclusions when it comes to effects. As a widely established practice it's important there is good-quality and comprehensive information on this subject here; it's not a clinical subject except when it e.g. comes to clinical neurostimulators and so on which isn't all of neuroenhancement but an arguably small part of it.
• 2. This part had lots of MEDRS sources. You would say coffee consumption is not for healthy people? Again 'enhancement' is a terminology quite different from 'therapy'. Maybe there could or should be some distinction between neuroenhancement for healthy and that for people with cognitive issues like Alzheimer's which is sometimes also referred to as neuroenhancement / is a part of cognitive enhancement.
• 3. "Neuroenhancement", "cognitive enhancement" or what these terms refer to. Here you are arguing just referring to the particular terminology used but not the conceptual topic. I've heard neurologists say there is undue focus on pharmacological methods in this context and your edits likewise led to a nonneutral incomplete nearly exclusive inclusion of pharmacological methods. Lots of sources however use this particular term rather than being about the same conceptual subject (or using only very similar terms). Maybe the section could be much shorter here.
• 4. I'd agree that newer reviews should be usually used in place of older ones when they are about the same subject but that policy is not saying the ref stops being a MEDRS ref after five years when no review even superseded it. And no, all of it was backed by good sources and if there were issues here and there I just said you went overboard, not that your edits didn't have any merit at all. Are you accusing me of plagiarizing or something like that? WP:AGF The content wasn't offtopic, I referenced sources throughout my additions and I didn't take it from anywhere but wrote it based on the sources that I cited.

Prototyperspective (talk) 12:59, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

From this long response above, it would be difficult for anyone to clearly see what you wish to add or subtract from the article; WP:TEXTWALL.

I recommend you take one section at a time and suggest changes supported by good sources. So, starting with 1. Potential agents, what do you propose? Zefr (talk) 03:55, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 January 2024

Only healthy participants are mentioned in this subsection. The effects of neuroenhancers on individuals with neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases need to be discussed. As well as early and advanced stages of mentioned diseases should be discussed. Efsun Doğan (talk) 10:10, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. --WikiLinuz (talk) 16:04, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Perception

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 January 2024 and 6 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Delshad7 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Anushkagk.

— Assignment last updated by Anushkagk (talk) 23:16, 8 May 2024 (UTC)