David Adam
David Adam is a United Kingdom science journalist with a doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Leeds, which settles the subject of the doctorate his own book leaves unstated. He was a specialist correspondent at the Guardian and later an editor at Nature, and now writes on neuroscience for The Transmitter. He is the author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop and of The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence, published by Picador in 2018, which is the book this site reads him through.
Who they are
He should be given his due first, because a page about him could easily become a list of the claims this site has barred, and the record says something else. About seven in ten of his references are peer-reviewed, which is high for the genre. He engages the replication crisis by name, which almost nothing on this shelf does. He reports the counter-evidence to his own argument in the body text where a reader actually meets it, rather than exiling it to a footnote. And he concludes, in print, that his own self-experiment was not scientific and generated no reliable data. That is the single most honest thing any author in this collection does, and it is the defining fact about him for our purposes.
Two further things he gets right that the genre normally does not. He makes no enhancement claim for methylphenidate in healthy people, which is the correct position on the evidence and is recorded here as a credit rather than as an omission. And he is accurate that the general factor in intelligence testing is not measured directly and cannot be.
Where the candour fails, it fails in a specific and interesting place: the apparatus thins out exactly where it is most needed. The section on mindset runs three pages with no citations at all and never names the originating researcher. The clearest overreach in the book is a chapter-closing line at page 26 about dipping into a ninety per cent unused brain potential, a myth the same book has already debunked twice, attached to a result the book itself later demolishes. It reads as a chapter hook. It is still wrong on the page, and this site bars it.
Two external checks belong here. Matthew Buchan reviewed the book favourably in Frontiers in Psychology in October 2018, calling it a rigorous and entertaining jaunt through cosmetic neuroscience. That review does not audit the book's citations and does not test any of its claims, so it corroborates the tone and the framing rather than the evidence, and a favourable peer-reviewed review is easy to over-read. His first book, The Man Who Couldn't Stop, won the Medical Journalists' Association's Tony Thistlethwaite Award, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books and received the International OCD Foundation's Illumination Award.
One standing constraint governs anything written from him. The Genius Within covers prescription drugs taken by healthy people and brain stimulation devices, including home-built ones. No dose, no protocol, no device setting, no source of supply and no construction detail enters this site from it, even where the book supplies them.
Key papers
Adam, D. (2018), The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence, Picador. Read in full here, with external verification and a forty-seven-claim audit. The book this page is written from.
Adam, D., The Man Who Couldn't Stop. Winner of the Medical Journalists' Association's Tony Thistlethwaite Award, shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, and recipient of the International OCD Foundation's Illumination Award. Not read here.
Buchan, M. J. (2018), review of The Genius Within, Frontiers in Psychology, 9:1930, 9 October. Favourable, and does not audit the book's citations or test its claims.
Key ideas
He declares his own experiment worthless as evidence, in print. That is the credit this site puts first.
Citation rate is high for the genre, at roughly seven in ten peer-reviewed, and he engages the replication crisis by name.
Counter-evidence sits in the body text. Where the argument runs against him he says so where the reader is, not in a note.
The apparatus thins where it is most needed. Three uncited pages on mindset, with the originating researcher unnamed.
The ninety per cent unused brain line at page 26 is barred here. The book debunks the same myth twice before repeating it as a chapter hook.
A favourable peer-reviewed review corroborates framing, not evidence. Buchan reviewed the book, not its citations.
Nothing operational travels from this book. No dose, protocol, device setting, supply route or construction detail, whatever the book prints.
Sources
- Adam, D. (2018), The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence, Picador.
- Buchan, M. J. (2018), review of The Genius Within, Frontiers in Psychology, 9:1930, 9 October.
- Vault note: [[David Adam]], which holds the forty-seven-claim audit, the barred claims and the standing constraint on operational detail.