Human electrophysiology and smoking

Tobacco company strategies to identify and promote the benefits of nicotine

“…Donald deBethizy, Director of Product Evaluation and Scientific Media Liaison for RJR, said that R&D invested in this work with the expectation that they ‘should be able to demonstrate that people can perform these complex but repetitive tasks better while smoking’ 44. RJR and BGSM collaborators published at least six research papers49–54 and a review of the effects of smoking on brain activity using EEG data, published in 1996 in Drug Development and Research 55. The authors concluded that ‘smoking appears to bring the brain to a global optimal state for a given situation in terms of factors such as affect and information processing.’55 RJR also funded a Stanford University study of airline pilot performance,56 published in 1998 in Psychopharmacology , which found that nicotine administration ‘improved scores on approach to landing, a task which appears to require sustained attention’ in non-smoking pilots 57.…”