We all know about sports doping. Well, welcome to the next frontier; brain doping. People in a range of fields are reaching for a variety of prescription pills to enhance what counts most in this modern life.

Despite its side effects, classical musicians, academics, corporate executives, and even professional poker players have embraced these drugs to clarify their minds, improve concentration or control their emotions.

“There isn’t any question about it – they made me a much better player,” said Paul Phillips, 35, who credited the narcolepsy pill Provigil and the attention deficit drug Adderall with helping him earn more than $2.3 million as a poker player.

The drugs improved his concentration during high-stakes tournaments, he said, allowing him to better track all the action at his table.

“Poker is the sort of game that a lot of people can play well sporadically, but tournaments are mostly won by people who can play close to their best at all times,” Phillips said. “It requires significant mental effort to play in top form fro 12 hours a day, five days in a row.”

However because these drugs are so new their physiological effects on the brain are well understood the drugs haven’t been tested extensively on healthy people. People who take the drugs say that they aren’t giving them an unfair advantage, but merely allow them to make the most of their hard earned skills.

In an article published last week in the journal Nature, Morein-Zamir and Barbara J. Sahakian, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge say that clear guidelines are needed to decide what is fair. It may be reasonable to ban the drugs in competitive situations, such as taking the SAT. However in other cases, they wrote, people such as airport screeners, air-traffic controllers or combat soldiers might be encouraged to take them.