Read some of the junk that passes for tobacco control talking points, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that not using nicotine slashes a person's IQ by at least 10 points. However, there are some well-known public figures who suggest that using nicotine can make you smarter by the same degree. What is the truth, and where did these claims come from?
Back in 2024, when media outlets were falling over themselves to claim that nicotine use was part of the right wing or white supremacy or something, some of them reported on a remarkable Peter Thiel claim.
Stemming from a profile in the Atlantic, titled Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy, many marvelled at the following statement: 
Thiel is a Silicon Valley figure. As such, he naturally has a regimen of various substances he uses to keep his edge. Per the Atlantic, he states that he’s thinking of adding nicotine pouches to his stack, because he believes it could add 10 IQ points.
Now, I’m not here to get into Thiel as a person. I don’t really know that much about him, but I admit I am a bit weirded out by his promotion of state surveillance technology and his excessive obsession with the Antichrist and transhumanism.
What I’m interested in is this claim about nicotine's ability to impact IQ.
Five papers on nicotine and intelligence
Thiel never cited a paper to support his claim. However, I’ve taken a look at five papers that might help us dig into the truth of his claim.
1) Meta-analysis of the acute effects of nicotine and smoking on human performance.” Psychopharmacology (Heishman, S. J., et al., 2010)
This paper does not talk about or measure IQ. However, it does explore how nicotine use affects short‑term changes in specific cognitive domains.
The paper is a meta-analysis of over 40 studies, and it suggests that nicotine gives small but significant short-term improvements in areas such as:
- Fine motor precision
- Attention
- Faster attention shifting
- Improved short-term memory
- Speeds up working-memory processing.
Study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3151730/
2) Cognitive Effects of Nicotine: Recent Progress (Mintzer, M. Z., & Griffiths, R. R, 2018)
Again, IQ is not being measured here. However, it looks at similar markers of cognitive performance as the paper above.
It finds that:
- Nicotine can briefly improve some aspects of attention and working memory
- It can also modestly enhance episodic memory and fine motor control in both animals and humans.
- The paper also notes that these effects may be especially useful for people with existing cognitive problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29110618
3) Smoking and Raven IQ (Stough, 1994)
OK, finally, a paper that looks directly at IQ, namely via Raven's Progressive Matrices, a popular nonverbal IQ test that measures fluid intelligence, abstract reasoning, and pattern recognition.
The authors hypothesised that nicotine improves performance on “elementary information‑processing correlates of IQ” and then tested this using the Raven APM. In their test, the smoking group scored significantly higher than the no-smoking participants, with a roughly 6 IQ points of difference.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/smoking-and-raven-iq
4)The effects of nicotine on cognition are dependent on baseline performance. (Vossel, 2014)
Again, this one doesn’t specifically look at IQ. Instead, it examines how acute nicotine affects specific cognitive tasks. However, the interesting part of the paper is how much these changes depend on each individual's baseline measurements for these tasks, such as attention, working memory, visual memory, processing speed, psychomotor function, and emotion recognition.
What they found was that people who performed worse at baseline sometimes improved, while those who performed best at baseline tended to get worse, especially in memory domains, which is pretty fascinating.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924977X14000960
5)Nicotine and Cognition in Cognitively Normal Older Adults (Hazeki, 2021)
Another study that doesn’t directly look at nicotine through an IQ-raising lens. Instead, it tests whether the substance can improve things like memory in older populations.
While there is a lot of research that looks at the use of nicotine in patients with Alzheimer's and related conditions, this paper is squarely focused on how nicotine can counter the effects of aging in demented adults. The most significant finding here was that small amounts of nicotine could boost short-term memory, particularly in subjects with lower baseline performance.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8131527
Conclusion
In a competitive world where everyone is looking for “hacks” or shortcuts, it’s natural that people will be interested in the potential that nicotine holds to increase intelligence. However, the research isn’t there right now to support claims of IQ boosts of 10 points or more. In fact, for a variety of reasons, nicotine’s effects on IQ or general intelligence seem a bit understudied.
What these papers do suggest is that the substance does result in short-term wins across different cognitive tasks. However, there are some caveats that seem to emerge. Firstly, the impact is greater on people with lower baselines to begin with. Secondly, some studies suggest that the effects reduce with both repeated and heavy use.
