What Nicotine Does to Your Brain
20th November 2025
The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.
By some reckonings, nicotine is as addictive as cocaine. It has led legions to a slow death by cigarette. Increasingly, however, people consume nicotine on its own. Nicotine vapes and oral pouches have soared in popularity; the global vaping market is expected to grow to $47.5bn in 2028, up from $22.5bn in 2022. But is nicotine simply a compound on which people are hooked or does it offer some kind of benefit?
Nicotine is much less harmful than the tobacco that naturally contains it. It has never been found to cause cancer. Nor does it cause other smokers’ diseases such as emphysema. But it is, of course, strongly linked with why smokers smoke at all. Beyond avoiding nicotine-induced withdrawal symptoms, such as irritability and anxiety, many say they smoke to “stay focused”. This has led scientists to consider whether nicotine might directly influence people’s ability to think.
In 2010 researchers at America’s National Institutes of Health pooled the results of 41 trials on nicotine’s cognitive effects. Participants were either given a placebo or nicotine (though a few used tobacco, not pure nicotine). They found that a nicotine hit had “significant positive effects” on attention and memory.
This mental sharpening arises because nicotine is a stimulant. It prods neurons to release brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, including dopamine, glutamate, noradrenaline and serotonin. These promote alertness, learning, memory and motor control. Brain-scan studies also show that nicotine’s stimulating properties increase blood flow to parts of the brain involved in thinking, such as the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus.
In addition to improving short-term memory, nicotine also suppresses appetite, which is why so many models and actresses smoke.
My Brother the Socialist became a regular cigarette smoker in college, as many people do. Most, however, pick it up as adolescents, because ‘cool’. I’ve never met anyone who picked up the smoking habit after age 20.