Here is the dream: you haven't slept, your brain has turned to mush, you are lost for words and you are just about to go in to the interview that could change your life. So, you pop a pill. In minutes you feel alert, in command of all your faculties and able to produce the right answers at the right time.

It could one day become a reality. A class of experimental drugs called ampakines could boost glutamate activity and flood the brain with the neurotransmitter that makes learning easy and memory a doddle. According to New Scientist today, Julia Boyle and colleagues at the University of Surrey tested an ampakine called CX717 on 16 healthy male volunteers aged between 18 and 45.

They were given the drug in doses of 100, 300 or 1,000 milligrams, and some were simply handed a sugar pill.

The volunteers started with a good night's sleep and then were tested for memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving. Then at 11pm they took their pills and were kept awake the whole night and tested again and again.

At 4am, they were told to go to bed in a dark room but stay awake, while researchers measured heart rate, brainwave activity and so on.

Even the smallest doses of the new drug - undergoing tests for the California com pany Cortex - improved the performance of the sleep-deprived volunteers. The more ampakine they took, the more their cognitive performance improved, and the longer their alertness lasted.

In the darkened room, the men who took the placebo dozed off within three minutes, but the ampakine users remained on full alert. And none of them suffered any of the jitters associated with caffeine or amphetamines.

The drug is under consideration as a possible treatment for narcolepsy, jet lag, attention deficit disorder, and Alzheimer's disease.

It is one of a whole generation of potential "smart pills" and memory boosters being explored in the US, Britain and Europe. The research is driven by the increasing incidence of Alzheimer's - a threat that grows as the population ages - and the aim is to produce drugs that will safely enhance short-term memory and stave off the worst effects of mental degeneration for as long as possible.

But a pill that helps an octogenarian remember where he put his keys could also help a student engineer remember a key algorithm during an examination.

"These are going to be like steroids for the brain, and they may have to be regulated like steroids in athletic competitions," warns Steven Rose, a neuroscientist and member of an Open University group working on the same challenge. "My own view is that it will be difficult to regulate them."

Others are less worried. "Stimulating your brain with a reminder on a BlackBerry doesn't seem that different to me from stimulating your brain with a drug," Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, told New Scientist.