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from the medication-must-be-the-answer dept.
Humans in 2015 have a small arsenal of tools available to at least temporarily upgrade our brains via the increasingly popular paradigm of "cognitive enhancement."
This is a different boost than that offered by sketchy as-seen-on-NPR brain training schemes, offering literal, physiological neuro-manipulations via either chemistry or electricity. It's no secret that drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are widely sought after among healthy populations looking for an extra push, while electronic stimulant headsets are seeing a somewhat quieter or at least less fretted-about rise. Do they really work? We mostly don't know, warns cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah in this week's issue of Science.
Original paper available here, or you can just read the vice.motherboard.com article.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:23AM
I don't think there will be a productive discussion on this topic.
Naysayers will say nay, and the people that use any of this will see those naysayers and will be unlikely to draw attention to themselves due to the negative stigma about being chemically enhanced. I think there is a sort of unfairness that people claim--sort of like the soylent drink product. It sometimes boils down to a I like to eat steak so you have to as well sort of thing--not because they have a valuable contribution, but because as a nay sayer they will say nay. Soylent is cheating because I like meat and god gave us canines to eat McDarwins as part of a healthy balanced diet--or some logical fallacy like that to defend the belief system.
That said, I know people that are on focus enhancing drugs -- people that do not need the drugs -- and they are better at everything they do because they can literally put down the pipe and get something done. I cannot deny the results they provide, but I actually like to work hard so I am more likely to have down time. I am not so sure I would want to use that down time to take a drug to work harder during it. Yet I know people that do this in the pursuit of money.
If anything, a drug that imparts a sense of passion and motivation would be a productive boon to society, but everything can be abused. (I do not mean blissing out or sex enhancement.)
There are people that have motivation to embark upon whatever it is they feel needs doing after giving it some serious thought (or on a lark), and those same folks are capable of seeing it through to the end--and maybe learning something new along the way...Should someone find a way to bottle that, it could be a wonder drug. If if it was safe and effective, call me a cheater.
But then, the naysayer that I am, I'll complain my competition took it during their downtime and it's not fair because I didn't take it because I wanted to relax and now they got ahead because they were willing to work and cheated by taking a pill. I'll swig soylent and try to catch up and not realize that the nootropics I took previously didn't give me any wisdom, but they did give me something to think about.
It's easy to fall into these logical fallacies sometimes...
But to other people's points -- there is no time like the present to be young, good looking, intelligent, and energetic enough to take advantage of all three. Not all of us are so blessed, so I see it as a benefit to society when something is offered to remedy some of these problems on a more than just superficial level.