Margaret Talbot’s long feature story in the current New Yorker, regarding the off-label use of prescription drugs as cognitive enhancers:
Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.
The article is a good read covering a fascinating subject, and I’m only going to add two pieces of supplemental reading. If, like me, you found Talbot’s article overly anecdotal and painfully short on the science, you need to read Botox for the brain: enhancement of cognition, mood, and pro-social behavior and blunting of unwanted memories appearing in Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews 32 (2008) 760-776. Due to the epic pain in the ass that is closed-access academia, you or your academic institution need to pay a boatload of money to Elsevier to read the paper, so I’m sticking it right here (PDF) until I’m asked to take it down.
And if the specific phrase Talbot uses at one point in the article — “mind hacking” — made you pause and reflect on just how fascinating a concept that is, my second link for you is a story. Cory Doctorow explores mind/body hacks in 0wnz0red, and it’s convincingly one of my all-time favorite pieces of short science fiction.
