“ 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.”
A Reporter at Large: Brain Gain: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Speaking of good journalism, this article is a prime example of that.
As for my own thoughts on the subject: as someone who depends exclusively on their brain for their livelihood, and as someone who is prone to distraction and multi-tasking to an extreme level, I think I would benefit from neuroenhancers. And while the health risks are a concern, I would expect that they would be at least more pleasant than the stomachaches I get from consistently pumping my system with enough caffeine to kill a small elephant on a near-daily basis.
Most teens/young adults go through a drug curiosity and/or experimentation phase, and I think it’s telling that during my own phase, I was never drawn to drugs that altered my mental state or made me lose contact with reality. I watched friends try acid or mushrooms and neither aroused the faintest desire in me. It wasn’t until college, when I was introduced to things like amphetamines, that suddenly I saw a use for drugs (not that I turned into a meth-head by any means): enhancing my mental powers, giving me a clearer, better, faster, stronger grip on reality rather than making me forget it. So if neuroenhancers are a possibly safer, less extreme version of this, I’m for it.
But it’s a moot point, as it will be years before Poland jumps on the white collar drug bandwagon - and perhaps that’s a good thing too.
