Your Brain on Steroids?

by David Safier

Are brain enhancement drugs the rough equivalent of steroids?

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about the new batch of drugs that can increase your ability to concentrate and allow you to continue working for long periods of time without sleep.

I agree with those who say performance enhancing steroids should be banned from sports. But when it comes to brain enhancing drugs in academia and elsewhere, I'm not so sure.

This is an open discussion. Brain enhancement drugs: a good thing or a bad thing?

Comments

[Michael Bryan]

From a logical standpoint, yes, they are equivalent. But as people don't intuitively understand what goes on in people's heads when they are doing intellectual feats, as they do with physical feats, their concern seems less.

It probably won't be until you see performance-enhancing mind drugs in competition that people will be prompted to control their use out of a sense of fair-play. Maybe chess tournaments or academic decathlons will have to have their doping scandals before Congress will have grandstanding hearings on the matter :)

[JohnRose]

Brain-enhancement drugs/implants are awesome and are our future. It would make zero sense to restrict them in academia. Even if there are health risks, as long as the drugs are clearly labeled and its users are clearly warned about the possible side-effects, people should be free to do what they want. If we were to restrict possibly-dangerous brain-enhancing drugs the way we ban illegal drugs these days, can you imagine how detrimental that would be to science?

Say they came out with a drug that increases scientific output by 100%, but is addictive and over the course of 10-15 years, damages your liver beyond repair. Some scientists might favor banning the drug, because getting science grants is a competitive arena, and they don't want to have to compete against their enhanced colleagues. So they ban it, and while the rest of the world vastly out-powers us technologically, you have USA scientists going underground to conduct their research, afraid to share their results without being branded "enhanced". In the meantime, we'd be losing out on all the potential scientific advances. In the end, it should be up to scientists whether or not they're going to try to get an edge with drugs or not.

[Michael Bryan]

JohnRose, it sounds like you are writing dystopian science fiction there, not public policy. But let me ask you this, does you liberality on substance abuse also extend to currently illegal recreational drugs, or does a drug have to have a socially redeeming purpose for you to give it a pass?

[JohnRose]

I think 99% of currently illegal drugs should be legalized and regulated like alcohol and tobacco.

[JohnRose]

And what's so dystopic about brain drugs and implants? Of course I don't expect that these types of changes will come anytime in the next 5-10 years, but the brain is not an unconquerable frontier. We are already implanting electronic devices into the brain to aid such conditions as Parkinson's disease, blindness, hearing loss... It will only be a matter of time before technology can help our brains in more general ways, like enhancing activity in certain parts of the brain that we find more useful for the task at hand or suppressing activity in less-useful parts of the brain.

[David Safier]

I tend to agree with JohnRose on this, though there are conditions. While athletic performance enhancing drugs are basically to increase an ability that is competitive and not "helpful" to society (my life is not improved because someone can run faster or throw farther), enhancing our brain power could lead to genuine advancements in knowledge and the arts.

I don't go along with life- or health-threatening brain enhancera. But if some kind of a drug can help focus the mind, help the brain make connections by energizing the connections between its various parts, that sounds like a good thing.

We already use brain modifiers, from coffee and alcohol to hallucinogens. All of these lead to different thought pathways. It's inevitable we'll create new brain stimulants. We should look at them on a case-by-case basis, but not reject them because they give someone an unfair competitive advantage.