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Johann Hari has a fascinating article on his use of Provigil, a drug that basically makes you smarter:
A few clicks on-line and I found I could order it from a foreign pharmacy, just £30 for a month’s supply. I called a friend who is a GP, and told her what I was thinking of. She’d heard of people using the drug, and went away and looked up the details. “I think it’s a stupid thing to do, because you shouldn’t ever take drugs you don’t need,” she said when she called back. “Do I think it’ll seriously harm you? No, I don’t. But you’d be much better off taking a long holiday than narcolepsy pills.” Then she warned me: “There is one known side-effect.” Oh, damn I thought. A downside. “It often causes people to lose weight.” Are you mad? You become cleverer and thinner? I whipped out my Visa card immediately.A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.It's another step towards "cosmetic neurology," or the day when we'll change our brain chemistry not to make ourselves better, but to make ourselves smarter. For now, Hari is deterred by lack of long term data -- that would deter me too -- and ethics. How, he asks, is this any different than steroids? Well, assuming we had the long term data, and could prove the safety conclusively, you could also ask how it's different than college, or preschool. It's something you pay for that makes you smarter and more cognitively efficient. If I felt sure that it would never harm me, I'd probably pop them like candy. Enough people doing that, of course, and you create a collective action problem in which everyone needs to use them to keep up. It could be a problem. Or, in the future, it could just be the norm.(via Kevin)
