Derek Lowe has a provocative post pondering the future role of drugs that enhance cognition. He speaks as someone who doesn't drink and has never used recreational drugs:
I’ve been meaning to write something about this story for a while, but one of the problems has been that I’m still quite divided about what I think about it. (Normally my opinions come to me more quickly, for better or worse). Some background: people who’ve known me personally for a while generally know that I’m personally very much opposed to chemically altering the way that I think or feel. I never drank in high school, for example, which I can tell you made me stick out a bit in late-1970s Arkansas. Nor did I in college or afterwards; I still don’t drink now. And that personal prohibition goes even more for other recreational drugs, as you’d imagine.My reason for that has long been that I enjoy my brain the way it is, and have seen no reason to mess up its function for fun. But the advent of cognition enhancing drugs is a scalpel to dissect that line of thought. What if the ingested chemicals add to some of the parts of my brain that I value the most? That “mess up its function” clause has been taken out and flipped upside down. And what if it’s for work, and not for recreation? Is that more allowable, because it’s somehow less frivolous? (All right then, what if I were to enjoy having a better memory, which I likely would?) That gets to a less creditable reason for my objection to alcohol and other such drugs – perhaps I’m not just objecting to them on practical grounds. Perhaps I’m objecting because I don’t want other people to have a good time, at least not like that.
I didn't drink for three years because it reacted badly with some other medication I was taking. Not drinking is, it turns out, a very good way to find out which of your friends and acquaintances are alcoholics. It's also an interesting window on yourself, pre- (and post) temperance. When other people get drunk, you sort of cringe for them--you imagine how you would feel if you were saying or doing those things right now, sober. Which is not the actual social space that inebriation occupies; we're more tolerant of various sorts of silliness in people using brain-altering drugs, and also, it's fairly likely that if you're drunk, everyone else around you is too drunk to much remember whatever you're saying. But it's psychologically very difficult to convince your empathy muscles of that.
Watching people perform fantastic memory stunts does not trigger the same reaction.
I'm much more tolerant than Derek of using various sorts of brain-altering drugs. think Thomas Szasz greatly overstates his case, but I think he has a valid core insight: we medicalize various mental states in order to give ourselves an excuse to treat them--and also in order to give society (and the state) control over how and to whom that treatment is administered. I think depression and ADD and so forth are fine categories insofar as they point towards which therapies might be most helpful for a given person. But if anti-depressants make you feel better, and you want to feel better, I don't see any reason that you shouldn't take them, even if you aren't depressed. Likewise, if you want to concentrate, or stay awake, or have a better memory. And if smoking pot makes you feel better than Prozac, I think you ought to be able to self-medicate that way.
Americans are generally deeply uncomfortable with the idea of giving people that kind of unfettered control over their mental state. In some way, altering our mental state seems to deeply violate the self--I think that's why so many people with depression insist so strenuously that the self on drugs is their "true" self, while the depressed self was some diseased aberration.
As I've written before, I don't think that there's any metaphysical state which can be defined as the "true" self, such that people shouldn't depart from it. We all have multiple potential selves within us, none of which is more "real" than any other. To me, the important question is: does the self I have now want to be different from what it is in some fundamental way? If so, you have a perfect right to seek other, more satisfying selves, whether through drugs, transcendental meditation, or voting for Barack Obama.
With a stunning lack of originality, what I worry about is the long term effect of these things. Mark Kleiman once said to me "Amphetamines don't actually give you more time--they just let you borrow it from the future at an extremely high rate of interest." The new class of cognitive enhancers seems to be less usurious, but what happens to the only brain you've got once you've been soaking it in chemicals for thirty or forty years? Paging Timothy Leary's ghost . . .
The new class of cognitive enhancers seems to be less usurious, but what happens to the only brain you've got once you've been soaking it in chemicals for thirty or forty years?
I don't know. I do know, though, that the government shouldn't be in the business of making the choice not to do so for its citizens. I don't believe the government has the right to tell people what is for their own good.
Oh, we're totally agreed on that point. I've now moved onto whether it's wise to actually follow through. Next: if it becomes possible, should you download your consciousness into a robot?
Megan, you would benefit astronomically from a revelatory acid experience if you were to ever get down like that. Acid opens up the brain in such a fashion that you can comb through and discard any thin, sad, old, worn-out principles that have endured too long. When it's all over, there is a definitive sense of freedom from the pressure to trim and distort the narrative of your experience to fit a bunch of principles that you're maintaining out of duty, or fear of the unknown in their absence, and so on. It just happens naturally as you discuss things with people during that mystically euphoric night. It's a great time.
The first thing to go would be that "I live in the best country in the entire world and I remind myself every day that I am just lucky to be here" thing that you do, I'll tell you that. Along with everything else that your daddy taught you that all good and virtuous people agree on. It might also dawn upon you that distinguishing yourself through contrarian defiance of progressivism and nationalistic ardor is having just the effect that it ought to have: impressing a few simpletons of the same mind, and making a sad clown out of you in anyone with any functional sense of the merit of one's position.
I'm curious if you extend that to suicide. What if the self you have now doesn't want to exist anymore? And not in the "replace with better self" sense but just in the "delete" sense?
If not, I wonder what the difference is? Is the principle that you are allowed to change the "self" in the vessel of the body so long as you don't destroy the body?
Megan,
I think Palmer answered your page.
Just to clarify, I wasn't saying Megan felt differently than I do regarding drug legalization, just pointing out what I think is the bottom line with the issue.
I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink, especially when they hang out with drinkers and don't drink. That is extremely rude and anti-social. I am surprised your friends hung out with you while you were a sober stick in the mud judging them for enjoying themselves and relaxing. Non-drinkers seem like they are hiding something or trying to get info on everyone, kind of like Obama
I forgot my italics. pudor. "Ardor," though? Bad edit. She burns not, she but reveres her sense of duty.
Daddyquatro,
That's not so. It's hard to explain, but there isn't really any need to page me, per se, since there is no place or moment in which I'm fully not present, or at least not fully present. See, it's hard.
Lo siento.
Funny, I see MM was able to pick up some language skills in the PR..
If long-term use of these proves safe, why shouldn't we offer them to everyone? We spend thousands of dollars per child to provide a fleeting IQ boost for disadvantaged preschoolers. A 2-3 point boost in adult IQ at $100 or so per citizen per year (assuming the meds will be off-patent by the time their long-term effects have been evaluated) would be an incredible investment given how much economic growth is driven by people in the higher IQ strata.
Thanks for a thoughtful post - I feel like some of the uncertainty around this issue is a lingering discomfort with mind / brain issues. We still have a sense that our mind or self is separate from the brain that houses it, while the evidence suggests that in fact the mind is what the brain does, nothing more.
So, changing your mental state via mental actions -- positive thinking, meditation, prayer, memory exercises, crossword puzzles, what have you -- seems perfectly acceptable, while causing the same kinds of changes through chemical actions seems a little suspicious. Or at least, that's one possibility.
I'm going to posit a heretical notion. Intelligence, while important, is not vital to the strength of a society. Hard work is. Not necessarily hard work as ditch digging, lifting 100 lbs over your head work, but hard work as plugging away at a task that doesn't yield results until some time in the distant future (also known as delayed gratification). So, while higher IQ points may help society, a bunch of lazy geniuses won't enrich us.
And if they were to create a drug that prompted this type of behavior, would we push it as much as this drug that makes us smarter?
Tres Equis wrote: I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink, especially when they hang out with drinkers and don't drink. That is extremely rude and anti-social. I am surprised your friends hung out with you while you were a sober stick in the mud judging them for enjoying themselves and relaxing. Non-drinkers seem like they are hiding something or trying to get info on everyone
If it's not fair for them to judge you for drinking, why are you judging them for abstaining? Or: If you've gotten that paranoid about what non-drinkers must be thinking of you, it's possible you may need to re-evaluate your own consumption quantities.
Megan,
I agree completely. I have a lot of experience with mental illness, the mentally ill, and the drugs used to treat these conditions.
Whenever I'm asked if I believe ADD is "real," or any other mental illness for that matter, I say that's the wrong way to look at the issue. We have various drugs, and, in the case of ADD, from the perspective of what we can do, we know that there's a large group of people who benefit substantially from taking regular doses of amphetamine or ritalin.
In college I took a course on psychopharmacology. One day I asked the whole class why, if it makes them happier, 95% of people shouldn't take Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant with relatively few side-effects (including positive sexual side-effects) that also, unlike SSRIs, has a fairly low risk of triggering a manic episode in someone who is bipolar.
Everyone disagreed, and most of their arguments were along the lines of the "true self" idiocy you described.
The other argument relied on the same premise but came from a different angle: that psychiatric meds exist to treat people with diseases, so giving them to the mentally healthy makes as little sense as giving excedrin to someone who doesn't have a headache. I'm sure that there's an implicit fear of losing one's "true self" in that argument, but it also points to one of the problems with viewing psychiatric drugs as medicine, rather than, say, vitamins.
And speaking of vitamins, YOU ARE MORE RIGHT ABOUT THIS THAN YOU KNOW. Most people treat psychoactive drugs as though they are uniquely able to alter the brain. The opposite is true. A person's diet and physical activity can impact the brain as much and in the same manner as many psychoactives (obviously not the heavy stuff like anti-psychotics).
Fish oil is the perfect example. Those Omega 3 pills are used as a first-line treatment for depression in Germany, and they've really caught on here too with a number of clinical trials indicating their effectiveness. This means that anyone who eats a lot of salmon is doing the equivalent of taking an anti-depressant.
I'm not familiar with any mental health blogs, but that said, this is the best post regarding psychoactives that I've yet to come across.