Over at Mind Hacks there is a link to an article about the fledgling – and potentially financially rewarding – field of "neurtechnology." Interestingly enough, the article starts with a reference to a conversation with a former research scientist for big tobacco. Seems that nicotine, that much aligned villain of addictions, is under new management is getting ready to audition for the role of hero, or savior of damaged memories, scattered attention spans, and nasty pains.
In addition to rushing both the development of drugs and implants to help cure the burgeoning crop of mental illnesses popping up across the world, scientists in this field are exploring the development of drugs used to enhance the mind in general.
A larger debate is percolating over what would happen if a pill could turn most people into brainiacs. "I don't believe in cognitive enhancement for people who are well," says memory expert and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, a professor at Columbia University. "These should be pharma products for sick people." N.I.H. neuroscientist Jordan Grafman agrees: "If you manipulate the brain, it can change who we are."
Others say enhancers can't be stopped. "The record is clear. Wherever there have been new agents that enhance our functioning, mental or physical, even when they're risky like steroids, there are people who will use them," says U.C.L.A. bioethicist Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future and a strident advocate for enhancement. "Why shouldn't people use them if they don't hurt us?"
That question quoted in the article sounds more at home in the mouth of an economist than that of a bioethicist, one would think. Unless, in the last few years, the field of bioethics has itself become one of the economies of impairment versus improvement measured on a personal scale. Not such a strange notion, mind you, since that is exactly what I am trying to do with my practice of yoga: improve my body and mind. Would I choose to take a pill to bypass the work and time incurred by my practice in order to derive the benefits? Hmm, I don't think so.
Pumping up the mind on attention enhancing drugs is in direct opposition to what I have been trying to explore in my series of comments on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which advocate the settling of the mind in order to come to both know and understand how the mind works. Of course, the aim of both this research and yoga is to know the mind. Science has made huge strides in identifying areas of the brain involved in different mental activities. And yet, it has nothing to say about the experience of consciousness that wraps that mental activity. There is something in the experience of the work and time I put into my yoga practice that I am not sure nicotinic drugs can deliver to my neurotransmitters. At least not yet….
