If you could take a pill to run faster or jump higher, would you? How about a drug to keep you sharp when you're up all night? Or a treatment to make you feel happier or deal with a bad memory? Of course, we have all that now, but steroids. blood doping, amphetamines, cocaine, whiskey and anti-depressants are illegal, expensive or tightly controlled, mostly because of nasty side effects like fatal addiction.
University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee (at right) wrote a paper last year for Neurology titled Cosmetic neurology: The controversy over enhancing movement, mentation, and mood. [PDF]
Chatterjee describes how medicines created to cure neurological disease might someday be applied to neurological enhancements. "Are better brains better?" he asks, and discusses the possibilities for medically improving things like movement, memory, attention and mood. "Would you give your child a medication with minimal side effects half an hour before piano lessons if it meant that they learned to play more expertly? ... Would you take a medicine that selectively dampened memories that are deeply disturbing? Slightly disturbing?"
And if we could, does that mean we should? (Doesn't it really mean we will?) The Chatterjee paper contains an excellent discussion of inevitability, ethics, justice and the role of the physician as cognitive science, but it seems to me that "elective neurology" might be a more accurate term.
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