Dispatches

enhancement is the norm. Here’s what

that might look like, and how we can be­
gin thinking about the implications.

Personalized Smart Pills

1
In many ways, we’re already
living in a world of constant neuro­
enhancement. There’s methylphenidate
(a k a Ritalin), intended to treat ADHD
and narcolepsy and now used by test
takers and paper­writers the world over.
In controlled trials, the drug has been
shown to improve memory, concentra­
tion, and motivation in individuals who
have no cognitive impairment. There’s
modafnil, developed to treat narcolepsy
and other sleep disorders. In people who
have gotten a full night’s rest, it has been
shown to increase executive function,
memory, and attention—and in those
who have gone without much sleep, it
has helped stave of symptoms of sleep
deprivation. There’s also donepezil, de­
veloped to treat Alzheimer’s. Like other
anti­dementia drugs, it has been shown
in clinical trials to improve both verbal
Technology and procedural memory (the memory we

BRAIN HACKING
use to perform a complex set of actions,
like driving a car) in healthy individuals.
None of these, of course, is the
mythical “smart pill,” a supplement
The ways we’ll make ourselves smarter in the future we could take to instantly boost our IQ

T
BY MARIA KONNIKOVA by 10 points. Instead, each targets spe­
cifc components of intellectual output:
h e pe r f e c t i bi l i t y of t h e h u m a n m i n d is a theme that has cap­ memory, concentration, motivation.
tured our imagination for centuries—the notion that, with the right tools, the And sometimes those functions come at
right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions the expense of others. Increase concen­
of ourselves. We cling to myths like “the 10 percent brain”—which holds that tration with Ritalin, for instance, and
the vast majority of our thinking power remains untapped—in part because your creativity could sufer. But the day
we hope the minds of the future will be stronger than those of today. It’s as may come, says Guoping Feng, a neuro­
much a personal hope as a hope for civilization: If we’re already running at full scientist at MIT, when we understand
capacity, we’re stuck, but what if we’re using only a small fraction of our potential? neural mechanisms well enough to de­
Well, then the sky’s the limit. sign personalized pills that can bolster
But this dream has a dark side: The possibility of a dystopia where an individual’s your particular strengths and minimize
fate is determined wholly by his or her access to cognition­enhancing technology. your weaknesses. Several biotech com­
Where some ultra­elites are allowed to push the limits of human intelligence, while panies are looking to do just that.
the less fortunate lose any chance of upward mobility. Where some Big Brother–like
fgure could gain control of our minds and decide how well we function. Give Yourself a Jolt
2
What’s possible now, and what may one day be? In a series of conversations The idea of using electric cur­
with neuroscientists and futurists, I glimpsed a vision of a world where cognitive rents to change brain function is not

1800s: Craniometry—the
A Brief Chronicle practice of measuring skulls 1905: The Binet-Simon test,
a precursor to the modern
1946: Mensa, the
society for people with
to determine intelligence and
of Understanding other traits—is widespread. IQ test, is introduced. high IQs, is formed.
Intelligence
History 1800 1900 1925 1950

30 JUNE 2015 T H E AT L A N T IC I L L U S T R AT I O N BY Á LVA R O D O M Í N G U E Z

 new—the electroconvulsive therapies of
yore were based on the concept—but in
recent years we’ve gotten much better at
controlling where that current goes and
how much of it is administered. Today’s
electric stimulation is the fne watercolor
to electroshock therapy’s fnger painting.
The most common approach, trans­
cranial direct­current stimulation, or
tDCS, involves applying a small current
to the scalp in order to modulate brain
activity. It has gotten a lot of attention
lately, and with good reason: In several
recent studies, tDCS appears to improve
concentration, problem­solving ability,
and working memory (which enables
us to hold in our minds the information
we need to carry out a complicated task).
The efects can last anywhere from 30
minutes to two hours.
Jamie Tyler, an Arizona State Uni­
versity neuroscientist, co­founded a
company called Thync because he was
inspired by the potential benefits of
brain modulation. Thync has developed
a prototype device, tested on more than
3,000 people to date, that can either calm
us down or give us a boost of energy—
providing an avenue toward concentra­
NEURON: NICOLAS.ROUGIER/WIKIMEDIA; CT SCAN: JOSAM70/WIKIMEDIA
tion or creative association, respectively.
“It’s just another tool to be able to navi­
gate your daily life,” says Tyler—akin to
a cup of cofee during a late­night cram
session or a few minutes of meditation
before a big presentation. (Some kinks
remain, though: When I tested a beta
prototype in Thync’s Boston ofce, I re­
ceived a mild electric shock to the head
instead of the promised calming vibe. A
failure of a software update and not the
device itself, I was told.)
A Pacemaker for
3
Your Head
Another option is to install electrodes
deep inside your brain, to stimulate
areas that tDCS cannot reliably reach.
Deep­brain stimulation is already used
to treat Parkinson’s disease as well
as some severe cases of depression. A
1962: The MIT scientist
Joseph Altman discovers that
our brains generate new nerve
cells well into adulthood.
1975
surgeon inserts electrodes directly into
the brain—the location depends on the
intent—and connects them to a device
in the chest that resembles a pacemaker.
That device can then regulate the brain’s
electrical impulses and chemical levels
via the electrodes. Applications of deep­
brain stimulation may someday be more
enhancing than therapeutic: in 2013, a
team from UCLA showed that the pro­
cedure could buttress memory and im­
prove the ability to process and store
information, and this spring, a study
using rats determined that it could
potentially stave off memory loss and
dementia­like symptoms. In other words,
in addition to making us smarter, deep­
brain stimulation could also ensure that
we remain smart for longer.
Direct Connections
4
Electrodes aren’t the only things
we may someday start implanting in our
brains. Consider what you could do with
a chip in your head that linked directly
to the Internet: Within milliseconds,
you could retrieve just about any piece
of information. And with the collective
knowledge of the Web at your disposal,
you could quickly fll in your brain’s nor­
mal memory gaps—no one would ever
guess you slept through that econom­
ics seminar. That’s the (distant) future
envisioned by people like Anders Sand­
berg, a computational neuroscientist
and self­described transhumanist at
Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
Sandberg believes in the possibility of
the extended mind, a way of transcend­
ing our cognitive limits through brain
implants. And why stop at the Internet?
A future mind could potentially connect
directly to other future minds. Whether
such connections would make us
smarter or just overwhelm and confuse
us—we’ll have to wait and see.
Designer Brains
5
Down the road, the most contro­
versial approach to neuroenhancement
2015
1970s: CT scans, pet scans,
and later, fMRI technology
lead to new discoveries
about how the brain works.
2000
could be a way not of stimulating the
brain but of reengineering it. Until a few
years ago, such a possibility was purely
theoretical, the realm of philosophical
debates and ethical quandaries. Now,
however, researchers have developed
a genome­editing technology called
CRISPR (or, more technically, Cas9),
which scientists could use to change any
part of an embryo’s genome, one nucleo­
tide at a time. It was developed to fght
disease by correcting mutations before a
baby is born. But one can imagine a day
when we are able to identify genes associ­
ated with cognitive ability and manipu­
late them for higher output. Granted, that
day is a long way of. “There’s no single
gene for intelligence. We can’t just go in
and change one gene and become cog­
nitively enhanced,” Feng says. What we
can do now is gain a deeper knowledge
of the relationship between the genome
and brain function—and perhaps in a few
decades, we’ll be in a position to evaluate
whether such tinkering is a good idea.
When that day comes, health con­
cerns may overshadow the ethical
considerations around engineering
supersmart babies. The truth is that
we have no idea what the long­term
effects of any artificial enhancement
may be. Will our brains be able to with­
stand running at artifcially heightened
capacity? “There’s a discussion going
on that our brains have evolved over
millions of years and might already
be at optimal neurochemical equilib­
rium, and any attempt to change some­
thing there can only do harm and can’t
strongly enhance brain function,” Mar­
tin Dresler, a German neuroscientist
who studies cognitive enhancement,
told me. If that’s the case, ethics could
be the least of our worries.
Maria Konnikova is the author of
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sher­
lock Holmes and the forthcoming The
Confdence Game. She is a contributing
writer for The New Yorker online.
1984: The philosopher RT
BE
James R. Flynn observes AL
2065: Personalized
RT
BE
that IQ scores have been AL intelligence-boosting
steadily rising for decades. pills hit the market.
WILLIAM
WILLIAM
Predictions 2050
T H E AT L A N T IC JUNE 2015 31
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