Daily Archives: April 28, 2017

Sceptics about the possibility of nootropics ("smart drugs") are victims of the so-called Panglossian paradigm of evolution. They believe that our cognitive architecture has been so fine-honed by natural selection that any tinkering with such a wonderfully all-adaptive suite of mechanisms is bound to do more harm than good. Certainly the notion that merely popping a pill could make you intellectually brighter sounds implausible - the sort of journalistic excess that sits more comfortably in the pages of Fortean Times than any scholarly journal of repute.

Yet as Dean, Morgenthaler and Fowkes' (hereafter "DMF") book attests, the debunkers are wrong. On the one hand, numerous agents with anticholinergic properties are essentially dumb drugs. Anticholinergics impair memory, alertness, focus, verbal facility and creative thought. Conversely, a variety of cholinergic drugs and nutrients, which form a large part of the smart chemist's arsenal, can subtly but significantly enhance cognitive performance on a whole range of tests. This holds true for victims of Alzheimer's Disease, who suffer in particular from a progressive and disproportionate loss of cholinergic neurons. Yet, potentially at least, cognitive enhancers can aid non-demented people too. Many members of the "normally" ageing population can benefit from an increased availability of acetylcholine, improved blood-flow to the brain, increased ATP production and enhanced oxygen and glucose uptake. Most recently, research with ampakines, modulators of neurotrophin-regulating AMPA-type glutamate receptors, suggests that designer nootropics will soon deliver sharper intellectual performance even to healthy young adults.

DMF provide updates from Smart Drugs (1) on piracetam, acetyl-l-carnitine, vasopressin, and several vitamin therapies. Smart Drugs II offers profiles of agents such as selegiline (l-deprenyl), melatonin, pregnenolone, DHEA and ondansetron (Zofran). There is also a provocative question-and-answer section; a discussion of product sources; and a guide to further reading.

So what's the catch? Unfortunately, there are many. Large, well-controlled, long-term trials of putative nootropics are scarce: the whole field of cognitive enhancement is rife with self-deception, snake-oil, hucksterism and (at best) publication bias. Another problem, to which not all authorities on nootropics give enough emphasis, is the complex interplay between cognition and mood. Thus great care should be taken before tampering with the noradrenaline/acetylcholine axis. Thought-frenzied hypercholinergic states, for instance, are characteristic of one "noradrenergic" sub-type of depression. A predominance of forebrain cholinergic activity, frequently triggered by chronic uncontrolled stress, can lead to a reduced sensitivity to reward, an inability to sustain effort, and behavioural suppression.

This mood-modulating effect does make some sort of cruel genetic sense. Extreme intensity of reflective thought may function as an evolutionarily adaptive response when things go wrong. When they're going right, as in optimal states of "flow experience", we don't need to bother. Hence boosting cholinergic function, alone and in the absence of further pharmacologic intervention, can subdue mood. Cholinergics can even induce depression in susceptible subjects. Likewise, beta-adrenergic antagonists (e.g. propranolol (Inderal)) can induce depression and fatigue. Conversely, "dumb-drug" anticholinergics may sometimes have mood-brightening - progressing to deliriant - effects. Indeed antimuscarinic agents acting in the nucleus accumbens may even induce a "mindless" euphoria.

Now it might seem axiomatic that helping everyone think more deeply is just what the doctor ordered. Yet our education system is already pervaded by an intellectual snobbery that exalts academic excellence over social cognition and emotional well-being. In the modern era, examination rituals bordering on institutionalised child-abuse take a heavy toll on young lives. Depression and anxiety-disorders among young teens are endemic - and still rising. It's worth recalling that research laboratories routinely subject non-human animals to a regimen of "chronic mild uncontrolled stress" to induce depression in their captive animal population; investigators then test putative new antidepressants on the depressed animals to see if their despair can be experimentally reversed by patentable drugs. The "chronic mild stressors" that we standardly inflict on adolescent humans can have no less harmful effects on the mental health of captive school-students; but in this case, no organised effort is made to reverse it. Instead its victims often go on to self-medicate with ethyl alcohol, tobacco and street drugs. So arguably at least, the deformed and emotionally pre-literate minds churned out by our schools stand in need of safe, high-octane mood-brighteners more urgently than cognitive tweakers. Memory-enhancers might be more worthwhile if we had more experiences worth remembering.

One possible solution to this dilemma involves taking a cholinergic agent such as piracetam (Nootropil) or aniracetam (Draganon, Ampamet) that also enhances dopamine function. In the late twentieth century, many researchers believed that the mesolimbic dopamine system acts as the final common pathway for pleasure in the brain. This hypothesis turned out to be simplistic at best. The mesolimbic dopamine system is most directly implicated in motivation and the capacity to anticipate future pleasures. The endogenous opioid system, and in particular activation of the mu opioid receptors, that mediates pure pleasure. Mesolimbic dopamine amplifies "incentive-motivation": "wanting" and "liking" may have different substrates, albeit intimately linked. Moreover mood-elevating memory-enhancers such as phosphodiesterase inhibitors (e.g. the selective PDE4 inhibitor rolipram) act on different neural pathways - speeding and strengthening memory-formation by prolonging the availability of CREB. In any event, several of the most popular smart drugs discussed by DMF do indeed act on both the cholinergic and dopaminergic systems. In addition, agents like aniracetam and its analogs increase hippocampal glutaminergic activity. Hippocampal function is critical to memory - and mood. Thus newly developed ampakines, agents promoting long-term potentiation of AMPA-type glutamate receptors, are powerful memory-enhancers and future nootropics.

Another approach to enhancing mood and intellect alike involves swapping or combining a choline agonist with a different, primarily dopaminergic drug. Here admittedly there are methodological problems. The improved test score performances reported on so-called smart dopaminergics may have other explanations. Not all studies adequately exclude the confounding variables of increased alertness, sharper sensory acuity, greater motor activity or improved motivation - as distinct from any "pure" nootropic action. Yet the selective dopamine reuptake blocker amineptine (Survector) is both a mood-brightener and a possible smart-drug. Likewise selegiline, popularly known as l-deprenyl, has potentially life-enhancing properties. Selegiline is a selective, irreversible MAO-b inhibitor with antioxidant, immune-system-boosting and anti-neurodegenerative effects. It retards the metabolism not just of dopamine but also of phenylethylamine, a trace amine also found in chocolate and released when we're in love. Selegiline also stimulates the release of superoxide dismutase (SOD); SOD is a key enzyme which helps to quench damaging free-radicals. Taken consistently in low doses, selegiline extends the life-expectancy of rats by some 20%; enhances drive, libido and endurance; and independently improves cognitive performance in Alzheimer's patients and in some healthy normals. It is used successfully to treat canine cognitive dysfunction syndrome (CDS) in dogs. In 2006, higher dose (i.e. less MAO-b selective) selegiline was licensed as the antidepressant EMSAM, a transdermal patch. Selegiline also protects the brain's dopamine cells from oxidative stress. The brain has only about 400,000 - 600,000 dopaminergic neurons in all. We lose perhaps 13% a decade in adult life. An eventual 70%-80% loss leads to the dopamine-deficiency disorder Parkinson's disease and frequently depression. Clearly anything that spares so precious a resource might prove a valuable tool for life-enrichment.

In 2005, a second selective MAO-b inhibitor, rasagiline (Azilect) gained an EC product license. Its introduction was followed a year later in the USA. Unlike selegiline, rasagiline doesn't have amphetamine trace metabolites - a distinct if modest therapeutic advantage.

Looking further ahead, the bifunctional cholinesterase inhibitor and MAO-b inhibitor ladostigil acts both as a cognitive enhancer and a mood brightener. Ladostigil has neuroprotective and potential antiaging properties too. Its product-license is several years away at best.

Consider, for instance, the plight of genetically engineered "smart mice" endowed with an extra copy of the NR2B subtype of NMDA receptor. It is now known that such brainy "Doogie" mice suffer from a chronically increased sensitivity to pain. Memory-enhancing drugs and potential gene-therapies targeting the same receptor subtype might cause equally disturbing side-effects in humans. Conversely, NMDA antagonists like the dissociative anaesthetic drug ketamine exert amnestic, antidepressant and analgesic effects in humans and non-humans alike.

Amplified memory can itself be a mixed blessing. Even among the drug-nave and chronically forgetful, all kinds of embarrassing, intrusive and traumatic memories may haunt our lives. Such memories sometimes persist for months, years or even decades afterwards. Unpleasant memories can sour the well-being even of people who don't suffer from clinical PTSD. The effects of using all-round memory enhancers might do something worse than merely fill our heads with clutter. Such agents could etch traumatic experiences more indelibly into our memories. Or worse, such all-round enhancers might promote the involuntary recall of our nastiest memories with truly nightmarish intensity. Ironically, a popular smart drug such as modafinil can be used experimentally to prevent long-term memory consolidation in animal models" - not quite the effect pill-popping students cramming for exams have in mind. Like most psychostimulants, modafinil may also have a subtle anti-empathetic effect.

By contrast, the design of chemical tools that empower us selectively to forget unpleasant memories may prove to be at least as life-enriching as agents that help us remember more effectively. Unlike the software of digital computers, human memories can't be specifically deleted to order. But this design-limitation may soon be overcome. The synthesis of enhanced versions of protease inhibitors such as anisomycin may enable us selectively to erase horrible memories. If such agents can be refined for our personal medicine cabinets, then we'll potentially be able to rid ourselves of nasty or unwanted memories at will - as distinct from drowning our sorrows with alcohol or indiscriminately dulling our wits with tranquillisers. In future, the twin availability of 1] technologies to amplify desirable memories, and 2] selective amnestics to extinguish undesirable memories, promises to improve our quality of life far more dramatically than use of today's lame smart drugs.

Such a utopian pharmaceutical toolkit is still some way off. Given our current primitive state of knowledge, it's hard to boost the function of one neurotransmitter signalling system or receptor sub-type without eliciting compensatory and often unwanted responses from others. Life's successful, dopamine-driven go-getters, for instance, whether naturally propelled or otherwise, may be highly productive individuals. Yet they are rarely warm, relaxed and socially empathetic. This is because, crudely, dopamine overdrive tends to impair "civilising serotonin" function. Likewise, testosterone functionally antagonises pro-social oxytocin in the CNS. Unfortunately, tests of putative smart drugs typically reflect an impoverished and culture-bound conception of intelligence. Indeed today's "high IQ" alpha males may strike posterity as more akin to idiot savants than imposing intellectual giants. IQ tests, and all conventional scholastic examinations, neglect creative and practical intelligence. IQ tests simply ignore social cognition. Social intelligence, and its cognate notion of "emotional IQ", isn't some second-rate substitute for people who can't do IQ tests. On the contrary, according to the Machiavellian ape hypothesis, the evolution of human intelligence has been driven by our superior "mind-reading" skills. Higher-order intentionality [e.g. "you believe that I hope that she thinks that I want...", etc] is central to the lives of advanced social beings. The unique development of human mind is an adaptation to social problem-solving and the selective advantages it brings. Yet pharmaceuticals that enhance our capacity for empathy, enrich our social skills, expand our "state-space" of experience, or deepen our introspective self-knowledge are not conventional candidates for smart drugs. For such faculties don't reflect our traditional [male] scientific value-judgements on what qualifies as "intelligence". Thus in academia, for instance, competitive dominance behaviour among "alpha" male human primates often masquerades as the pursuit of scholarship. Emotional literacy is certainly harder to quantify scientifically than mathematical puzzle-solving ability or performance in verbal memory-tests. But to misquote Robert McNamara, we need to stop making what is measurable important, and find ways to make the important measurable. By some criteria, contemporary IQ tests are better measures of high-grade autism than mature full-spectrum intelligence. So before chemically manipulating one's mind, it's worth critically examining which capacities one wants to enhance; and to what end?

In practice, the first and most boring advice is often the most important. Many potential users of smart pills would be better and more simply advised to stop taking tranquillisers, sleeping tablets or toxic recreational drugs; practise good sleep discipline; eat omega-3 rich foods, more vegetables and generally improve their diet; and try more mentally challenging tasks. One of the easiest ways of improving memory, for instance, is to increase the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain. Enhanced cerebrovascular function can be achieved by running, swimming, dancing, brisk walking, and more sex. Regular vigorous exercise also promotes nerve cell growth in the hippocampus. Hippocampal brain cell growth potentially enhances mood, memory and cognitive vitality alike. Intellectuals are prone to echo J.S. Mill: "Better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig". But happiness is typically good for the hippocampus; by contrast, the reduced hippocampal volume anatomically characteristic of depressives correlates with the length of their depression.

In our current state of ignorance, homely remedies are still sometimes best. Thus moderate consumption of adenosine-inhibiting, common-or-garden caffeine improves concentration, mood and alertness; enhances acetylcholine release in the hippocampus; and statistically reduces the risk of suicide. Regular coffee drinking induces competitive and reversible inhibition of MAO enzymes type A and B owing to coffee's neuroactive beta-carbolines. Coffee is also rich in antioxidants. Non-coffee drinkers are around three times more likely to contract Parkinson's disease. A Michigan study found caffeine use was correlated with enhanced male virility in later life.

Before resorting to pills, aspiring intellectual heavyweights might do well to start the day with a low-fat/high carbohydrate breakfast: muesli rather than tasty well-buttered croissants. This will enhance memory, energy and blood glucose levels. An omega-3 rich diet will enhance all-round emotional and intellectual health too. A large greasy fry-up, on the other hand, can easily leave one feeling muddle-headed, drowsy and lethargic. If one wants to stay sharp, and to blunt the normal mid-afternoon dip, then eating big fatty lunches isn't a good idea either. Fat releases cholecystokinin (CCK) from the duodenum. Modest intravenous infusions of CCK make one demonstrably dopey and subdued.

To urge such caveats is not to throw up one's hands in defeatist resignation. Creative psychopharmacology can often in principle circumvent such problems, even today. There may indeed be no safe drugs but just safe dosages. Yet some smart drugs, such as piracetam, are relatively innocuous. If the user doesn't like their effects, (s)he can simply stop taking them. Agents such as the alpha-1 adrenergic agonist adrafinil (Olmifron) typically do have both mood-brightening and intellectually invigorating effects. Adrafinil, like its chemical cousin modafinil (Provigil), promotes alertness, vigilance and mental focus; and its more-or-less pure CNS action ensures it doesn't cause unwanted peripheral sympathetic stimulation.

Unfortunately the lay public is currently ill-served, a few shining exceptions aside, by the professionals. A condition of ignorance and dependence is actively fostered where it isn't just connived at in the wider population. So there's often relatively little point in advising anyone contemplating acting on DMF's book to consult their physician first. For it's likely their physician won't want to know, or want them to know, in the first instance.

As traditional forms of censorship, news-management and governmental information-control break down, however, and the Net insinuates itself into ever more areas of daily life, more and more people are stumbling upon - initially - and then exploring, the variety of drugs and combination therapies which leading-edge pharmaceutical research puts on offer. They are increasingly doing so as customers, and not as patronisingly labelled role-bound "patients". Those outside the charmed circle have previously been cast in the obligatory role of humble supplicants. The more jaundiced or libertarian among the excluded may have felt themselves at the mercy of prescription-wielding, or -withholding, agents of one arm of the licensed drug cartels. So when the control of the cartels and their agents falters, there is an especially urgent need for incisive and high-quality information to be made readily accessible. Do DMF fulfil it?

Smart Drugs 2 lays itself wide open to criticism; but then it takes on an impossible task. In the perennial trade-off between accessibility and scholarly rigour, compromises are made on both sides. Ritual disclaimers aside, DMF's tone can at times seem too uncritically gung-ho. Their drug-profiles and cited studies don't always give due weight to the variations in sample size and the quality of controls. Nor do they highlight the uncertain calibre of the scholarly journals in which some of the most interesting results are published. DMFs inclusion of anecdote-studded personal testimonials is almost calculated to inflame medical orthodoxy. Moreover it should be stressed that the scientific gold-standard of large, placebo-controlled, double-blind cross-over prospective trials are still quite rare in this field as a whole.

Looking ahead, this century's mood-boosting, intellect-sharpening, empathy-enhancing and personality-enriching drugs are themselves likely to prove only stopgaps. This is because invincible, life-long happiness and supergenius intellect may one day be genetically pre-programmed and possibly ubiquitous in our transhuman successors. Taking drugs to repair Nature's deficiencies may eventually become redundant. Memory- and intelligence-boosting gene therapies are already imminent. But in repairing the deficiencies of an educational system geared to producing dysthymic pharmacological illiterates, Smart Drugs 1 and 2 offers a warmly welcome start.

DP (1998, 2017).

Refs and further reading

HedWeb Talks (2015) Future Opioids BLTC Research Superhappiness? Utopian Surgery? Social Media (2017) Nutritional Medicine Wirehead Hedonism The Good Drug Guide Nootropics (Wikipedia) The Abolitionist Project Reproductive Revolution Quora Answers (2015-17) Critique Of Brave New World MDMA: Utopian Pharmacology Nootropics/Smart Drugs: Sources The Biointelligence Explosion (2013) Male intelligence vs female intelligence Humans and AI: Co-evolution, Fusion or Replacement? (2013)e-mail dave@bltc.com

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nootropics / smart drugs

It's not exactly news that people do drugs in college. But in recent years there's been a flurry of reports from both the UK and here in the US that suggest students are increasingly getting high to help them do their work, rather than to block out its existence until the day it's due.

The majority of media attention awarded to these "smart drugs" so far has been directed at their misuse, given that some of the most popular substanceslike Ritalin, Adderall, and modafinilwere originally developed to combat specific disorders, such as ADHD or narcolepsy. But there's also been a steady rise in the use of supplements designed to improve brainpower in healthy adults over extended periods of time, as opposed to the brief but efficient effect you'll get from using any of the time-tested prescription drugs.

These supplements are known as nootropics and range from the mundane (ginseng) to the unpronounceable (phenylalanine). As with the prescription drugs, little is known about their long-term side effects.

It's difficult to draw any clear distinctions between nootropics and other brain-boosting drugs, but if you, like many others, share the views of John Harrisprofessor of bioethics at Manchester University in Englandthere's very little need to draw those distinctions in the first place. "I'm interested in cognitive-enhancing drugs," he said. "How you define nootropics doesn't interest me."

Of course, not everyone agrees. Corneliu E Giurgea, a Romanian psychologist and chemist, synthesized piracetamthe first nootropicin 1964 and established an exact set of criteria in doing so. For Giurgea, nootropics must enhance learning acquisition, increase the coupling of the brain's hemispheres, and improve executive processing (that last one involves tasks such as planning, paying attention, and spatial awareness). Importantly, these drugs must also be non-toxic and non-addictive.

Due to the wide variety of supplements classed as nootropics, there's no single way of explaining how they work. Broadly speaking, however, nootropics achieve their effects by altering the supply of neurochemicals, enzymes, or hormones in the brain. Giurgea's piracetam, for example, can improve the memory of users by altering the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which, in turn, affects the plasticity of synapses in the brain (the extent to which entire brain structures, and the brain itself, can change from experiences). We understand our memories to be composed of complex matrices of synapses, and our ability to access them is related to how well they can link. Improved plasticity makes it easier for synapses to hook up.

Three of the most popular British vendors (Nootropics.co.uk, Intellimeds.co.uk, and SmartNootropics.co.uk) have all appeared in the last two years, so it's clear that there's been a recent surge in the popularity of nootropics. However, the benefits of some of the substances used to make the supplements have been known for years. We all know the productivity perks of caffeine, for instance, and the brain-boosting power of fish oil has been touted for as long as any of us can remember (with or without the help of nootropics). For those reasons, caffeine and fish oil form the base of many nootropic "stacks"super-effective nootropic combinations.

Image by Jonny Mellor

Sean Duke is an American neuropharmacologist who specializes in devising stacks. He refers to those who take nootropics as "noonauts" and claims that they "are the mental equivalent of bodybuilders." On the nootropics Subredditand a number of other online message boardsnoonauts from all corners of society come together to obsess over drug regimens and optimizing doses and boast about how many books they can mentally bench-press.

Duke's steroids allegory also works on a legal level. As with all drugs, the government's method for legislating cognitive enhancers is scattershot at best. Modafinila substance created to treat narcolepsycannot be sold legally without a prescription in the UK, but it is legal to import for personal use. The same goes for piracetam. This creates a pretty illogical situation in which UK suppliers can sell experimental nootropics unimpeded but cannot legally sell piracetama substance that has been thoroughly proven as safe for more than 40 years.

Duke says of humans, "We are all nootnauts; some of us just try harder." And it's a sentiment that's been true throughout our history. Great advances in our evolution have been precipitated by adjustments to our diets. Our brains swelled when we began eating meat 2.3 million years ago. Then, a million years later, our ability to cook food gave rise to Homo erectus, our closest ancestor, who developed a digestive system 20 percent smaller and a brain 20 percent larger than his predecessors.

In the 1950s, Britain and America experimented with mind-altering technology for military gain. One of the CIA's most cartoonishly evil projects, MKUltra, investigated the effects of psychotropic drugs, shock therapy, and hypnosis on participants, some willing and some not. Scientists attempted to make their subjects better at dealing with torture or more likely to tell the truth, and worked to "increase the efficiency of mentation and perception." However, the science backfired, and the agency's attempts to control the human mind had remarkably counterproductive results.

Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter were two volunteers for the MKUltra experiment at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, a mental health facility in California. Kesey spent time talking to the patients there and decided that they were socially marginalized rather than insane. His experiences inspired him to write the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest. Hunter would go on to join The Grateful Dead, and it is said that he was under the influence of the MKUltra experiments when he wrote the words to "China Cat Sunflower."

Both figures played a seminal role in arguably the biggest cultural movement of the 20th Centuryone that endorsed the use of psychedelics for their ability to broaden horizons and produce a new kind of society.

Image by Jonny Mellor

Timothy Leary, a close friend of Kesey's, took a scientific approach to expanding consciousness. In 1964, he published The Psychedelic Experience, which laid out a practical framework for experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. In Romania, in the same year, Giurgea published The Fundamentals to the Pharmacology of the Mind, in which he stated: "Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain."

In the eyes of the scientific community, Leary's passion for his subject transformed him from detached researcher to evangelistthe pervasive memory of him is of a guy who dropped acid with Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon; no one really remembers any meaningful data concerning the effects psychoactive drugs have on someone's brain. Giurgea's work, however, became a field of serious research.

Studies have repeatedly shown the practical benefits of nootropics, but their impact on society has been less explosive than Leary's work. This is, in part, because the effectiveness of nootropics is dependent on an individual's neurochemistry, which is closely tied to weight, sleep patterns, and even mood, meaning the results of their use can vary hugely.

As Leary got older, his focus moved from drugs to technology. He proclaimed that "the PC is the LSD of the 90s" and began what came to be known as the cyberpunk movement. Many adherents of the subculture went on to work in Silicon Valley, and it was from here that the Information Age unfolded.

In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: "There were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days." The exact details of what he said were quickly proven to be incorrect, but we exist in a world of overwhelming information nevertheless. We are now expected to deal with an exorbitant amount of data endlessly streaming to us from every corner of our lives, and our natural response to this has been inadequate; we have no time to question fictions if they suit our worldviewthe first paragraph of a Wikipedia page is as much knowledge as we need to get by.

Image by Alex Horne

Despite our natural ineptitude at managing this volume of data, we are increasingly treated like information processors in many aspects of life. Performance targets, efficiency ratings, and calculated margins of error have become the parameters we work within. In education, even the most abstract and non-prescriptive subjects are being reduced to an exercise in memorizing facts. And in attempts to plan and organize society, we are treated as predictable machines. Instead of Leary's vision that computers would liberate us, we are becoming the computers ourselves.

Wearable technology like Google Glass is the logical extension of this concept, minimizing the distinction between our devices and us. It keeps us fed with information and ensures we are never offline. But can we adapt to such an existence? Maybe nootropics can help us come full circle.

Smart drugs could be seen as the key to unlocking our full potential within the narrow confines of a society reliant on technology. In a Daily Mail piece, for example, a "James," a Cambridge student, said that, when taking modafinil, "Your brain worked more like a computer as it processed information." And although the government still doesn't quite know what to do with nootropics, John Harris thinks they could be fundamental to the future of education: "They may even be provided to all students as a matter of course," he said.

The fact remains, however, that we are not information processors, and the human brain cannot be fully understood in terms of chemistry. Duke said: "If we were just chemicals, how can one explain free will? Free will ignores the energy-defined constraints of chemistry." Ultimately, free will is more powerful than our chemical makeup. The brain plasticity that piracetam aids is consciously guided whenever we make a decision to learn a new language or to play an instrument.

So while smart drugs can provide an edge in a world where processing power is paramount, viewing them as a universal cure risks reducing humans to automatons. Duke says: "The jury is still out on these drugs being evolutionary as opposed to de-evolutionary. How much are we guiding our brain to make connections that cannot be re-visited without the aid of the nootropics? We certainly don't know now, and I'm not sure if we ever will." What he's saying is that if we start providing cognitive enhancers to children, we may be narrowing their future capabilities, prioritizing their functionality over their creativity and individuality.

William Gibson, another famous cyberpunk, once said: "Technologies are morally neutral until we apply them." Many noonauts are currently enhancing their lives with brain-boosting supplements, but if cognitive enhancers become normalized, which is more likely: that we become a society filled with intellectual experts, or that our increased capacity for work results in a larger workload?

Smartphones mean the office is always in our pocket. Smart drugs could mean the office is always in our minds. Which sounds like a really shitty place to end up.

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Will 'Smart Drugs' Really Make Us Smarter, or Just ... - VICE