Mother's Little Helper

A Commentary ("Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy", Nature.com, 12/7/2008) in Nature's online magazine has generated a lot of discussion off- and online in the past month. The latest I read was an opinion piece by Judith Warner in The New York Times, which is a thoughtful response and yet fairly typical in addressing the Commentary's argument that this use is 'morally equivalent' to other cognitive-enhancing behaviors such as drinking coffee, getting enough sleep, exercising etc. I'm not particularly interested in the moral reading of using drugs to enhance mental performance. I'm much more interested in the nature of these enhancements.

According to the authors, the drugs (such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil) act as stimulants that improve a healthy person's alertness, focus and memory use. People who need a short-term brain function 'enhancement' -- such as students taking a final exam or a physician on night call -- would, for the sake of argument, benefit. And so, in the popular mind, these are now 'smart pills': if use of these drugs help a student perform better on a test, why shouldn't we all take them to be the best we can be? The authors even state "..many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it...".

So, apparently, did Arthur Conan Doyle believe that cocaine enhanced his fictional detective's already considerable mental faculties. In the 1980s in the US, this drug's popular use in creative fields led to heartbreaking losses and - more mundanely - some truly awful creative work. The syllogism is thus: John Belushi was brilliant; he did drugs; doing drugs makes you brilliant. May I suggest that anyone who fails to see the fault in that logic will definitely NOT benefit from taking cognitive-enhancing drugs?

My worry is not that this is the beginning of profligate use of drugs by healthy people, or that the bar for being 'smart' will become unattainable for those who can't afford the drugs. I worry that this argument will result in over-stimulated, under-disciplined brains that over-value their own brilliance.

The kinds of problems we rely on employees to solve in most workplaces do not require the cognitive feats of a student taking a final exam. The ability to access memory banks is not a premium in the workplace, where data is a few clicks away on the office file server or the Internet - you really don't have to remember it all and you don't get extra points if you do. The problems in business cannot be solved by a textbook: how do we increase throughput while decreasing costs? what will it take to capture more market share? how can we increase engagement and retention of staff? Businesses struggle with problems daily, and rely on the brainpower of their people to solve those problems. When a business does more struggling than solving, it's usually not because they lack the caffeine, or because they don't have enough geniuses on the payroll. But how do the people they employ use their native intelligence?

At least a generation of workers has been nurtured by an educational system that has taught to the test: memorization has had primacy. During this time, the obsolescence of technical knowledge has occurred with unprecedented speed. We've rewarded those students who were best able to commit to memory data that have a half-life of maybe a couple years. Teaching students how to synthesize ideas, how to make their thinking more plastic, how to apply rigor to critical thinking -- these efforts cannot so easily be measured, and therefore are not valued. And yet, aren't the problems we need to solve in industry and in the world just the types that require more than memorization -- they require flexible, inventive minds that work in a structured manner. They require the ability to work on problems over lengthy periods of time, much longer than the duration of a drug dose.

Of course, this type of cognitive enhancement is not on offer from the pharma industry. Unfortunately it's not regularly on offer from our educational system either. As long as we're happy to accept our lot as consumers of other nations' inventions, we can take our pills and feel OK about that.