Self improvement through pharmacology

I just finished watching 'Limitless' and while 1/2 of the movie was an unexplained non-sensical mess, the other 1/2 has me thinking. Premise in a nutshell: Man takes drug, gets ridiculously smart, makes lots of money on account of his newfound intelligence, has lots of sex on account of his oldfound good looks, learns languages, fights amazingly, and otherwise chalks his life up in the win column.

Science fiction, of course, but it raises an interesting question about how our society will or won't deal with memory- or cognitive-enhancing drugs. Though we only prescribe them for individuals effected with ADHD, one could argue that adderall and ritalin might already fit this bill. Just go to your nearest neighborhood college campus on finals week and ask around to see if these drugs really only enhance the focus of individuals afflicted with ADHD.

Another example that I recently learned about is Modafinil (see: Wake Up, Little Susie). This is a drug that claims to drastically reduce the amount of sleep that individuals need with few/no side effects. There is controversy surrounding both its efficacy and the no side-effects claims, but nevertheless, the benefits aren't necessarily restricted to the prescribed individuals (narcolepsy and sleep apnea).

What if new varieties of adderall/ritalin/modafinil work even better? And the real kicker, what if they can start to do it with minimal/no side-effects? I, for one, think this is inevitable (for a recent scientific treatment, see: A critical role for IGF -II in memory consolidation and enhancement).

The authors of the aforementioned study showed that by injecting mice in their hippocampus with Insulin like growth factor II (IGF-II) after training the mice had greatly enhanced memory recall abilities. Much like 'Limitless', these memories were already created via the training and dosage with this drug 'cemented' those memories so that they were available for recall weeks down the line. Injections to the brain aren't quite as ideal as a pill, but a mouse is an extremely complex organism and these kind of results point in the direction of serious advances in the realm of cognitive enhancing pharmacology.

This concept of enhancing our cognition, or ridding ourselves of sleep is quite controversial because in a sense we're not curing anything but I would argue that 'cure' drastically depends only on what you call normal. Most diseases are spectrum disorders, and our society has set a minimum bar for 'normal'. We have no problem prescribing drugs to bring individuals up to that bar. But that line whereby someone crosses from ADHD to 'normal' is incredibly fuzzy and there are many individuals who equally far on the other end of the continuum with focal abilities that are greater than the population average.

A high school teacher of mine belongs to a rather elite group of people known as healthy insomniacs who need only 3 or 4 hours of sleep per day to feel perfectly rested. He is 'abnormal' if we define our normal to be the population average, but no one would say that he has a disease.If we can design a drug to bring narcoleptic individuals up to a reasonable level of 8 hrs of sleep per day, I can't fathom a logical argument against bringing the average person up to that 3 or 4 hour per day level where unique individuals already reside.

Drugs that enhance physical performance are generally frowned upon in the sporting world, but sports is a zero sum game with winners and losers. If we can design drugs to safely increase memory storage and recall, enhance focus, and/or decrease the amount of sleep required, no one loses. The technological and intellectual advancements that this could make possible are vast and it would almost be immoral to not allow this to happen.

The only question that haunts me is when to personally decide that the benefits are large enough, and the side effects low enough to take the plunge. I don't have that line sketched in my head to know when pharmacology has crossed it, but I'm happy to be thinking about it.