This week, as many as one quarter of LSU undergraduates will use prescription drugs like Adderall, Ritalin and Vyvanse to enhance their cognitive performance, according to a 2008 study.
Use — or abuse.
A 2007 column in the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, eloquently declared that these students “create work that is dependent upon the use of a pill rather than their own work groups.”
Either way, the idea of “brain steroids” and “brain hacking” isn’t by any means a novel one — in fact, some of humanity’s most celebrated thinkers were “cheaters,” as it were.
English polymath Sir Francis Bacon, for one, voraciously consumed the spice saffron, writing that “it maketh the English Exit.” Mon Dieu! Off with his head!
Just as there’s nothing new about all this, there’s also nothing wrong.
“Toward responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy,” a 2008 article published by the University of Pennsylvania — and authored by academics and neurologists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester and Harvard Medical School — went as far as endorsing neuroenhancement outright.
“Like all new technologies, cognitive enhancement can be used well or poorly,” the article said. “We should welcome new methods of improving our brain