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Paul McHugh a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, has written skeptically about cosmetic neurology. In a 2004 essay, he notes that at least once a year in his private practice he sees a young person—usually a boy—whose parents worry that his school performance could be better, and want a medication that will assure it. In most of these cases, “the truth is that the son does not have the superior I.Q. of his parents,” though the boy may have other qualities that surpass those of his parents—he may be “handsome, charming, athletic, graceful.” McHugh sees his job as trying to get the parents to “forget about adjusting him to their aims with medication or anything else.” When I spoke with him on the phone, McHugh expanded on this point: “Maybe it’s wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people. And if the idea is that the only college your child can go to is Harvard, well, maybe that’s the idea that needs righting.” If Alex, the Harvard student, and Paul Phillips, the poker player, consider their use of neuroenhancers a private act, Nicholas Seltzer sees his habit as a pursuit that aligns him with a larger movement for improving humanity. Seltzer has a B.A. from U.C. Davis and a master’s degree in security policy from George Washington University. But the job that he obtained with these credentials—as a researcher at a defense-oriented think tank, in northern Virginia—has not left him feeling as intellectually alive as he would like. To compensate, he writes papers in his spare time on subjects like “human biological evolution and warfare.” He also primes his brain with artificial challenges; even when he goes to the rest room at the office, he takes the opportunity to play memory or logic games on his cell phone. Seltzer, who is thirty, told me that he worried that he “didn’t have the mental energy, the endurance, the—I don’t know what to properly call this—the sponginess that I seem to recall having when I was younger.” Suffice it to say that this is not something you notice when you talk to Seltzer. And though our memory is probably at its peak in our early twenties, few thirty-year-olds are aware of a deficit. But Seltzer is the Washington-wonk equivalent of those models and actors in L.A. who discern tiny wrinkles long before their agent does. His girlfriend, a technology consultant whom he met in a museum, is nine years younger, and he was already thinking about how his mental fitness would stand up next to hers. He told me, “She’s twenty-one, and I want to stay young and vigorous and don’t want to be a burden on her later in life.” He didn’t worry about visible signs of aging, but he wanted to keep his mind “nimble and healthy for as long as possible.” Seltzer considers himself a “transhumanist,” in the mold of the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and the futurist writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Transhumanists are interested in robots, cryogenics, and living a really, really long time; they consider biological limitations that the rest of us might accept, or even appreciate, as creaky obstacles to be aggressively surmounted. On the ImmInst forums—“ImmInst” stands for “Immortality Institute”—Seltzer and other members discuss life-extension strategies and the potential benefits of cognitive enhancers. Some of the forum members limit themselves to vitamin and mineral supplements. Others use Adderall or modafinil or, like Seltzer, a drug called piracetam, which was first marketed by a Belgian pharmaceutical company in 1972 and, in recent years, has become available in the U.S. from retailers that sell supplements. Although not approved for any use by the F.D.A., piracetam has been used experimentally on stroke patients—to little effect—and on patients with a rare neurological condition called progressive myoclonus epilepsy, for whom it proved helpful in alleviating muscle spasms. Data on piracetam’s benefits for healthy people are virtually nonexistent, but many users believe that the drug increases blood flow to the brain. From the time I first talked to Seltzer, it was clear that although he felt cognitive enhancers were of practical use, they also appealed to him on an aesthetic level. Using neuroenhancers, he said, “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.” For some people, he went on, it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important “to increase mental horsepower.” He added, “It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.” Whereas the nineties had been about “the personalization of technology,” this decade was about the personalization of the brain—what some enthusiasts have begun to call “mind hacking.”Of course, the idea behind mind-hacking isn’t exactly new. Fortifying one’s mental stamina with drugs of various kinds has a long history. Sir Francis Bacon consumed everything from tobacco to saffron in the hope of goosing his brain. Balzac reputedly fuelled sixteen-hour bouts of writing with copious servings of coffee, which, he wrote, “chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.” Sartre dosed himself with speed in order to finish “Critique of Dialectical Reason.” My college friends and I wrote term papers with the sweaty-palmed assistance of NoDoz tablets. And, before smoking bans, entire office cultures chugged along on a collective nicotine buzz—at least, if “Mad Men” is to be believed. Seltzer and his interlocutors on the ImmInst forum are just the latest members of a seasoned cohort, even if they have more complex pharmaceuticals at their disposal. I eventually met Seltzer in an underground food court not far from the Pentagon. We sat down at a Formica table in the dim light. Seltzer was slim, had a shaved head, and wore metal-frame glasses; matching his fastidious look, he spoke precisely, rarely stumbling over his words. I asked him if he had any ethical worries about smart drugs. After a pause, he said that he might have a concern if somebody popped a neuroenhancer before taking a licensing exam that certified him as, say, a brain surgeon, and then stopped using the drug. Other than that, he couldn’t see a problem. He said that he was a firm believer in the idea that “we should have a fair degree of liberty to do with our bodies and our minds as we see fit, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the basic rights, liberty, and safety of others.” He argued, “Why would you want an upward limit on the intellectual capabilities of a human being? And, if you have a very nationalist viewpoint, why wouldn’t you want our country to have the advantage over other countries, particularly in what some people call a knowledge-based economy?” He went on, “Think about the complexity of the intellectual tasks that people need to accomplish today. Just trying to understand what Congress is doing is not a simple thing! The complexity of understanding the gamut of scientific and technical and social issues is difficult. If we had a tool that enabled more people to understand the world at a greater level of sophistication, how can we prejudice ourselves against the notion, simply because we don’t like athletes to do it? To me, it doesn’t seem like the same question. And it deserves its own debate.” Seltzer had never had a diagnosis of any kind of learning disorder. But he added, “Though I wouldn’t say I’m dyslexic, sometimes when I type prose, after I look back and read it, I’ve frequently left out words or interposed words, and sometimes I have difficulty concentrating.” In graduate school, he obtained a prescription for Adderall from a doctor who didn’t ask a lot of questions. The drug helped him, especially when his ambitions were relatively low. He recalled, “I had this one paper, on nuclear strategy. The professor didn’t look favorably on any kind of creative thinking.” On Adderall, he pumped out the paper in an evening. “I just bit my tongue, regurgitated, and got a good-enough grade.”On the other hand, Seltzer recalled that he had taken piracetam to write an essay on “the idea of harmony as a trope in Chinese political discourse”—it was one of the papers he was proudest of. He said, “It was really an intellectual challenge to do. I felt that the piracetam helped me to work within the realm of the abstract, and make the kind of associations that I needed—following this idea of harmony from an ancient religious belief as it was translated throughout the centuries into a very important topic in political discourse.” After a hiatus of several years, Seltzer had recently resumed taking neuroenhancers. In addition to piracetam, he took a stack of supplements that he thought helped his brain functioning: fish oils, five antioxidants, a product called ChocoMind, and a number of others, all available at the health-food store. He was thinking about adding modafinil, but hadn’t yet. For breakfast every morning, he concocted a slurry of oatmeal, berries, soy milk, pomegranate juice, flaxseed, almond meal, raw eggs, and protein powder. The goal behind the recipe was efficiency: to rely on “one goop you could eat or drink that would have everything you need nutritionally for your brain and body.” He explained, “Taste was the last thing on my mind; I wanted to be able to keep it down—that was it.” (He told me this in the kitchen of his apartment; he lives with a roommate, who walked in while we were talking, listened perplexedly for a moment, then put a frozen pizza in the oven.)