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A Dose Of Genius
Even psychopharmaceuticals have been around for generations. Amphetamines -- which are the active ingredient in Adderall and Ritalin -- were first synthesized in Germany in 1887. Students have been using them for generations, in the form of Benzedrine and Dexedrine.
Beta blockers have been the dirty little secret of classical musicians since the 1970s. Originally prescribed to treat high blood pressure, they became the "steroids of the symphony" when it became clear Inderal controlled stage fright. As long ago as 1987, a study of the 51 largest orchestras in the United States found one in four musicians using them to improve their live performances, with 70 percent of those getting their pills illicitly.
  Harvard professor Howard Gardner wonders if smart pills can benefit those with nontraditional expressions of intelligence such as musical competence and manual skills. (By Laurie Swope For The Washington Post) |
What's new is the range, scope, quantity and quality of substances, old and new, aimed at boosting our brains -- as well as the increase in what's in the pipeline. Current psychopharmaceuticals represent only the beginning of cognitive enhancers aimed at improving attention, reasoning, planning and even social skills.
The memory compounds being raced to market by four U.S. companies are initially aimed at the severely impaired, such as early-stage Alzheimer's patients. But researchers expect the market for memory drugs to rapidly extend into the aging population we think of as normal, such as the more than 70 million baby boomers who are tired of forgetting what they meant to buy at the shopping mall and then realizing they've forgotten where they parked their cars, too. Or students who think such drugs could gain them hundreds of points on their SATs.
In research now underway, one such substance, ampakines, boosts the activity of glutamate, a key neurotransmitter that makes it easier to learn and encode memory. How useful they might be in a French or law exam.
But there are side effects with every drug. Strattera -- the ADHD medicine that is not a stimulant and may be taken for weeks before it shows an effect -- comes with a warning that it can result in fatal liver failure. The FDA warns it also may increase thoughts of suicide in young people. For a while last year, Canada pulled a form of Adderall from its markets as a result of sudden unexplained deaths in children with cardiac abnormalities. Provigil can decrease the effectiveness of birth control. All of these drugs come with a raft of side-effect warnings.
Nonetheless, pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring to market new drugs aimed at fundamentally altering our attitudes toward having a healthy brain. The idea is less to treat a specific disease than it is to, in the words of the old Army recruiting commercial, "Be all that you can be."
Of Mice and Men
Is this what smart has come to in the early 21st century? Is Ken Jennings, the "Jeopardy" phenom, our model of smart? Do SATs and grade-point averages measure all of what it means to be intelligent? If so, these drugs have a potent future. But definitions of intelligence may change -- already, some colleges have stopped requiring SAT scores from applicants.
Howard Gardner of Harvard is the godfather of the idea that smart is more than what IQ tests test. In his seminal 1983 book, "Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences," and later works, he laid out a then-novel model of cognition that included many other kinds of sagacity.
"I feel that what we call 'intelligence' is almost always 'scholastic skill' -- what it takes to do well on a certain kind of short-answer instrument in a certain kind of Western school," he writes in an e-mail. "Other uses of intellect -- musical competence, facility in the use of one's hands, understanding of other people, sensitivity to distinctions in the natural world, alertness to one's own and others' emotional states etc. -- are not included in our definitions of intelligence, though I think that they should be. Unless performances in these other domains were directly tapped, we'd have no idea of whether 'performance enhancing pills' affect these other forms of intelligence as well."
Eric R. Kandel is shocked by the idea that powerful elixirs like the ones he is developing might rapidly trickle down to ambitious college kids. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He also founded Memory Pharmaceuticals.
"That's awful! Why should they be taking drugs? They should just study! I think this is absurd. What's so terrible about having a 3.9? The idea that character and functioning and intelligence is to be judged by a small difference on an exam -- that's absurd. This is just like Barry Bonds and steroids. Exactly what you want to discourage. These kids are very sensitive. Their brains are still developing. Who knows what might happen. I went to Harvard. I like Harvard. It ain't worth it."
The mind amplifiers he's working on, he insists, could have major effects on lots of needy people -- those with mental retardation or Down syndrome, or those with memory loss from depression or Alzheimer's or cancer chemotherapy or schizophrenia. "There are lots of populations out there that really, really need help," he says.
Kandel is hugely enthusiastic about taking a memory that has slipped and bringing it back up to reasonable. His compounds are terrific in aging mice, he says.
But ambitious college kids?
Why take the risk?
In normal mice, he says, his stuff improves memory -- only by 20 percent to 50 percent.
