Mental Doping: The future is here

From an article in The Economist (pdf):

For thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias associated with Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth. But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental boost to the healthy, too.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report from the Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades.

This was likely inevitable. Many diseases of cognition, such as Alzheimer’s, are treated by enhancing cognitive processing. In patients with a disease, this brings them closer to normal cognition. For those who are already functioning normally, the drugs seem to increase their cognitive abilities even further. Alzheimer’s drugs pinpoint memory centers of the brain, Ritalin focuses attention, and the list goes on.

Already, a poll of readers of the journal Nature showed that 20% of readers take some kind of brain-boosting drug. In the highly competitive “publish-or-perish” world of academic research, will taking these drugs be vilified like steroid use, users branded as cheaters? Will scientists need to go through drug testing? Or will this become commonplace so that every professor needs to take them in order to make tenure?

Hemispherectomies: Yes, they remove a whole hemisphere.

I watched a rerun of House tonight, and a hemispherectomy was performed on the patient of the week. Yes, they remove an entire hemisphere. When it’s done in young patients, they can recover and live surprisingly normal lives. A snippet from a New Yorker article:

As an eight-year-old, Christina played soccer, swam, and did karate. Then she contracted Rasmussen’s encephalitis, a little-understood condition that causes chronic inflammation of the brain. One day at the Jersey Shore, her foot started twitching, and within a few months, as the right side of her brain deteriorated, she was having hundreds of seizures a day. Christina became Johns Hopkins hemispherectomy case No. 30—her surgery took fourteen hours, one of the longest operations Carson has performed. The alterations to Christina’s car are necessary, because she has impaired motor function on her left side. (Each hemisphere of the brain primarily controls the opposite side of the body.) She also lost sight on the left side of each eye, and now wears prism glasses that bring the left field of vision over to the center of the eye. When I met her, she had taken her S.A.T.s and just finished high school, coming in seventy-sixth in a class of two hundred and twenty-five. Last fall, Christina was a freshman at College Misericordia, in Dallas, Pennsylvania, where she’s studying speech pathology.

All that I have to say is that the brain continues to amaze. This was done in an eight year old, so much of the brain is still developing, and that’s a huge advantage. Having this surgery when you’re older is much riskier. But the fact that someone can bounce back from having their brain removed - astounding!

Article on the New Yorker website
Article in PDF form