I had a conversation last night with a man who is working to develop neuro-enhancers. Do you take them yourself? I asked, casually. I wondered secretly whether the field of neuro-enhancement research was progressing at a faster rate than all the other neurosciences.
He said that he did not. He is happy with the progress he is making in life, and is uncomfortable with risk of side effects: nervousness, depression, headaches, sleeplessness, cardiac problems, decreased appetite and, of course, addiction. But the research will deal with the side effects within the next 10 to 20 years, and we will be able to take drugs to boost our mental capacity. Our memories will be crisper, we will learn faster; maybe we will have better ideas. Some of us will feel that we have no choice, and will take them just to keep up.
I suppose that this will be a revolution.
Despite myriad reservations, I would like to be smarter. There is a Borges story about a man who has suffered a brain injury that endows him with prefect perception and infallible memory:
We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book of Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising.
These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: “I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world”. And again: “My dreams are like you people’s waking hours”. And again, toward dawn: “My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap”. A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge – all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireno could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony; with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don’t know how many stars he saw in the sky.
