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One pill makes you smarter: The myths of the meat machine

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Neuroscience gets invoked these days to explain virtually any behavior—from the actions of Wall Street traders to a "God gene" that makes us devout. The term "neuromyths" has even emerged as a collection of fibs about how the brain works. The biggest neuromyth, of course, is that we only use 10 percent of our brain.

 

It emerges as the theme of a new movie called Limitless that has actually received a few good reviews. A down-on-his-luck writer pops a pill and is able to think faster, remember every detail from his past life and generally outthink everyone. The pill, again we’re really in la-la land here, takes effect in a matter of seconds and the person who ingests it becomes a mental superman.


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The pill, NZT, works by allowing the user to rev up mental processing to take advantage of all neural circuits. The promotions that go with the movie acknowledge that, while it’s true that we have occasion to use all of our brain, we only tap into, say 20 percent of our full capacity at any given time. This too is a bubbe meise ("urban myth," loosely translated from the original Yiddish). The more we find out about the brain, the more we understand that a lot is going on behind the scenes: all news all the time. Do a Google search on “default mode network”.

 

Okay, let’s give the creators of Limitless a little crumb: suppose that your brain is not going full bore every second and suppose we could via a magic pill like NZT make that happen. With all of the neural machinery running full blast, what would be the result: Gordon Gekko, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso? Maybe not. With everything cranked up, at best, you might be ravenously hungry, sexually aroused and sending tweets while skydiving. More likely, though, things would be a lot worse. A flood of stimulatory neurotransmitters would lead to what the experts call “excitotoxicity,” in which circuit after circuit blows out, the kind of massive brain damage that occurs after a stroke. Metaphorically, your head would explode. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

Gary Stix, Scientific American's neuroscience and psychology editor, commissions, edits and reports on emerging advances and technologies that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Developments chronicled in dozens of cover stories, feature articles and news stories, document groundbreaking neuroimaging techniques that reveal what happens in the brain while you are immersed in thought; the arrival of brain implants that alleviate mood disorders like depression; lab-made brains; psychological resilience; meditation; the intricacies of sleep; the new era for psychedelic drugs and artificial intelligence and growing insights leading to an understanding of our conscious selves. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Einstein, Darwin, climate change, nanotechnology and the nature of time. The issue he edited on time won a National Magazine Award. Besides mind and brain coverage, Stix has edited or written cover stories on Wall Street quants, building the world's tallest building, Olympic training methods, molecular electronics, what makes us human and the things you should and should not eat. Stix started a monthly column, Working Knowledge, that gave the reader a peek at the design and function of common technologies, from polygraph machines to Velcro. It eventually became the magazine's Graphic Science column. He also initiated a column on patents and intellectual property and another on the genesis of the ingenious ideas underlying new technologies in fields like electronics and biotechnology. Stix is the author with his wife, Miriam Lacob, of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte: A Survival Guide to the Technologically Perplexed (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

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