People
have always sought advantages over their rivals. But trying to improve
intelligence as a way to do it has been off-limits. An education can be
bought, but ability? You either had it or you didn’t. Now a new science
called cognitive enhancement promises that someone who doesn’t have
intelligence today could have it tomorrow.
Using science to boost
intelligence might sound far-fetched, but some people in high places
take the prospect very seriously indeed. In the dying days of Tony
Blair’s premiership, British government officials asked an expert panel
to look at the possible political impact. Britain wanted to know if
other countries – economic rivals – might be willing to introduce
national programmes to artificially boost the intellectual “quality” of
their populations.
State-funded scientists in China have run
experiments to see if pressurised oxygen chambers – the type typically
used to treat scuba divers with the bends – can improve mental
performance. Without waiting for the results, ambitious families are
booking their teenagers into these chambers the night before the pivotal
Gaokao school-leaving test, the traditional route to higher education
and a secure career with the state.
Closer to home, the use of smart
drugs is common. Some surveys suggest that as many as a quarter of UK
undergraduates have taken modafinil or a similar medicine to help their
work. A fifth of surgeons say they have taken it, and a similar number
of professional scientists. In Britain, it’s a prescription-only drug,
so it’s legal to possess but illegal to sell and supply.
Several
startup neuroscience companies already sell basic electrical brain
stimulators online that they claim will supercharge neural activity.
These efforts piggyback on parallel efforts in universities and
hospitals that aim to use cognitive enhancement to address the gathering
dementia crisis of an ageing population, and the lack of reliable
treatments for mental disorders that burden at least a quarter of the
global population. The question is only how far this cognitive
enhancement research will spread its influence into broader society.
There is a strong tradition, after all, of medical treatments being
borrowed by the healthy to enhance normal performance: drugs in sport is
the most obvious example.
Is brain doping fair? Should it be
allowed, or even encouraged? Could it increase our attention? Our
memory? Our maths and language skills? And if it can, what are the
implications for society? It’s too soon to answer all of these
questions, but it’s not too soon to ask them. I believe cognitive
enhancement works because I used it to help increase my own
intelligence. The evidence? I used it to cheat my way into Mensa.
The
international high-IQ society, Mensa offers membership to people with
IQ in the top 2% of the population. On the most commonly used scale,
that’s an IQ of 130. There are well over a million people in the UK with
an IQ of 130 or above. The membership of Mensa UK is about 21,000
people. So clearly, not everybody with a high IQ wants to join a high-IQ
society. That made the dozen or so people I met at a London university
one Saturday morning in 2015 something of a rarity. They were there to
join. I was there to get my baseline IQ score before I started a
self-experiment in cognitive enhancement.
There were two separate
tests. The first was symbols and shapes: the odd one out; next in a
series; what it looks like if you rotate in this direction. Then a
second paper swapped the symbols for words. The format was the same but
the focus this time was language.
It took a couple of weeks for my
results to drop through our letterbox. The word Mensa was clearly
visible through the envelope, so it took a couple of seconds for my wife
to “open it by mistake”. She called me at work with the news.
“Ha,
you got in. I knew you would,” she said. I told a colleague, and in
doing so realised there is no way to tell people you have got into Mensa
without coming across as smug and a bit odd. How do you know if someone
you meet at a party is in Mensa? They will tell you.
I took a closer
look at my Mensa test results. I hadn’t passed the first test at all.
But I didn’t need to. To join Mensa, applicants need pass only one of
the two separate papers. And my score on the second, the language, was
high enough. But, working as a journalist, I thought I had a natural
advantage when it came to language.
The first test felt much more
like a true measure of natural brain power, so that became my goal: to
improve my score and pass that test with the help of cognitive
enhancement. But I was going to have to wait. Taking an IQ test for a
second time comes with a built-in improvement. It’s hard to be sure how
big this retest effect is, or how quickly it wears off. To be safe, I
decided to wait a year, which is how long Mensa asks people who fail to
get in to wait until they try again.
My goal of increasing
intelligence – cognitive enhancement – is a tricky thing to identify. Is
it enough to achieve an increase in IQ score?
Critics of IQ tests,
and there are many, like to point out that it’s ridiculous to try to
reduce the myriad abilities and potential of a person to a single
representative number. They are right, but it is not clear who they are
really arguing with. It is much harder to find someone – at least
someone who fully understands IQ tests – who truly believes they should
be used that way.
IQ is not so much intended as a measure of
individual ability, but a way to compare differences in that ability.
And, on average, better performance on IQ tests does indicate higher
levels of achievement in the wider world.
First, and most
unsurprising given the pen-and-paper style of most IQ tests, students
with higher scores tend to spend more time in education and achieve
better grades. Are these people only book-smart, and not street-smart?
It seems not – the same positive association shows up in the workplace.
The employees who are judged the best performers and managers by their
bosses and colleagues are most likely to be those with higher IQs. This
applies to all sectors, from white-collar, highly skilled professional
work to low-complexity, blue-collar jobs.
Performance and pay are
linked, and sure enough, those with a high IQ tend to earn more money.
And they are less likely to suffer from high blood pressure and heart
disease, less likely to be obese, and less likely to have a psychiatric
disorder needing hospital treatment. They will probably live longer.
Some studies suggest a relatively low IQ carries the same extra risk of
an early death as smoking.
A year on, by the time of the Mensa
retest, I had bought online a basic brain stimulator: two electrodes
wired to a 9V battery (one of the chunky ones from a smoke alarm) that I
connected to wet sponges pressed to my scalp. For 30 minutes each night
for a week before the test I aimed the current at my anterior temporal
lobes, above my ears, trying to copy an experiment in Australia that
seemed to show an improvement in volunteers asked to solve puzzles.
Electricity
has been applied to the brain to try to change just about every
cognitive function, with some success. Before it deployed soldiers to
Iraq in the early 00s, the US army made them play a video game to
simulate what they would encounter. Volunteers who had a 2mA current
applied to the right side of their skull, above their inferior frontal
cortex (behind the temple) or right parietal cortex (beneath the crown
on the right-hand side), improved twice as fast as the others when it
came to identifying threats. (Although one dropped out because they said
they experienced a burning pain.) The effect lasted for at least an
hour after the current was switched off, which suggests the stimulation
might have provoked lasting change in the brains of the volunteers.
These
sort of experiments have inspired DIY communities who like to be known
as “brain hackers”. Largely outside bona fide research institutes and
universities and beyond the reach of any regulation or control, these
people are building brain-altering equipment and using it on themselves.
They swap stories, techniques and tips over specialist sites on the
Internet. They film their experiences and upload them to YouTube.
My
brain self-stimulation started with a bang. As I turned the switch from
off to 2mA, a flash of light shot across my vision, a tracer bullet
passed through my brain. I gasped, and my wife – already nervous about
my self-experimentation – leaned forward ready to pull the plug on it.
It was a phosphene, a pinprick of light not there and created only by
the electrical stimulation of the retinas at the back of my eyes, or
more likely my brain’s visual cortex. Phosphenes are harmless, but they
do show that messing with the brain can have unexpected consequences. At
the moment, there is no evidence of harmful side-effects, but
electrical brain stimulation can certainly go wrong. Some home users
have said they burned themselves quite badly.
On the morning of the
Mensa retest, I also took a smart pill: some modafinil that I had bought
online and a friendly chemist had tested to make sure it was genuine.
The
effects of smart drugs are often hyped and exaggerated. But solid
evidence suggests modafinil has a positive and significant effect on
cognition. It’s been shown to improve the performance of healthy
volunteers in several tasks – recalling a series of numbers, decision
making, problem-solving and spatial planning among them. In August 2015,
scientists at Harvard and Oxford universities pooled and analysed all
of the most reliable experiments and concluded that modafinil is the
world’s first safe and effective smart drug.
By safe, they mean in
the short term. Nobody knows what the long-term effects might be, partly
because scientists haven’t tracked chronic modafinil use, and partly
because they are not sure how the drug works, or indeed what it does in
the human brain.
I felt the drug made me more alert and helped me to
concentrate. I whizzed through the early easy questions, but as time
ticked on and the puzzles got trickier, a curious thing happened. The
modafinil – at least I think it was the modafinil – dragged me fully
into each question, and made it more difficult to take an educated guess
and move on. Where I could see the answer early on, the drug acted as
an accelerator. But when some effort was required, it was almost a
brake. I was sucked into the problem, the way it was phrased and posed,
and, if I was taking too long, I found it harder to walk away from the
intellectual challenge and move on to the next question. (In January
2017, scientists in Germany reported what looks like a similar effect of
modafinil on expert chess players. Those given the drug made better
moves, but actually lost more games on time penalties.)
When Mensa
sent me the new results, my IQ as measured by the symbols test was now
135, up from 125 a year before, and so well above the threshold required
for Mensa membership.
Was the increase down to my efforts at
cognitive enhancement? It is impossible to know for sure, but I think
some of it was. Still, it is hard to disentangle all of the confounding
factors, which is why science and medicine do not take one-off results
in such uncontrolled trials seriously as hard evidence. Even if the
effect is genuine, we can’t tell if one of the methods I tried worked
better than the other. I am only a case study. But case studies can
still be useful. They can identify effects that require attention,
exploration and, eventually, explanation.
The rise of cognitive
enhancement challenges us to think about intelligence and ability in a
new way. Around the time the UK government asked experts to investigate
enhancement, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology produced
a briefing note on the topic for British policy makers. “Widespread use
of enhancers would raise interesting questions for society,” it said.
“Currently, individuals with above-average cognitive performance in
areas such as memory and reasoning are valued and rewarded. Making such
performance readily available to all individuals could reduce the
diversity of cognitive abilities in the population, and change ideas of
what is perceived as normal.”
Just as with doping in sports, the
benefits that cognitive enhancement techniques offer do not have to be
colossal to be significant. Intelligence is relative. It’s like speed in
the old joke about the two wildlife cameramen filming a lion. As the
hungry beast notices them and gets roaring to its feet, one of the pair
slips off his jungle boots and laces up a pair of trainers.
“You’ll never outrun a lion,” says his colleague.
“I don’t need to. I just need to outrun you.”
To
investigate, to explore and explain, the only way is to pay attention
and to carry out larger and more controlled trials. Should we? I think
we should, if for no other reason than to give society the evidence it
needs to decide what to do about cognitive enhancement. It seems the
smart thing to do. - Guardian News and Media
* The Genius Within by David Adam is published by Picador.
Chinese students study in a hyperbaric chamber prior to exams.