Adventures in brain-hacking

Peoplehave always sought advantages over their rivals. But trying to improveintelligence as a way to do it has been off-limits. An education can bebought, but ability? You either had it or you didn’t. Now a new sciencecalled cognitive enhancement promises that someone who doesn’t haveintelligence today could have it tomorrow.Using science to boostintelligence might sound far-fetched, but some people in high placestake the prospect very seriously indeed. In the dying days of TonyBlair’s premiership, British government officials asked an expert panelto look at the possible political impact. Britain wanted to know ifother countries – economic rivals – might be willing to introducenational programmes to artificially boost the intellectual “quality” oftheir populations.State-funded scientists in China have runexperiments to see if pressurised oxygen chambers – the type typicallyused to treat scuba divers with the bends – can improve mentalperformance. Without waiting for the results, ambitious families arebooking their teenagers into these chambers the night before the pivotalGaokao school-leaving test, the traditional route to higher educationand a secure career with the state.Closer to home, the use of smartdrugs is common. Some surveys suggest that as many as a quarter of UKundergraduates have taken modafinil or a similar medicine to help theirwork. A fifth of surgeons say they have taken it, and a similar numberof professional scientists. In Britain, it’s a prescription-only drug,so it’s legal to possess but illegal to sell and supply.Severalstartup neuroscience companies already sell basic electrical brainstimulators online that they claim will supercharge neural activity.These efforts piggyback on parallel efforts in universities andhospitals that aim to use cognitive enhancement to address the gatheringdementia crisis of an ageing population, and the lack of reliabletreatments for mental disorders that burden at least a quarter of theglobal population. The question is only how far this cognitiveenhancement research will spread its influence into broader society.There is a strong tradition, after all, of medical treatments beingborrowed by the healthy to enhance normal performance: drugs in sport isthe most obvious example.Is brain doping fair? Should it beallowed, or even encouraged? Could it increase our attention? Ourmemory? Our maths and language skills? And if it can, what are theimplications for society? It’s too soon to answer all of thesequestions, but it’s not too soon to ask them. I believe cognitiveenhancement works because I used it to help increase my ownintelligence. The evidence? I used it to cheat my way into Mensa.Theinternational high-IQ society, Mensa offers membership to people withIQ 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 withan IQ of 130 or above. The membership of Mensa UK is about 21,000people. So clearly, not everybody with a high IQ wants to join a high-IQsociety. That made the dozen or so people I met at a London universityone Saturday morning in 2015 something of a rarity. They were there tojoin. I was there to get my baseline IQ score before I started aself-experiment in cognitive enhancement.There were two separatetests. The first was symbols and shapes: the odd one out; next in aseries; what it looks like if you rotate in this direction. Then asecond paper swapped the symbols for words. The format was the same butthe focus this time was language.It took a couple of weeks for myresults to drop through our letterbox. The word Mensa was clearlyvisible through the envelope, so it took a couple of seconds for my wifeto “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 indoing so realised there is no way to tell people you have got into Mensawithout coming across as smug and a bit odd. How do you know if someoneyou meet at a party is in Mensa? They will tell you.I took a closerlook 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 ofthe two separate papers. And my score on the second, the language, washigh enough. But, working as a journalist, I thought I had a naturaladvantage when it came to language.The first test felt much morelike a true measure of natural brain power, so that became my goal: toimprove my score and pass that test with the help of cognitiveenhancement. But I was going to have to wait. Taking an IQ test for asecond time comes with a built-in improvement. It’s hard to be sure howbig this retest effect is, or how quickly it wears off. To be safe, Idecided to wait a year, which is how long Mensa asks people who fail toget in to wait until they try again.My goal of increasingintelligence – cognitive enhancement – is a tricky thing to identify. Isit 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 toreduce the myriad abilities and potential of a person to a singlerepresentative number. They are right, but it is not clear who they arereally arguing with. It is much harder to find someone – at leastsomeone who fully understands IQ tests – who truly believes they shouldbe used that way.IQ is not so much intended as a measure ofindividual ability, but a way to compare differences in that ability.And, on average, better performance on IQ tests does indicate higherlevels of achievement in the wider world.First, and mostunsurprising given the pen-and-paper style of most IQ tests, studentswith higher scores tend to spend more time in education and achievebetter 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 theirbosses and colleagues are most likely to be those with higher IQs. Thisapplies to all sectors, from white-collar, highly skilled professionalwork to low-complexity, blue-collar jobs.Performance and pay arelinked, 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 heartdisease, less likely to be obese, and less likely to have a psychiatricdisorder needing hospital treatment. They will probably live longer.Some studies suggest a relatively low IQ carries the same extra risk ofan early death as smoking.A year on, by the time of the Mensaretest, I had bought online a basic brain stimulator: two electrodeswired to a 9V battery (one of the chunky ones from a smoke alarm) that Iconnected to wet sponges pressed to my scalp. For 30 minutes each nightfor a week before the test I aimed the current at my anterior temporallobes, above my ears, trying to copy an experiment in Australia thatseemed to show an improvement in volunteers asked to solve puzzles.Electricityhas been applied to the brain to try to change just about everycognitive function, with some success. Before it deployed soldiers toIraq in the early 00s, the US army made them play a video game tosimulate what they would encounter. Volunteers who had a 2mA currentapplied to the right side of their skull, above their inferior frontalcortex (behind the temple) or right parietal cortex (beneath the crownon the right-hand side), improved twice as fast as the others when itcame to identifying threats. (Although one dropped out because they saidthey experienced a burning pain.) The effect lasted for at least anhour after the current was switched off, which suggests the stimulationmight have provoked lasting change in the brains of the volunteers.Thesesort of experiments have inspired DIY communities who like to be knownas “brain hackers”. Largely outside bona fide research institutes anduniversities and beyond the reach of any regulation or control, thesepeople are building brain-altering equipment and using it on themselves.They swap stories, techniques and tips over specialist sites on theInternet. They film their experiences and upload them to YouTube.Mybrain self-stimulation started with a bang. As I turned the switch fromoff to 2mA, a flash of light shot across my vision, a tracer bulletpassed through my brain. I gasped, and my wife – already nervous aboutmy self-experimentation – leaned forward ready to pull the plug on it.It was a phosphene, a pinprick of light not there and created only bythe electrical stimulation of the retinas at the back of my eyes, ormore likely my brain’s visual cortex. Phosphenes are harmless, but theydo show that messing with the brain can have unexpected consequences. Atthe moment, there is no evidence of harmful side-effects, butelectrical brain stimulation can certainly go wrong. Some home usershave said they burned themselves quite badly.On the morning of theMensa retest, I also took a smart pill: some modafinil that I had boughtonline and a friendly chemist had tested to make sure it was genuine.Theeffects of smart drugs are often hyped and exaggerated. But solidevidence suggests modafinil has a positive and significant effect oncognition. It’s been shown to improve the performance of healthyvolunteers in several tasks – recalling a series of numbers, decisionmaking, problem-solving and spatial planning among them. In August 2015,scientists at Harvard and Oxford universities pooled and analysed allof the most reliable experiments and concluded that modafinil is theworld’s first safe and effective smart drug.By safe, they mean inthe short term. Nobody knows what the long-term effects might be, partlybecause scientists haven’t tracked chronic modafinil use, and partlybecause they are not sure how the drug works, or indeed what it does inthe human brain.I felt the drug made me more alert and helped me toconcentrate. I whizzed through the early easy questions, but as timeticked on and the puzzles got trickier, a curious thing happened. Themodafinil – at least I think it was the modafinil – dragged me fullyinto each question, and made it more difficult to take an educated guessand move on. Where I could see the answer early on, the drug acted asan accelerator. But when some effort was required, it was almost abrake. 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 theintellectual challenge and move on to the next question. (In January2017, scientists in Germany reported what looks like a similar effect ofmodafinil on expert chess players. Those given the drug made bettermoves, but actually lost more games on time penalties.)When Mensasent me the new results, my IQ as measured by the symbols test was now135, up from 125 a year before, and so well above the threshold requiredfor Mensa membership.Was the increase down to my efforts atcognitive enhancement? It is impossible to know for sure, but I thinksome of it was. Still, it is hard to disentangle all of the confoundingfactors, which is why science and medicine do not take one-off resultsin such uncontrolled trials seriously as hard evidence. Even if theeffect is genuine, we can’t tell if one of the methods I tried workedbetter than the other. I am only a case study. But case studies canstill be useful. They can identify effects that require attention,exploration and, eventually, explanation.The rise of cognitiveenhancement challenges us to think about intelligence and ability in anew way. Around the time the UK government asked experts to investigateenhancement, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology produceda briefing note on the topic for British policy makers. “Widespread useof enhancers would raise interesting questions for society,” it said.“Currently, individuals with above-average cognitive performance inareas such as memory and reasoning are valued and rewarded. Making suchperformance readily available to all individuals could reduce thediversity of cognitive abilities in the population, and change ideas ofwhat is perceived as normal.”Just as with doping in sports, thebenefits that cognitive enhancement techniques offer do not have to becolossal to be significant. Intelligence is relative. It’s like speed inthe old joke about the two wildlife cameramen filming a lion. As thehungry beast notices them and gets roaring to its feet, one of the pairslips 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.”Toinvestigate, to explore and explain, the only way is to pay attentionand to carry out larger and more controlled trials. Should we? I thinkwe should, if for no other reason than to give society the evidence itneeds to decide what to do about cognitive enhancement. It seems thesmart thing to do. - Guardian News  and  Media* The Genius Within by David Adam is published by Picador.