This was a piece I wrote for the International Neuroethics Society (INS) 2018 Student/Postdoc Essay Contest. I was one of five finalists who was selected to participate in a 1-on-1 editorial mentorship session with INS Chief Operating Officer Elaine Snell.
———
The typical conception of neuroenhancement conjures up images of super-drugs or high-tech stimulation targeting the brain to unlock greater human cognitive potential. Indeed, much of the ethical debate around whether and how neuroenhancement should be done presupposes that directly manipulating the brain is the only way of enhancing the mind.
However, our mind is not confined to the roughly three-pound mass in our skulls. Two prominent philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers put forth the notion that a person’s mental state extends beyond his or her brain. This Extended Mind thesis takes the view that things outside the brain can play the same functional role in mental processes, such as cognition and emotion.
Take the case of poor Otto in a famous thought experiment posed by Clark and Chalmers. Otto is trying to get to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see an exhibit there. Unfortunately, Otto has Alzheimer’s disease and thus cannot rely on his own memory to figure out where the museum is. To compensate for his memory loss, he uses a notebook to record important information and carries it with him at all times for easy reference. So, he takes out his trusty notebook, where he reads that the museum is located on 53rd Street and, armed with this knowledge, can set off to see the exhibit.
In this example, Otto’s notebook plays the same functional role as the brain of a non-amnesiac person would in retrieving a memory (ie: the location of the museum) effectively serving as a substitute for his biological memory. While the notebook is external to Otto’s brain, it is something he highly trusts, relies on, and can readily access; for Otto, losing his notebook would be akin to losing his memory all over again.
While most of us are fortunate enough to have more or less intact memories at our disposal, we all extend and augment our minds just like Otto, though we might not at first conceive it as such. Our brains and their functioning are inextricably tied to the bodies in which they’re housed and the environments in which we live; changing key physical or environmental factors can change influence our cognitive and emotional capabilities. Indeed, there are many methods, technologies, and strategies that enhance how quickly and accurately you perform cognitive tasks that you probably already employ. Education, reading, healthy diets, coffee, diary entries, and good sleep are all examples of neuroenhancement, though they are more prosaic than taking “smart drugs” or electrical brain stimulation.
With the ubiquity of smartphones , wearable technologies, and the Internet, we are able to store, process, and manipulate even more information more readily than ever before. In the process, we extend our mind and off-load some of our cognitive burdens and processing to these technological neuroenhancements thereby improving our mental functioning.
For example, the smartphone in my pocket (and yours too, most likely) allows me to track my contacts, rapidly search for facts about cats, update my social network, calculate restaurant tips, navigate my car through unfamiliar cities, wake myself up (mostly) on time in the morning, remind me of friends’ birthdays, and on and on. These are all cognitive tasks I could perform without my iPhone, but ones I complete more efficiently with it. When I had my smartphone stolen a few years ago, I lost photos containing memories that I cannot replace, had to navigate the city without updated traffic information, and had to ask for my contacts’ phone numbers again; for a time, my mental functioning was diminished as a result. In a sense, new advances in neurological manipulations, such as pills that enhance attention or technologies that stimulate specific brain areas, allow for new and different ways of doing what humans have already been doing for a long time.
Thus, a neuroethics for neuroenhancements should concern itself with not only the dramatic methods of pharmacology and brain stimulation, but also the neuroenhancements we are all subject to whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Taking the Extended Mind view seriously expands the scope of ethical concern into questions about social policy, technology, nutrition, social media, education, and more. Many of the questions ethicists have already been asking about smart drugs and brain stimulation should be applied to these domains as well.
In short, we must think about what kinds of environment and tools are best for a human mind to reach its fullest potential and under what values: What kinds of cognitive (or emotional) skills do we value as a society? How do we design the best systems to optimize for well-being and while reducing possibilities for negative consequences? Given that neuroenhancement is already here, the neuroethical questions should shift from whether it is permissible to how it should be done.
The moral landscape is replete with trade-offs, and all neuroenhancements have unintended consequences. Drugs have side-effects, but using a navigational system decreases our internal cognitive maps, and Socrates was concerned that written language would erode our biological memory because writing would allow for external storage of information. More recent critics like Nicolas Carr contend that technologies like the Internet make us dumber because they do the work for us. The benefits of each of these neuroenhancements in turn should be weighed against their drawbacks.
Concerns of the inequitable access to neuroenhancement also need be addressed on a broader scale. The wealthy may have access to cognition-enhancing drugs in the future that the poor do not, but it would be alongside the advantages they already enjoy in education, nutrition, and environment. Poverty, for example, has a detrimental effect on healthy brain development and having a safe, nurturing childhood environment is a form of neuroenhancement that not all children enjoy. The neuroethics of neuroenhancement encompasses the problem of inequality and how we address the vast gulfs between those who have the means to improve their minds and those who do not.
References:
Bostrom, N., & Sandberg, A. (2009). Cognitive enhancement: Methods, ethics, regulatory challenges. Science and Engineering Ethics, 15(3), 311–341. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9142-5
Carr, N. (2011). The Shallows. What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. WW Norton & Company. http://doi.org/10.7238/rusc.v9i1.1134
Clark, A., & Chalrmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind Author ( s ): Andy Clark and David Chalmers Published by : Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Committee Stable URL : http://www.jstor.org/stable/3328150 . Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
Farah, M., Illes, J., R, C.-D., H, G., E, K., P, K., … P, W. (2004). Neurocognitive enhancement: what can we do and what should we do?: Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 5(5), 421–425. Retrieved from papers2://publication/uuid/2FF9B974-A32C-4622-BF6E-DA7B949EA186
Heersmink, R. (2017). Extended mind and cognitive enhancement: moral aspects of cognitive artifacts. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16(1), 17–32. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9448-5
Levy, N. (2007). Rethinking neuroethics in the light of the extended mind thesis. American Journal of Bioethics, 7(9), 3–11. http://doi.org/10.1080/15265160701518466