What do you think of Adderall?

Hello, world, and welcome to So Curious, presented by the Franklin Institute.

In this season, Human 2.0, we will be talking to scientists and non-scientists

alike about technology and innovations surrounding the human experience.

We're your hosts.

I'm Angelica Pasquini.

And I'm the Bul Bey.

But you could just call me Bey.

All right, here we are.

First episode. This is it.

This is it. How are you feeling?

I'm good. I'm excited.

I'm excited to learn, get learnt. Yeah.

I feel like one of those kids at the

beginning of that Magic School Bus episode.

You know, something is about to happen. It's about to go down.

Absolutely.

This is essentially the Magic School Bus podcast.

Who's the Lizard?

You know what, I didn't watch the show that much. But I know I am Miss Frizell.

That's kind of like without any pushback. You got that.

Yes. I'm really excited to talk to scientists

and people that are really talented in their field.

I mean, there's nothing I like more than

listening to someone who knows what they're talking about.

And it's not something that I need to necessarily know anything about.

Isn't that kind of nice in this day and age when everyone has to have an opinion

on everything and know everything about everything?

Experts are becoming a part of the conversation.

I think conversations are becoming democratized, which is cool.

But experts should always be experts and stand out and always be that source of

facts, studies, figures, measurements, documented things.

And we're going to be talking to all of

those different people in those different fields and they're on bleeding-edge

technology stuff, cognitive enhancements and biohacking.

I would talk to anyone who is an expert in anything.

In fact, that's like taking a vacation.

You can just listen to someone talking about it.

I like anything Renaissance Faire,

anything. I will listen to someone talk about it.

All right.

So I was thinking about starting this podcast off without introducing ourselves

at all and just jumping into the topics and being different.

But no, let's introduce ourselves.

And my name is the Bul Bey.

But you could just call me Bey.

I'm a Philadelphia-based rapper, creative collaborator.

And who are you? Hello, world.

My name is Angelica Pasquini.

I'm a comedian, writer, musician.

I like to think about the intrusive nature of technology and societal standards

around modern living, really casual stuff like that.

Yeah. This is episode one.

Today we're going to be talking about cognitive enhancements.

Yeah. Enhancing the mind.

Yeah, I know how to enhance a room vibes, candles, incense, furnishing, textures.

I love all that. I mean, in terms of cognitive

enhancements, memory, pattern recognition, so many different things.

But focus is something that we all deal with a little bit.

My focus kind of trails off. What about you?

Are you someone that locks in on something

and knows exactly what's going on and all the details and all the patterns?

If it was up to me, I would love to have

the ability to focus on what I want to focus on and tune out the rest.

Like sounds and noise and people, literally that.

But also the cool thing about cognitive

enhancements is the idea of eliminating what's not necessary, you know what I'm

saying? So I love the idea of being able to pay attention to what I need to do, and

then that alleviating, like, tons of time-wasting looking all around.

Right.

I'm not sure if this is a superpower in a good way or if I'm a villain, but I have

an uncanny ability to just block people out when they talk to me.

Wow.

So if I'm having a conversation with someone and I don't know if I'm just more

focused or interested in something else in other detail, my mind will drift.

I'm not sure if that's actually like a

superpower or like a step back, a disadvantage or something.

Yeah.

I think that in some situations that could probably be really helpful.

I block people out all the time, but that seems rude.

So cognitive enhancements, a lot of the drama around this that people have and

culture would be what is considered fair and unfair.

Right.

So I think, like any kind of enhancement, what does that mean?

You take something and it needs to be better.

The idea of it needing to be better at all

is very philosophical, especially when it comes to the mind.

This is where people get really tripped up because it's like, of course we all would

like to be enhanced, but what is the limit?

And what are the parameters around that?

And what is considered fair or unfair advantage.

What I'm excited to do is just get to a baseline, a standard, a default.

I think the word enhancement is a loaded term.

People come to the conversation with so

many different stories connected to it, narratives.

It has some negatives attached to it, enhanced.

Have you been specially enhanced in all these different ways?

But it's not something to be scared of or

frightened or something to explore and ask questions about.

Or at least that's more or less my take on it.

Yeah. I think for me, we all have such different

minds and we all have such different gifts, and it's cool to give people the

opportunity to see where they have natural gifts.

And maybe sometimes we feel like we have to enhance ourselves

to be able to do certain things that maybe we don't necessarily need to be doing.

I don't know. The SATS, for example.

This is one way to measure knowledge. Right?

There are so many different types of knowledge.

There's so many different types of people that are so uniquely gifted.

I think sometimes, cognitive enhancements,

people might think about having to apply themselves in a way that might not come

naturally to them, and they have every right to do that.

But it's also cool to look at what is

coming natural and sort of like lean into that as well.

And I think you're entirely right.

I love what you just brought up.

All right, so let's transition into our first guest because I think she has a

better understanding of all the cognitive enhancements.

Our first guest today is Dr.

Erin Conrad.

Erin Conrad works in the Neurology

Department of the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in

epilepsy seizures and deep brain stimulation.

Before coming to Philadelphia, she earned

Her article, "Attitudes Towards Cognitive Enhancement, the role of the metaphor and

context," was a vital addition to cognitive enhancement research.

The piece assesses people's views on cognitive enhancement and how we might

help destigmatize and educate about its use.

Welcome, Erin.

Could you introduce yourself?

I'm Erin Conrad. I'm a doctor.

I'm a neurologist specifically, and my specialty is in epilepsy.

My research is a combination of more quantitative EEG analysis, trying to help

improve outcomes in epilepsy, and then also a little bit of ethics as well.

And this is how I forayed into cognitive enhancement.

I got really interested in neuroethics.

You kind of lit up around cognitive

enhancement. Where did that spark come from?

I did a lot of work with Anjan Chatterjee, who's at Penn as well, and he was starting

to do some work in cognitive enhancements, so he got me interested in it.

From a research standpoint.

Can you define what cognitive enhancements are?

It's where healthy people enhance their cognition.

So this is very different from enhancing

cognition for the purpose of treating a disease.

So as a neurologist, for instance, I prescribe medications like cholinergics to

help treat Alzheimer's disease and improve thinking in that disease.

And then psychiatrists might prescribe

stimulants to people with ADHD or similar diseases.

Increasingly, healthy people have started

to use these same sorts of medications to enhance their own thinking.

Why do you think people are making that decision?

I think there are a lot of motivations.

I'm most familiar with seeing this among students who are studying for an exam or

something like that and might take stimulants to kind of help with their

attention and their focus while they're studying.

We also see a similar class of sorts of

medications in athletes who are kind of taking performance-enhancing drugs.

We're also increasingly seeing this in the workplace.

People who aren't students aren't athletes

but are just taking it to perform better at their jobs.

Are energy drinks cognitive enhancers?

I mean, they could potentially, you could say a cup of coffee, you could say is a

cognitive enhancer, like anything that is enhancing your thinking or mood or

anything could be argued to be a cognitive enhancer.

Can you talk about some of the language in

a conversation going on about healthy people using cognitive enhancements?

I think the pro arguments are some of the more obvious ones.

First, as an individual, you can improve your thinking, your mood.

It sounds great.

Also, there are potential benefits to society.

So, for instance, some people work in jobs where their reasoning ability, their

focus, their reaction time are critical to helping, protecting the public.

So you can think of pilots or maybe doctors, for instance, firefighters.

I'm a doctor.

And so medical residents who are young doctors in training.

They routinely work 30 hours shifts without sleep.

Which is wild, which is crazy.

That's a whole other conversation.

That's a problem in itself.

That's the other thing about this stuff is sometimes it's like there's a solution

here, but the problem is sometimes a societal one.

You think the best solution to the 30 hours shift thing is not stimulants.

It would be like fixing the doctor shortage or something like that. But

that's going to be hard to fix. So in the absence of that, if you're a patient and

you know your doctor is going to be sleep-deprived, would you rather have a

sleep-deprived doctor or a sleep-deprived doctor on stimulants?

I'd rather them be well rested! Is one of

the reasons the cognitive enhancers are such an exciting topic for you and many

other people in the field, is it because you're pioneering? Is this all new?

A lot of neurology and psychiatry are

undergoing, an explosion now in terms of our understanding.

The brain is so poorly understood, and

it's one of the last organs of the body that we don't understand very well.

And then with cognitive enhancement, that's really in its infancy, I think.

But there are a lot of doctors and scientists that think that there's

potential that the future incarnations of these could actually be really powerful.

And so it's exciting to think about it

from an ethical standpoint while it's still in its infancy.

I would love to talk a little bit about

your findings and your paper and talking about the framing and the language that we

use around cognitive enhancement in society.

study of basically public opinion on cognitive enhancement.

Most of the studies that had been done so far were asking about the use of

cognitive enhancement in students, but we were interested in looking at it more

broadly because we're seeing increasingly people who aren't students, who are just

taking it for work or for personal use, was increasing.

And so we wanted to see what people thought about that.

We gave participants one of three different scenarios.

We asked them to imagine a student using

cognitive enhancement pills to help study or an athlete using them to help train or

an employee using them to help in the workplace.

And we asked them, what do you think about this?

Do you think this is okay to use cognitive enhancement in this situation?

And would you do it yourself if you were in this situation?

The first thing we found is that people were much more likely to say it was okay

to use it than to say that they would use it themselves.

We also found that people were more accepting of cognitive enhancement in the

workplace than in either school or athletics.

And that was a little interesting and unexpected.

We had expected that people wouldn't really like the use of cognitive

enhancement in sports, and we weren't expecting necessarily to see this

difference where people thought it was more acceptable to use cognitive

enhancement in the workplace than in school.

So it wasn't totally clear why people

thought it was more okay to use it in the workplace than in school.

I have a wild guess, only because we see work as a lifeline.

This is how you make a living.

If you are not able to work and you can't make a living and take care of yourself

and the loved ones around you, so on and so forth.

So we might have a softer attitude towards

someone being stimulated so they can stay up for 30 hours.

That's my guess.

And I will have to follow up with another survey.

Yeah, right. So you think the benefits to

the individual are higher in the workplace?

That's fair.

Erin, do you think that cognitive enhancements are cheating?

This is a cheating answer, but I think

that cheating is defined based on the rules of the game.

And if you set the rules of the game very

clearly to say don't use these drugs, then it is cheating.

And then in school, I think that gets more complicated because then

for instance, if you're taking a pill that enhances your performance right before you

go into the SATs, that feels like "not fair." What about, though, if you're

taking that same pill to help you study for the SATs two weeks before, that is

also maybe a little less unfair, but still doesn't seem great.

But then let's say, what if you took this pill ten years earlier and it actually

made you smarter, able to learn more information down the line, and then maybe

go on to do more good things with that? That seems more fair. It seems like it's a

continuum depending on the context in which you're using it.

I love that answer. The one thing that popped into my mind and when you said that

is, who's making these rules and how are we navigating these questions based on

these assumptions, based on these standards and these rules?

I have a question, too, about transparency around these things.

So everyone has the right to be private about what they want to be private about.

But when it comes to hero-worship and

putting people on a pedestal, do you think that people being transparent about some

of the enhancements they use would be beneficial to our society?

That's a good question.

So I think in the context of school, for instance, being able to say, oh, I was

successful in part because I was taking a stimulant.

I think that could be helpful to inform

other people's choices, potentially in a positive way.

Like, if more people were using stimulants

and that was helpful to them, then maybe that could be a good thing.

We don't fully know the potential of these

medications, both from a positive and a negative.

So I think for now, understanding what

people are doing would be more helpful in terms of the pros, benefits to the

individual, benefits to society, and then in terms of the downsides.

People talk about the medical risks, the psychiatric risks of addiction.

Some people are concerned about this

concept of fundamentally altering who we are.

Other people are really worried about this coercion idea.

Like, so for instance, you catch someone

who's taking performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and they say, I didn't want to

take it, but I had to because everyone is taking it.

And then there's also a concern of exacerbating inequalities, because

imagine, these pills are probably not going to be free.

So if they're available only to those who

can afford them, then it's going to be exacerbating preexisting inequalities.

And then you imagine, taking SAT prep

classes or things like that -- it's just another way for people who are already

rich and successful to get more rich and successful.

And also it is an answer to a societal pressure. Is there ever a time where it's

like, all right, enough, you're good enough as you are?

I think one way in which cognitive enhancement is different from, say, SAT

prep classes is the idea of it being a zero-sum game or not.

So if it's something like the SATs, I feel like that is a zero-sum game.

You're measuring your ability relative to other people's.

But you can imagine if people are taking cognitive-enhancing pills for their job,

then depending on what that is, everyone could potentially benefit.

I think the classic historical example I can think of is Paul Erdos.

He was a mathematician, and one of the most prolific mathematicians in history.

and was doing this heavily aided by stimulants.

And one of his friends was kind of worried about him, and he actually made him a bet

that he couldn't go off of stimulants for a month.

And Erdos took the bet and he did it.

He didn't use any stimulants for a month.

He was not able to write anything.

He couldn't come up with any discoveries.

And he told his friend, you just set mathematics back a month.

And you can imagine the flip side of, w

ell, maybe if you have people, scientists, whatever, who are taking these, can they

accelerate their discoveries and enhance social progress?

That's the big potential benefit of cognitive enhancement.

That's exciting.

But against all of those potential negatives.

Something that jumps out to me as well as

far as the workday and how many hours we should be working.

Me, as a young person, and I know a lot of

other young people, have an assumption that people are grinding nonstop.

But a lot of the CEOs that we look up to

of these big corporations work like 2 hours a day.

And so I like using cognitive enhancements as a tool to at least kind of deconstruct

and ask these really important questions about work, who we are.

What are some of the next steps in cognitive enhancements?

So first, from a public policy and public

opinion standpoint, understanding how people feel about these different things

depending on the situation they're in. In terms of the actual research, before we

even get to cognitive enhancements helping healthy people,

improving these medications that we have available to people with disease, and then

find a way to translate that to healthy people.

What do you think the future is of cognitive enhancement?

The future.

First, I think most universities ban

the use of these stimulants for nonmedical reasons.

And also just the fact that so many people

are using this, out of proportion to how many people are prescribed it.

When it comes to prescription stimulants,

for instance, that makes me think that banning cognitive enhancement probably

isn't going to actually stop people from using it.

So I think it is to some degree inevitable.

So then it's more about, well, how do we

then respond to it, given that people are going to use it?

And I think part of that is involving the public in the debate to understand how

people feel about it, whether they would use it, in what context?

So that it's not just a bunch of ethicists and scientists talking in isolation.

But then also I think that it's so hard to

talk about it now because it's still in its infancy.

The pills, as they exist right now, aren't that effective.

And I think that as we develop

future versions of these that are potentially more effective and have their

own concrete risks and benefits, then I think it will evolve from a conversation

that's more abstract thinking about potential benefit, potential harms into a

real conversation about these are the benefits, these are the harms.

And then I think it will become clearer what we're talking about.

Erin, thank you so much for joining us and having this conversation.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

Yes, thank you.

That was awesome. Yeah.

I always find it so interesting that the context plays into people's opinions.

Right? Yeah.

Well, I guess some people don't feel that way.

Right?

Like some people are a little bit on the fence about that.

Yeah.

I love how she was so open about talking about the differences that people have in

perception around this and that she empathized with that.

And even though it's her specialty, I think that she had a very zoomed-out

point of view, and she was able to see everyone's point of view.

I also love that she accepted us, saying, hey, we put people on a pedestal, that's

superhuman, and maybe we should take it easy around that.

So how do you think the attitudes towards

cognitive enhancement might push us to, I don't know, being better, faster,

stronger, smarter, quicker and all that stuff?

I think it's all about people understanding what's good for them.

And I think the best version of Human 2.0 is an integrated version of yourself where

you're like, all right, what do I need and what does that look like?

And I think that some of these cognitive enhancements give people the opportunity

to assess what they really need and even have a team around them and have

accessibility to it and even have the opportunity to say, hey, guess what?

Actually, no, it's not what I need.

So as this research happens, I think the

discourse is going to change around the content.

Absolutely. Some of the framing of the questions might

evolve so continuously we'll gain enlightenment but be confused.

Yeah, those are both always happening at the same time.

It's kind of a beautiful thing.

There's someone who can certainly shed more light on cognitive enhancement.

We're referring to, of course, Franklin

Institute chief bioscientist Dr. Jayatri Das.

Let's welcome, Jayatri now for a recurring

segment, Body of Knowledge with Jayatri Das.

On this segment, we will discuss our episode topics in a more open formu.

We're going to throw around some questions and talk about ideas.

Welcome, Dr. Jayatri Das.

Welcome, Jayatri. So what comes to mind

for you first when you hear cognitive enhancements?

Right.

So I think about how do I make myself smarter, right.

Very simple level.

I need to be better.

I need to do better on something.

I just need my brain to work better. Right.

That's the assumption in a cognitive

enhancement is that we need to fix something.

Right. I think what surprised me when I first

started learning about this was how many people are already doing it.

I read a statistic that in a survey of college students in the US, about 17% of

students are already taking some kind of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancer.

Wow.

So a little troubling, but I mean, maybe that's just that.

So let's unpack that! Yes, exactly.

I'd love to.

Right, so when we think about different types of cognitive enhancers, we can think

about things like caffeine and nicotine, which are legal.

And I think most people would think it's ethical because it's legal.

That's kind of an interesting connection between ethics and the law.

But I drink caffeine to get some energy or

wake up in the morning or focus before I'm getting ready to do something.

So we're all pretty comfortable with caffeine.

But then when you think about attention,

drugs, like Ritalin or Adderall, or drugs that help you stayP awake, like Provigil.

These are drugs that people are now using not to treat a particular diagnosis, but

to do better on a test or to stay awake and study longer.

Things like that. Totally.

I think too about celebrity culture and how a lot of celebrities are taking things

to stay awake and taking things to then rest and they're traveling around the

world and they're creating all this work that people look up to.

But the transparency around cognitive

enhancements is important to me because I think that if that kind of thing is talked

about, then maybe more people would understand.

Like you can totally accomplish these

things, but please understand that there were enhancements and that there was

help. I don't know. That's an interesting question.

And I really appreciate that insight because people act human as if they're

doing everything without any level of assistance.

But there's a lot going on when you kind of pull back the layers.

Yes. I mean, what you guys are touching on

really gets at some of these ethical questions that social scientists have

talked about when it comes to cognitive enhancement.

So even getting beyond, just the medical

risks of taking it when it's not prescribed to you, the authenticity of it,

this boundary between treatment versus enhancement and who defines what's healthy

and what's enhanced talking about inequality.

There are people who have access to these drugs and others who don't.

And what does that mean in terms of who can get it and who can benefit from it?

And then that idea of just unfairness, right?

Thinking back to doping in sports and things like that.

So for this part of Body of Knowledge, we're taking to the Internet.

Ever heard of that?

To see what people are curious about when it comes to cognitive enhancement.

Cognitive enhancements, to me are like the

real Housewives of science because there's so much drama around it.

Everyone has an opinion.

People think it's fair, and some people think it's not fair.

Some people think it's none of your business.

Our team Google search cognitive

enhancement and we're going to read off some of the search results.

Yeah. And really quickly, we ask the Internet,

of course, what do they think about cognitive enhancements?

So we have some auto-fill questions here.

"is cognitive enhancement for studying?"

There you go.

Probably about 17% of people Googling where to get those drugs.

"is cognitive enhancement for depression?"

That's such a complex one to unpack because there's so much that we don't know

about what happens in the brain because of depression.

People's ability to think and process is...They just can't do it.

But we don't understand enough about why they can't do it to be able to reverse it.

Within the realm of science and research, how is depression framed? How are

scientists looking at depression? You talked about some of the complexities

around it and not being able to pin it down.

It's one of the biggest mysteries

in neuroscience right now is trying to figure out what is the brain chemistry of

depression, what causes it, and how do you change it.

And even when you think about antidepressants,

we kind of know what they do, but we don't really know why they work and why they

work for some people and don't work for other people.

I think where we're seeing this

relationship with cognitive enhancement is this general cry for help, is like, "I

know that I'm not working the way to be who I want to be and how do I help that?"

And then, of course, taking into

consideration the natural ebb and flow of moods.

Right.

And the manic and then the depressed waves that many people go through before

accomplishing anything or truly even getting out of bed,

almost depressed enough to become manic enough to do something with the day.

That is often what I think about and that

I see around me, especially obviously with artists.

But then you get to talk to people that aren't artists.

If you open up your world a little (I'm

speaking to myself) and you see that everyone feels this way.

Everyone.

So there's this other thing with modern

society and depression, which is, i nstead of something being wrong with you,

maybe something is right with you because look around if you're not depressed at

all, we got a big problem going on with you.

But of course, there needs to be solutions

when it's getting in the way of being able to live a life.

But there are thresholds there that are interesting.

Right. Again, who defines what's healthy

and what's clinically depressed? And what is that gradient?

"cognitive enhancement in the elderly....?"

Man, this is one of the questions that I

get asked the most, like how do I keep my brain healthy as I get old? Becausee part

of normal healthy aging is some cognitive decline.

I walk in rooms constantly and I'm like,

why did I come in here? What was I going to do?

And you're not even that elderly, right?

We're all here living our lives along a spectrum.

Right.

Time is a construct, Bey.

It's fine.

People are asking that a lot for sure.

And again, it's just like

what is sort of quote-unquote "normal aging?" And what kind of cognitive decline

can we all expect versus when is it a symptom of something more serious?

The next one on the list is, "are cognitive enhancers worth it?"

That's a value question.

Yes, it is, "worth." What are you trading and what are you gaining?

Right.

You brought up something a couple of moments ago about, I know I can do this.

So it's that perception of who you are and your ego.

And like, I know I can do this.

And so maybe I don't know the pursuit of that you think anything's worth it?

You'll lay it out all on the line to

perform the way that you feel like you could or should.

Right. But if you think of cognitive

enhancer as like a shortcut to an achievement, does it still mean as much?

Wow. Well, that's a great question.

I think the last one, which I absolutely loved was Adderall, is life changing.

I love that that's a commercial.

I mean, it can be life changing for

somebody who suffers from attention disorder.

This type of medicine can really make a huge difference in someone's life.

Right.

And the question is, okay, but for that purpose, that's great.

But what about repurposing it for somebody who just wants to do better on a test?

Right.

Well, that's all the time we have for today.

Thank you so much to Jayatri and Aaron Conrad.

This concludes our first episode of So Curious.

I'm excited.

Hi, this is Angelica Pettini from So Curious.

You know what?

We love making this shop okay, but sometimes they are great bits.

We just can't fit them into the episode.

So we put together a bunch of great bonus content and you can find that available at

beyond fi.edu. Thanks so much for listening to our premiere episode of So

Curious presented by The Franklin Institute.

We're excited for the season ahead.

We've got a lot of amazing science and guests in store for you.

Subscribe to this podcast wherever you're

listening and Mark your calendar for new episodes every Monday.

This podcast is part of The Franklin Institute.

The Franklin Institute is a science Museum located in Philadelphia.

The Franklin Institute's mission is to

inspire a passion for learning about science and technology.

For more information on everything about

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Check them out@radiokismet.com.

There's a lot of people who make this podcast happen.

Thanks to the producers Joy Montefusco and

Jayatri Das, our managing producer, Emily Cherish, our operations head, Christopher

Plant, our associate producer, Liliana Green, our audio team, Christian Cedar,

Lund, Goldie Bangley, Lauren DeLuca, and Brad Florence.

Our developer footman producer, Opiola

Bocola, our science writer Kira Vayette, and our graphic designer, Emma Sagar.

See you next week. Bye.