BEFORE David Adam can convince himself to ingest modafinil in a bid to cheat his way into Mensa, the society for people with a high IQ, he has a long way to go. First, he settles on a dodgy online pharmaceuticals outfit in India that apparently doubles as a honeymoon travel agency.
But when pills finally arrive in unlabelled blister packs, the risk proves too much for the author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop (in which he chronicles his triumph over OCD). It is legal to possess the sleep disorder drug in the UK, but he still needs to know if it is indeed modafinil he is about to put in his body.
Adam pleads with university chemistry labs to do the analysis. When he finally finds one willing, he has to hand over a blank cheque in return for the alarming promise that “we will try our best not to spend too much”. Some £230 later, spectroscopic analysis puts his mind at ease: the honeymoon travel agency has supplied the real thing.
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Later, Adam turns to boosting his brain with electrical stimulation to improve his physical intelligence – as measured on a home rowing machine. He recruits his wife to run a DIY trial of one. Twice he rows himself to exhaustion. During both sessions, he wears headgear – bought commercially – with electrodes pressed to his skull. To minimise the placebo effect, he asks his wife to choose when to turn the current on. The results are thrilling: nearly identical times. His delight ends when he asks which session was juiced up. “You asked me to choose so I turned it on both times.”
“Adam’s own definition of intelligence is the ability to use what you have got to get what you want”
Such stunts illustrate the perils of neuroenhancement, and form the backbone of Adam’s truly moreish The Genius Within. This, his second book, is of its time, as people reach for ever-more extreme ways to boost cognition. We used to have brain training, now we have modafinil and brain-zapping headgear – and we don’t know how well they really work.
But questions of effectiveness quickly give way to much more interesting ones: what do we mean by “intelligence” and “boosting intelligence”. If the answers seem obvious, the controversial history of intelligence research sets you straight. After nearly a century of prying into what makes some people cleverer than others, there is still no scientific definition of intelligence. In the end, Adam coins his own – and I will hazard it is a pretty good one. Blending various definitions, he comes up with: intelligence is the ability to use what you have got to get what you want. This provides his book with its structure, as each chapter explores a different facet of what he means by “what you have got”.
Many words are devoted to the mystery of general intelligence, or g: the innate, genetically linked (possibly, but hints of racism have made this research area too hot a potato) trait that started the hunt for the meaning and measurement of intelligence. As well as g, there is also the kind of executive control that can override the body’s decision as to when enough physical exertion is enough (hence the rowing experiment). Then there is creativity, emotional intelligence and even rationality.
Each chapter includes the most eye-popping examples of when these have been accidentally or purposefully altered or enhanced. Thus a blow to the head turns a mediocre artist into a savant, and electrodes that regulate one man’s epilepsy also restore his photographic memory.
A book on brain enhancement must pay at least lip service to the ethical objections and health concerns of well-meaning medics. The most common criticism is that it will increase the divides between haves and have-nots. All bets for egalitarianism must be off if the poor can no longer rely on the meritocracy because the rich can buy all the best brains.
Adam dispenses with these issues briskly but fairly. And in one of the book’s most satisfying reversals, he reveals that modafinil works better the further you are from high intelligence: brain enhancement turns out to offer the promise of doping as the great equaliser. He also defends it by extending his definition of intelligence to encompass the ability to be resourceful. If you can figure out how to obtain modafinil to boost your intelligence, that determination also counts as a facet of your intelligence.
While The Genius Within is hardly alone in the bookstore, it is among the best, and the least likely to make you struggle. In part, this is because it is generous with anecdotes, sharp-witted evasions of obvious conclusions and pub facts (who knew that a Japanese chemist first synthesised methamphetamine in 1919 as a medicine for people with lethargy and depression – or that it was given to kamikaze pilots in the hope it would make them less likely to change their minds?).
In the end, however, this vastly entertaining book never quite delivers a satisfying answer to its questions about what intelligence is for, and why we are going to such possibly illegal or maybe damaging lengths to increase it.
You might be forgiven for wondering whether some common anxiety hides behind our apparently unslakeable thirst to hack and boost our minds and bodies. André Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour at London’s Cass Business School, certainly thinks so. He co-authored Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement with Carl Cederström of Stockholm University. Our obsession with self-enhancement, Spicer argues, is a psychological bulwark against the increasing loss of control we face in our lives. Uncertainties like automation and rising inequality are fuelling a “collective nervous breakdown” that manifests in an effort to take greater control over our minds and bodies.
Against this backdrop, Adam points to a slightly uglier motive for trying to eke out an extra 5 IQ points by any means necessary: “The population is growing, and opportunities are shrinking.” He illustrates the point of cognitive enhancement in an increasingly brutal society with a familiar joke. “You’ll never outrun that lion,” says a wildlife photographer to another in the bush. “I don’t need to,” says the colleague. “I just need to outrun you.”
We have been cognitively “outrunning” each other for the past century. A steady increase in IQ in Western countries has been documented as the Flynn effect, after the researcher who identified it. If the industrial revolution led to that rise, it was because it “demands an upgrade to the average working person”. And it wasn’t just a mental upgrade. Our corporate wellness programmes also sprang from the sense that “people who don’t carefully cultivate their personal wellness are seen as a direct threat to contemporary society, a society in which illness… is defined as the inability to work”, says Spicer.
But in the so-called fourth industrial revolution we are now living in, the relationship between increasing intelligence and the tasks demanded of the average worker is less clear. In particular, the “knowledge economy” has replaced manufacturing jobs with desk jobs such as telemarketing, admin and PR. These don’t require IQs to rise any further, and indeed there is evidence that the Flynn effect may be tapering off.
“Magnetic stimulation won’t stop populism replacing democratic institutions with autocracy”
At the end of the day, what is the point of neuroenhancement? And how much improvement can we expect?
The modafinil and electrical stimulation did help Adam get into Mensa, but not quite in the way you might expect. Like a good scientist, he first ran a baseline experiment, taking the Mensa qualification test undoped.
To his chagrin, he got in – albeit only just. It would have been a neater experiment if he had failed. When he repeated the test a year later, now with modafinil, he got in again – this time with room to spare.
A few extra points added to our IQ might help us outrun the lion of automation, but with neuroenhancement becoming more pervasive, we will always be looking behind us.
Book details
Pan Macmillan
This article appeared in print under the headline “Getting smart in the 21st century”
