In our world where success is judged often by how much you can juggle rather than how well your tackle any one particular item, drugs have become the human answer to competing with automation. We see it in sports where performance enhancing drugs drive an industry once dominated by smoking, drinking and chewing tobacco. As we compete with models of perfection, we need to become a bit more perfect to succeed (and I haven't yet mentioned plastic surgery, makeup or other external beauty enhancements). It seem smart people can't keep up anymore.

This week's New Yorker ran a story called Brain Gain which explores the use of performance enhancing drugs by high school and college students trying to do just a little better against the pack, and perhaps save some time for play. Reporter Margaret Talbot also discussed her research on KRCW's To the Pont today (listen here).

My position here is the same as with sports. It's time for footnotes and asterisks. In sports, the record books would have a big red line across which is written: from this point on, performance enhancing drugs were permitted in sports so comparisons with un-enhanced humans should be done cautiously. We could eventually do the same thing with academic awards, scientific papers, even Nobel Prizes.

To some degree we have to give up the moral high ground and recognize where society pushes individuals and just how far we have come down paths that won't allow for retreat or retrenchment. We try to control our children through these mind altering substances so they will concentrate at school and do OK. Why didn't we consider that the smart kids would want to boost their performance too?

My biggest concern is that we use these drugs to create factory smart people, not open minded, creative people who test boundaries and want to discover new things rather than master many things we already know. The future of our society depends on creativity (so as the director of my daughter's school play said, that by definition, means creative investments are under funded) not just on doing old things well. I always refused to give my children anything that would make them concentrate better in class. I might admonish them, and encourage them to learn, but learning takes many paths and sometimes fidgeting is an indicator of more than poor social control (like systemic issues of curriculum or an educators inability to engage or a mismatch between student and content).

At the end though, all of these issues are personal, thus the footnote. And I do mean all of these issues. We live in a society that reflects its members, a society with emergent, not engineered attributes. Our choice to accept cognition enhancements to drive performance is sad, inevitable and perhaps even distributive in a positive way. Only time will tell, if we end up with enough patience to pay attention and enough compassion to care.