What is an acceptable level of brain enhancement in social or work situations today? A strong cup of Starbucks? A Red Bull? A dose of Ginko Biloba? 54mg of Concerta? The current state of debate would suggest that the line for the average person on the street (ie, someone not diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD), the line is beginning to move from standard of over-the-counter traditional stimulants such as coffee, herbal supplements or sugary drinks to what one researcher calls cosmetic neurology. This is roughly defined as using heavier pharmaceuticals and higher dose supplements to attain states the brain cannot get to on its own: hyper-focused, able to stay on task for long periods under duress.

The issue specifically in question in a recent issue of Nature was the discussion by two academics of their colleagues' use of such drugs to further their working capacities. It is only controversial because use by academics themselves has been called out in public, while behind the scenes statistics mount daily about high school and college students' use of friends' prescriptions to cram for exams and otherwise extend study ability. Like alcohol, this use of so-called "smart drugs" is also finding its way into social and other professional situations, but instead of a drink to wind down after work, they are being used to enhance personality and performance in more important situations such as job interviews, presentations and such.

One analog to watch is the advance in enhancement in athletics. In the past decade, the line of acceptable assistance has moved from a good breakfast and some Gatorade to running with shorts interlaced by supportive bands of material that assist in muscle retraction for sprinters, as featured in the Adidas Techfit line of products. Today, no one complains about athletes wearing assistive clothing. So, after society moves beyond a few high profile "test cases" mulling the ethics of dosing the brain with smart drugs before a critical event (performing surgery, delivering the State of the Union address), we will all move on to find our breakfast cereal or morning juice will contain a hint of DMAE in a few years.

Of course, we could just stick to drinking tap water.
 

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece about how "zoomability" was emerging as a new value in consumer information and media usage, and how it may eventually move from digital interfaces to how our children view the world, becoming a reference model for combining space and information. Bruno Giussani points out a new article in Newsweek looking at the same phenomenon and how the urge to zoom is being fulfilled by a raft of new applications on our mobile phones and other places where we encounter media.

The article makes a good point about the fundamental flaw in limiting information browsing and selection to a hierarchical structure such as folders, where this natural inclination to create mental maps and zoom for information is hindered by the older technical limitations of computing:

'The Internet, it seems, doesn't take advantage of how humans best process information. Evolution granted Homo sapiens a high degree of visual acuity—all the better to pick out camouflaged predators on the savanna—and despite the progress of civilization, we're still highly visual creatures. "Humans are best at scanning over a fixed field and finding what they want," says design guru Edward Tufte, whose books on visual display have influenced generations of designers. Finding a jar of honey in the kitchen cupboard is a simple task—you have an intuitive sense of where it rests in your house and how to access it. Translated to the computing world, the process becomes more deliberate: click the "house" folder, navigate to the "kitchen" subdirectory, find another folder dubbed "cupboards"—and so on. "If you just think about everything in your house, and all the places you know in the world," says (Microsoft's Blaise) Aguera y Arcas, "you have a much richer mental map of all those things than you have of where your files are in your computer." Scrolling and linking are inferior modes of taking in information. "Humans are incredibly good at spatial navigation and incredibly bad at navigating through a list of generic icons or generic text," says John San Giovanni...'

Fulfilling the desire to zoom may present some fundamental changes in the way we work with products and services common to our lives. As our lives, possessions, relationships, tools and information sources become more complex, the need to quickly and intuitively navigate a system map of these things to locate hidden bits of information, see correlations or relationships, or rapidly find failure points points to a need for zoomable visual interfaces to replace the nested folder view or textual links in our lives.

This may also present another interesting point of generational departure: are our children growing up to be more visually oriented than us due to a higher exposure to visual stimulus? Will we be like our parents, struggling to adapt to a major change interfaces in our children's world? Will information vertigo become the new information overload? In the coming decade, easing this transition will become a major issue for designers concerned with interface usability.

Not a day after writing about the impact of video games on society's future cognitive abilities we find that a German company is marketing a multivitamin for gamers. The product, FpsBrain, provides its users with a mixed dose of B vitamins, caffeine and amino acids, just a taurine and a glucuronolactone away from a can of Red Bull.

This product is completely in step with today's performance-enhancement zeitgeist, and is just a logical next stop along the road of specialized multivitamins for different age groups. Why not activity-centered supplements for pursuits other than athletics? Is there a businessperson's gummi vitamin for bright ideas at the right moment, or perhaps a neurosurgeon's "stinger" to stay sharp during brain surgery in the near future?

Forget human growth hormone. Perhaps the next big thing is fast-twitch muscle implants. 

To find out more about this topic and how Changeist can help your organization understand its impact and the opportunities it presents, contact us at + 1 919 373 4360, or at info @ changeist.com. 

"Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related," shouts the headline of a great story on the satirical Web site, the Onion, today. My mind, admittedly made up in part of recipes for paella and 12-minute remixes of electronica classics, jumped straight to two other items I've seen this week--a post today on Smart Mobs about how different the technology experiences of thirty-something parents are from their children, and my own post, Nintendo Fluency, about how naturally Millennial take to the kind of social communication experiences we adults still experience as "seamful".

The Onion article elaborates on the fictional findings of researchers imaging a twenty-something's brain thusly:

"The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes."

While trying to be funny, the author doesn't know how true this statement probably is. While some have gone so far as to say that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may be in part a manifestation of children's brains adapting to high levels of stimulus brought on by our environmental explosion of technology and media, its not a long shot to say that kids' cognitive abilities and possibly even neural pathways are being heavily imprinted by the experiences easy access to technology--games, communication, other media, new interfaces and more that we heap on them every day through progress and development. The US military has taken note of young soldiers' comfort with video games as a cue to provide them training via similar environments. Serious games, video games designed with a training or educational goal in mind, are also centered around the idea that younger people may be more apt to learn and spread ideas through video game-based training.

Longer term, there are sure to be major implications for problem-solving, decision making, corporate strategy, and governmental policy in an age where professional adult engineers, CEOs, politicians and generals can look back not just to Sun Tzu,  Clausewitz or Drucker, but Pokemon and Katamari as well. I, for one, am curious to see the outcomes.

To find out more about this topic and how Changeist can help your organization understand its impact and the opportunities it presents, contact us at + 1 919 373 4360, or at info @ changeist.com.