If were ten years older, i.e. old enough to be self-supporting with a little left over to invest, I’d be buying biotech. Computers seem to have reached a plateau for most practical purposes–oh, they’ll continue to get a lot shinier in a general way, and increased processing power could help with a few things like juggling graphics and cryptography, but they already do everything the average person really needs them to do pretty well. Alternative energy will be important, but that’s basically a matter of upping the efficiency of solar panels until they close in on the theoretical maximum efficiency–ultimately of little excitement. Biotech seems really exciting, though. Evolution is a blind watchmaker, a great builder of jury-rigged systems, but we’re beginning to figure them out, and this is giving us an ability to control them which, surely, will come to outstrip the wildest dreams of science fiction writers.

Sort of.

I mean, the above is what I thought when I got into molecular biology in the second half of my sophomore year. There’s some truth to it. But the thing is that what progress we’ve made in biotech has often been made in ignorance of what’s actually going on. With medicine especially: you do some clinical trials, you start using the stuff on a wide scale, and two, three, maybe more decades later you’re still debating how it really works.

This annoys me profoundly. It’s not enough to take the excitement out of it, we’ll still see cool things out of biotech, but it would be so much more gratifying to know how it works. We currently have a most a little, incomplete bit on many of the big issues–though I guess I can sate my interest on that little bit for now.

Take cognitive enhancers. They’re the stuff of superhero movies and dystopias, and at a moderately less fanciful level, some have suggested cognitive enhancers could lead to a cultural upheaval similar to the enlightenment (on the argument that caffeine cause the original enlightenment). Cognitive enhancers are here, not something for the future, though what we have right now will one day seem primitive. This has been true ever since it was realized that drugs designed to treat cognitive deficits can have similar benefits on those already operating at a normal level.

Think about it for a moment, and you realize there’s no good reason to expect to understand how these things work right now. We can tell everything that happens when a computer adds two large numbers together, but we don’t have similar information for the brain. So if we can’t give a full account of one case, why would we expect to give a full account of why things go better than one case than in another?

So, if you go into an account of, say, how cognitive enhancers work by focusing brain activity, expecting to get a full account, you’ll be disappointed. Okay, so some brain regions like the “default network” become less active, and the “default network” is what’s active when your mind wanders–but so what? Knowing gross facts about brain regions doesn’t tell you how the changes in this or that region cause the effect you care about. You may have thought that you could get an account of “focusing brain activity” as precise as the accounts you can get of focusing a beam of light, but what you’re really getting is much vaguer.

Oddly, though, we may get better explanations if we go “up a level,” away from the physical brain to the realm of subjective experience. /Slate/ had a very good piece about the writer’s personal experiments with Adderall that included this section:

The first hour or so of being on Adderall is mildly euphoric. The feeling wears off quickly, giving way to a calming sensation, like a nicotine buzz, that lasts for several hours. When I tried writing on the drug, it was like I had a choir of angels sitting on my shoulders. I became almost mechanical in my ability to pump out sentences. The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my inbox apparently shut down. Normally, I can only stare at my computer screen for about 20 minutes at a time. On Adderall, I was able to work in hourlong chunks. I didn’t feel like I was becoming smarter or even like I was thinking more clearly. I just felt more directed, less distracted by rogue thoughts, less day-dreamy. I felt like I was clearing away underbrush that had been obscuring my true capabilities.

Catch that sentence about e-mail? Your first reaction may be “pseudoscience–we really have no idea if there’s a part of the brain responsible for making you check e-mail.” But we know that the brain is quite specialized in terms of how damaging one part affects function. Maybe there is a region of your brain that makes you want to check e-mail, like part of your default network. That actually points us towards a general guess about how things work at the micro level. We know that circuitry is powerful, which suggests the hypothesis that different brain regions do what they do through specialized circuitry. That doesn’t tell us exactly what the circuitry is or how it works, but its a good direction to do research in.

Back to these subjective viewpoint: Will Wilkinson has talked about the benefits of cognitive enhancers by talking about how he once thought that he could be paid merely for coming up with great ideas, but to get stuff done he needs to shut off the feed of new ideas to put the ones he’s already got into something salable. This, I think, will be the core of what cognitive enhancement gets us in the near future. We can’t refine the horridly complicated microcircuitry, but we can choose to emphasize one thing and mute another. Ideally we’d be a lot better and more reliable at this than we are now–I once saw a guy who was trying to get through finals on Adderall, who ended up getting side tracked with an obsession over how to fix a calculator. Pretty horrifying to watch, actually. For cognitive enhancers to count as really safe, we need to be able to turn on what we want, rather than something distantly resembling what we want.