“Brain Gain” is a long but extremely fascinating article by Margaret Talbot for the New Yorker, discussing the effects and ethics of using prescription drugs to boost mental performance. I highly recommend that anyone and everyone take the time to read this, because it’s interesting, and an imminent issue that could (will?) affect all of us.

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What do you think (after reading the article, the highlights below, or neither)?

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Highlights:

In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

“We’re not talking about superhuman intelligence. No one’s saying we’re coming out with a pill that’s going to make you smarter than Einstein! . . . What we’re really talking about is enabling people.” He sketched a bell curve on the back of a napkin. “Almost every drug in development is something that will take someone who’s working at, like, forty per cent or fifty per cent, and take them up to eighty,” he said.

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This is an excerpt from “Once in a Lifetime” by Jhumpa Lahiri from her book of short stories Unaccustomed Earth. O had originally bought this book for his friend’s birthday, and I told his friend that I really wanted to read this book that he let me borrow it immediately. I’ve read three stories, and I already can tell you that it’s a highly recommended beautiful read. The reason I like this passage is because I love how Lahiri describes things.

In the morning you all slept in, victims of jet lag, reminding us that despite your presence, your bags crowding the hallways, your toothbrushes cluttering the side of the sink, you belonged elsewhere. When I returned from school in the afternoon you were still sleeping, and at dinner–breakfast for you–you all declined the curry we were eating, craving toast and tea. It was like that for the first few days: you were awake when we slept, sleeping when we were awake; we were leading antipodal lives under the same roof.

(Kristan, I read “Once in a Lifetime” from the old issue of The New Yorker and it is one of the stories in the second part of Unaccustomed Earth. I just finished reading the short story “Hell-Heaven” yesterday, and it is in the first part of the book.)