This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology

Excerpt from an Interview with Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution, from h+ magazine.

Like any new set of tools, the set of emerging neurotechnology tools can be used for both good and bad purposes. Today there are college students, Wall Street financiers, software programmers, and even poker players who are using cognitive-enabling drugs to improve their competitive performance.

There is a whole host of ethical, legal, and societal issues with taking drugs generally developed to treat an illness and then using them to help normal humans. There are issues of safety. There are issues of fairness. There are issues of health. And there are issues of coercion. And the reality is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, there are over 100 compounds in clinical development right now focused on treating some form of memory loss. And we expect a small handful of these over the next decade to improve memory in normal humans. So you can imagine the inherent coercive force that will emerge as those treatments become developed. Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco and she's competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, India. Neither one knows whether the other is using one of these cognitive-enabling drugs.

And it's not just drugs; there are neurodevices in development that will be able to improve memory and speed learning. What we're going to see is what I call "neuro competition." This is the next form of competition that individuals and businesses and nations will adapt to gain competitive advantage –- except this will be a neuro advantage. Just as companies today compete for a competitive advantage in information technology –- whether it's the latest social software, the latest IT backbone, the latest servers, or the latest customer relationship management systems –- they will use neurotechnologies to improve their competitive positioning.

The new neurotechnologies will come in multiple forms. They will come not just as drugs to improve one's competitive performance, or emotional performance, or physical stamina, but they will also come in emotion-sensing technologies... and one of the really hard questions moving forward is: where does this all go? This was a major reason for writing the book -- to begin to spark a broad public dialog around the societal implications of where this technology might go, and how might we begin to have a conversation around what regulatory options that we might want to start discussing.