Mental Steroids

An interesting story from the L.A. Times about the prevalence of drugs like Adderall and Ritalin among professionals in mentally-demanding jobs.  For instance, a quarter of flutists (flautists?) are on some kind of pill.  This doesn’t bother me, but I wonder if anyone will ever be able to go back and judge the effect of something like caffeine on something like literature.  Would we notice any changes in the actual works that we could attribute, in whole or in part, to the introduction of a new psychoactive substance at the cultural level?

Anyway, the main reason I want to mention this article is this claim here:

 “Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame,” said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.

Can you imagine a world full of elderly men with rail-hard penises and photographic memories?  Well, you better get used to the idea, because that’s how we’re going to put down the robot uprisings of 2024.