Personality hacking - what are we willing to enhance?
OK, hypothetical question - let’s say you could pick any personality trait to be chemically enhanced. Which aspects of your personality would be in the top three? [image by Tom Saint]
According to a recent study, you’re most likely to be willing to tweak the parts of your psyche that you don’t consider fundamental to to your identity as a person - your ability to concentrate, for example, or maybe the number of hours of sleep you need each night. [via FuturePundit]
Human enhancement drugs are still very much in their infancy at the moment; to draw an analogy, many people were pretty leery of plastic surgery when it was first becoming more commonplace. So I suspect that we’ll see the ‘early-adopter’ pattern with more drastic enhancements, with artists, outcasts and other pioneers of the psyche venturing out beyond mere ‘cosmetic’ cognitive enhancement… after all, think how useful it would be to become autistic for a week.
