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.
1. It doesn’t say _You_ won’t enhance you’re personality, but a freaking marketing research study of *Young* people (which isn’t really defined) and what words they’d pitch to them to buy Teh_Future_BrainPillz.
2. Um, don’t people already change their personality via medz prescribed by Psychologists? Isn’t that _the point_?
3. I agree with the outliers theory 😉 And you’ve got me thinking of the Meths in AlteredCarbon now.. enhancement, long-life will never be for everybody.. it will take a certain kind of person to do these things. (*raises hand*)
4. That Autistic-for-a-day link is very interesting (how did I miss it?). Thanks Dude!!!
NP, m1k3y. 🙂
Great input for a story I happen to be working on now. Just don’t tell anybody, OK?