Pick Your Brains
“It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses… more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.” Carl Sagan. ‘Pale Blue Dot’ This was going to be a crazy idea article about increasing human intelligence then Elon Musk launched Neuralink to do just that and the idea went from ‘crazy’ to ‘mainstream’ overnight. The questions now are: how do we do it and should we do it at all? I mage: Gerd Altman / Pixabay Building a Better Brain ‘Smart drugs’ or Nootropics have been around a while. Unfortunately there’s no Limitless-style pill to increase your brain power as yet though there is plenty of information of varying provenance available on-line and a large sub-culture of self-experimenters. Results appear modest and mixed. We could always try adding in intelligence genes with gene editing tools like CRISPR but the problem there i...