Sunday’s Big Idea
Design Your Mind
The switch from beer to coffee as a morning drink in England coincided with (and, quite possibly, fueled) the rise of the Industrial Age. 5-hour Energy Drink and Red Bull haven't greatly improved upon the basic formula. But there's every reason to believe that we're on the cusp of an age in which we'll be able to enhance memory, attention, creativity, and other desirable cognitive attributes pharmaceutically, and possibly without undesirable side effects. Further down the line, parents may very well have the option of enhancing these traits in their babies in utero, through genetic modification.
But in these early days of the revolution, we're seeing a lot of marketing for products that promise more than they can probably deliver, including learning apps and software designed to make us smarter, more efficient, and in every way closer to the "we that we want to be."
