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By Michael N. Tennison  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . Bioethicists and neuroethicists distinguish therapy from enhancement to differentiate the clusters of ethical issues that arise based on the way a drug or device is used. Taking a stimulant to treat a diagnosed condition, such as ADHD , raises different and perhaps fewer ethical issues than taking it to perform better on a test. Using a drug or device to enhance performance—whether in the workplace, the classroom, the football field, or the battlefield—grants the user a positional advantage over one’s competitors. Positional enhancement raises issues of fairness, equality, autonomy, safety, and authenticity in ways that do not arise in therapy; accordingly, distinguishing enhancement from therapy makes sense as a heuristic to flag these ethical issues.  These categories, however, do not capture the entire scope of the reasons for and contexts in which people use drugs or devices to modify their experiences. Con...

By Nada Gligorov Nada Gligorov is an associate professor in the  Bioethics Program of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai . She is also faculty for the  Clarkson University-Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Masters Program . The primary focus of Nada’s scholarly work is the examination of the interaction between commonsense and scientific theories. Most recently, she authored of a monograph titled  Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense  (Studies in Brain and Mind, Springer). In 2014, Nada founded the  Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology speaker series –a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. Within the debate on neuroenhancement, cognitive and moral enhancements have been discussed as two different kinds of improvements achievable by different biomedical means. Pharmacological means that improve memory, attention, decision-making, or wakefulness have been accorded the sta...

By Kelsey Drewry Kelsey Drewry is a student in the Master of Arts in Bioethics program at the Emory University Center for Ethics where she works as a graduate assistant for the Healthcare Ethics Consortium. Her current research focuses on computational linguistic analysis of health narrative data, and the use of illness narrative for informing clinical practice of supportive care for patients with neurodegenerative disorders. After reading a recent study in Frontiers in Public Health (Ohtani et al. 2017) I realized I might have unwittingly been taking part in cognitive enhancement throughout the vast majority of my life. I have been a dedicated equestrian for over twenty years, riding recreationally and professionally in several disciplines. A fairly conservative estimate suggests I’ve spent over 5000 hours in the saddle. However, new evidence from a multi-university study in Japan suggests that horseback riding improves certain cognitive abilities in children. Thus, it seems my pri...

By Shweta Sahu Image courtesy of Pexels . I was always an average student: I was good, just not good enough . I often wondered what my life and grades would be like if I’d had a better memory or learned faster. I remember several exams throughout my high school career where I just could not recall what certain rote memorization facts or specific details were, and now in college, I realize that if I could somehow learn faster, how much time would I save and be able to study even more? Would a better memory have led me to do better on my exams in high school, and would my faster ability to learn new information have increased my GPA? Such has been the question for years now in the ongoing debates of memory enhancement and cognitive enhancement , respectively. I’m not the only student to have ever felt this way and I’m sure I won’t be the last. Technology and medicine seem to be on the brink of exciting new findings, ones that may help us in ways we’ve never before thought imaginable. Th...

By Somnath Das This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. I am a Senior at Emory University and am currently pursuing a double major in Neuroscience and Chemistry. Currently, I am applying to medical school. My interest in healthcare lies primarily in understanding the behavioral motivations of patients as they navigate through various healthcare systems. I also wish to study how to effectively translate innovations powered by biomedical research into accurate health information for patients and optimized healthcare delivery. Neuroethics allows me to focus these interests onto patient dignity and rights when considering the role of novel therapeutics and interventions in treatment. Studying this fascinating field has given me a perspective on the role that deontological considerations play in both neuroscience and medicine as a whole. It is with this perspective that I h...

By Nadia Irfan This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. The Western society familiar to most of us attending the Neuroethics Network conference in Paris is certainly one that values and glorifies financial gain and socio-economic upward mobility. We are obsessed with the notion of the “optimal” self: an idealized image of a self that never tires, never ages, and is always running at its top performance. The Neuroethics Network Cinéma du Cerveau movie Limitless raises an interesting perspective about who represents this image, who achieves and maintains this lifestyle, and whether this optimal version only has value in a competitive context. I think when representing cognitive enhancement, it is important to note the lens it is viewed through. Eddie Morra, the main character in the film, is played by Bradley Cooper, “a young, able-bodied, white, cis-gendered heterosexual male,” as note...

By Peter Leistikow This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris in Summer 2016. Peter Leistikow is an undergraduate student at Emory University studying Neuroscience and Sociology. When he is not doing research in pharmacology, Peter works as a volunteer Advanced EMT in the student-run Emory Emergency Medical Service.  Ever since the advent of electricity, people have tried to harness this power for therapeutic purposes. Nineteenth century posters touted the benefits of “self-applicable curatives for nervous, functional, chronic, and organic diseases” in the form of electric belts and harnesses (Browne 2014). Although these items are historical curiosities today, scientists are still trying to harness the potential benefits of electricity, especially in the treatment of psychiatric and learning disorders. Transcranial direct current stimulation ( TDCS ) is a non-invasive experimental procedure that u...