Slashdot Mirror
Smarter Children Through Food Supplements
An anonymous reader writes "Baby rats (mmm...baby rats) fed a little extra choline in utero popped out with brain cells dramatically bigger and faster than pups who didn't receive the supplement. Duke University researchers say the implications are profound for humans and the future of learning."
So now we get to find out if overclocking the brain
with choline will lead to nasty side effects?
I would think that some percentage of Slashdotters would understand that a child who isn't challenged by schoolwork could turn into an outcast of some sort or, worse, could refuse to do work altogether. They will think of petty homework and tasks such as character charts and subjects such as The Renaissance as beneath their intelligence. I am going through a personal hell not being able to concentrate in my classes. It's all so uesless to me. Why am I reading this book? Why am I doing this math problem? I'm a writer. I need to write freeform! Anyway, that's basically the mindset of a kid who has given up on school.
And now, for a sig that's a complete copout.
You can buy choline in almost any of those stores which sell vitamins and nutritional supplements. I live in New York and there is one on every corner.
I read something similar about over a year ago in Science News magazine. Curious and willing to experiment on myself, I bought a jar of choline and started taking one a day.
Here's what I noticed:
First, its it's an intestinal irritant. Its sold in gelatine capusules and if you just swallow one a day, you'll be sorry after a while. I recommend opening the capsules and disolving the choline in something buffered, like milk.
You don't notice anything for a few weeks. And after you stop taking it, the effects persist for weeks.
The stuff is defintely psychoactive. I was constantly locked in deep thought. I finally stopped taking it because I got tired of thinking all the time.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This strikes me as a bit bizarre.
Humanity already has a fairly well-known subgroup of people with brains that have more active neuronal structure, greater capacity for memory, a drastic reduction in age-related decline in cognitive/memorizations kills, and heightened sensory reactions. (Which is all wonderful to have, speaking firsthand.)
The response from the community has not been to embrace us. It has been to force us into painful "treatments" from a young age that train us to "act normal" -- to hide all signs that we're different, including strong natural interests in learning and pain at stimuli that doesn't bother sensory-average humans. There are huge organizations decrying how horrible it is that we exist at all, that actively claim it'd be better if we died of cancer, because we don't act just like "normal" people.
It strikes me as bizarrely hypocritical for one wing of science to be fighting to find a way to prevent/cure my kind, while another is attempting to learn how to intentionally create us. We're already here, we tend to reproduce reliably within families, we just need to be accepted rather than terrorized into hiding our abilities.
More on topic, changing one parameter of complex system that is possibly well tuned for what it does, but not well tuned for parameter changes, may result in a system that is far less efficient or even completely broken.
Imagine if you magically made it possible for signals to travel on ethernet faster than routers could process them. You might see an increase in congestion or in misrouted packets. This in turn could melt down the network, or at least make it impossible for anyone to use it.
I am not trying to say that this is what the researchers have proposed. I'm just pointing out that making one thing better can put stress on or even break the entire system.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
A smarter rat doesn't necessarily correspond to a smarter human. And human intelligence isn't necessarily related to whether the hardware is faster. By analogy, a DSP may run operations faster than a Pentium, but that doesn't make the DSP a better general purpose processor. Or, as another analogy, just upgrading the clock circuit on your motherboard doesn't just make your processor faster--it may also make it flakier. It's plausible that choline is somewhat beneficial as a nutrient during pregnancy. But I wouldn't expect miracles (if choline were that important, women would crave more of it than they do), and there is at least the possibility that an unbalanced intake actually might do some harm.