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'Mind Doping' Becoming More Common
runamock writes "The Los Angeles Times is running a story on the growing use of 'mind drugs':
'Forget sports doping. The next frontier is brain doping. ... Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions. Unlike the anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and blood-oxygen boosters that plague athletic competitions, the brain drugs haven't provoked similar outrage. People who take them say the drugs aren't giving them an unfair advantage but merely allow them to make the most of their hard-earned skills.'" There's an interesting comment on this topic in Fresh Air's top cultural trends of 2007 broadcast.
Caffeine.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
how hard we try to 'fix' ourselves.
Most of us aren't really as broken as we think.
what about places like MIT where they use norm referencing for grading their students? I would certainly be pissed off at a doper because it directly affects my grade in the class.
Want the audience to feel sad? In goes some depressants. Want them to feel the adrenaline the protagonist feels in a car chase? In goes an injection of adrenaline.
This is equivalent to giving the media companies root access to the entire population of the planet. Sometimes natural privilege separation is a good thing.
There's a hell of a lot more to it than presenting a "lily white" or "wholesome" package when it comes to the ban on sports doping (couldya pack in the word "conservative a few more times? I didn't see it enough in there). There was a recent (and still ongoing) debate on the use of sports enhancers in friggin' golf FFS. (Having been stuck w/ frequently visting a hospital that doesn't have WiFi over the past month or so, I get to read the newspapers a lot). Okay... golf. We're not talking the Tiger Woods type of golfers incidentally; we're talking about old men who takes drugs to keep their knees and hips from coming apart - drugs which have a neat side effect of adding a measureable number of yards to their swing... yet for some odd reason, the entire golf industry is going apeshit over whether or not these old men, playing the various Senior tours, should be allowed to use these medicines and keep playing. The whole point had frig-all to do with image, or what the kids might think (I mean, c'mon - how many teenaged kids watch Senior Tour Golf)? No - the whole point was that golf, like any other sport*, is a measurement of how good at it a human being can get without any help of the chemical variety - they're measuring the man, not the chemicals he used to get the win.
Point is, there are tons of people so obsessed and engrossed with sports (kids, adults, what-have-you), that it's all about the stats. It's all about the drive to eliminate 'cheating' of any kind.
A good geek parallel would be a pro gamer being caught with a custom aimbot. Would you be so quick to dismiss that as a drive by the sponsors to present a "lily white", "conservative" image? Hell, no! You'd want the bum tossed. Similarly, you get shades of grey there, too - wallhacks, "custom" binds that enhance gameplay, things like that... all the sudden it's no longer a contest of skill, but a contest to see who can build the best hack, and the game is no longer the game.
Sure, PR plays a pretty big role in the whole sports/drugs affair, no doubt about it, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's the primary goal of the whole anti-doping brouhaha.
Academia is a whole other dimension - mostly because the question is... "what competition"? Sure, there is a level of competitiveness, but not in any organized sense of the concept.
While the goal is certainly noble (more knowledge), there are a lot of side-effects that nobody understands. A researcher sucking down "mind-enhancing" pills may or may not come up with some new way to get a widget to do something neat, or they might manage to build an anti-gravity machine... but how many of these folks understand that they're facing a coctail of potential troubles down the road? The thought of accelerated Alzheimers' disease or chemically-induced mental illness down the road seems to be a hellishly high price to pay for something that may or may not come true.
Pretty much the same deal with the whole "i'm afraid of my body" semi-taunt you posted... it isn't fear of the body (or mind), it's what happens much later on, when the demand/desire is over, and you're stuck trying to pick up the pieces with what you have left - mind, body, finances, social circle, etc. Some drugs (e.g. marijuana) can be taken over years without too much worry over long-term effects - provided that the one consuming it is at least halfway mature, does so in moderation, and exercises enough willpower to not let it affect (let alone dominate) all other aspects of his or her life. That said, most folks don't have these qualities, and tend to make a royal mess of things, even with the relatively harmless stuff (let alone the real dangerous shit like, say, methamphetamines). Same with alcohol, incidentally. (now the whole idea of legality and such is beyond the purview of discussion... personally, I believe the "war on drugs" is idiotic; there are far better ways to handle it - by actually profiting off of human stupidity (e.g. tax the shit) and at the same time
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Putting aside your clear political motivation, the real difference and the real reason why the original post is so overstretching is that sports IS entertainment which is based on certain rules, that every participant should meet certain standards to enter _competition_.
Real life (business) is not about _competition_ and _winning_ _everyone_. It is about money. Who cares if Bill Gates is number one or number 10? As long as he does not violate rights of others, he can do to himself whatever he wants according to the rules of Western society.
Sport is about "ultimate" justice, "honesty". That is why it is a model. A second life, an incubator, an artificial construct. Real world is not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
But people are being told by the media that meth users get horrible skin lesions from the drug, that it rots teeth, causes crash and burn onset anorexia, that even one exposure causes permanent brain damage, etc.
If all this is false, then our drug laws are based on terrible lies, and we are putting lots of people in prison for lengthy mandatory minimum sentences for essentially nothing.
If all this is true, then we are exposing currently upwards of 200,000 5 to 11 year olds to a drug that is incredibly risky for adults, and counting on once-a-year doctor visits to control it. The pharmaceutical industry is expecting to see the number of elementary school aged children on Adderal rise to about 1 million in the next 4 years. Somehow, the medical difference between ADHD and normal brain chemistry automagically protects the child's body from all the horrible effects we see in the rest of an adult's body.
And yes it is exactly the same drug and not just pretty much - Adderal is a mixture of Methamphetamine and Benzedrine salts, with meth amounts similar to averages for adult recreational exposure. Parts of the pharmaceutical industry have tried to get around this fact by comparing the time release average dose in a child's system at any one time to the peak dose in a meth-junkie's system immediately after injection, which ignores three things.
1. many meth users at least supposedly addict without injecting the drug.
2. many adverse health effects depend on average dosage at least as much as peak.
3. elementary school age children normally have a much lower tolerance for just about all drugs than do adults. We generally assume safe exposures are much smaller even for non-perscription drugs.
Who is John Cabal?
Cut back on the caffeine. A gram a day is a bit much. Don't ask how I know this.
And if you want to really make a difference - try going ethanol free for a week. Eat dinner at least three hours before going to sleep, and during the two hours before bed drink three or four full glasses of water. Pee before climbing into bed. Go to bed eight and a half hours before you need to wake up, so you fall asleep over the next 30 minutes and still get eight solid hours of sleep.
I'm not saying I do this all the time, but when I do do it I'm in a lot better shape the next day.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Oh, you mean like Apartheid or the Belgian Congo or Imperial Egypt or Imperial India or.... (list goes on FORVEVER...)
Retard, Hispanics are descended from European culture, ever hear of Spain? Conquistadors? Get a clue. Won't bother responding to the rest of your diatribe because I already proved you don't know what you're talking about, and thus anything that follows out of your cowardly mouth is unreliable.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
But what if part of that "mental capacity" is really ... measuring how well you can concentrate? That'd be true for a professional poker player, and the same would be true for a student taking an exam. Yes, other mental faculties still matter, but ability to concentrate is an important one (and there is a whole lot of personal difference there).
The same exact thing you said about "mind doping" holds true for "substance abuse" of athletes. Steroids don't magically give you a bulkier body. You still have to work out. You could almost say that all steroids do is compensate for lack of hormonal inclination towards building higher muscle mass. The exact same way caffeine helps you stay awake more and other substances help you concentrate (beyond what you'd "normally" be able to do).
You can draw as many lines in the sand and split as many hairs as you want. There is a definite double standards towards "substance abuse" of athletes and substance abuse of other professions that are, in nearly all aspects, including health of participants, exactly the same.