The New Yorker has a long article on Brain Doping (or as others like to call it, cognitive enhancement) by Margaret Talbot. I was interviewed for it a while ago because of my mischevious April 1, 2008 blog/web joke I coordinated announcing that NIH was cracking down on brain doping.
And although they do not mention my April 1 joke in the New Yorker article, they do quote me
Still, even if you acknowledge that cosmetic neurology is here to stay, there is something dispiriting about the way the drugs are used—the kind of aspirations they open up, or don’t. Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at U.C. Davis, is skeptical of what he mockingly calls “brain doping.” During a recent conversation, he spoke about colleagues who take neuroenhancers in order to grind out grant proposals. “It’s weird to me that people are taking these drugs to write grants,” he said. “I mean, if you came up with some really interesting paper that was spurred by taking some really interesting drug—magic mushrooms or something—that would make more sense to me. In the end, you’re only as good as the ideas you’ve come up with.”
I am sure the quote is reasonably accurate. However, it does not include the whole discussion behind the quote. What I said was that staying up all night while on ritalin to write a grant proposal seems silly (and after my Arpil 1 joke was outed, multiple people told me they actually do this). What you need to get a grant funded is good ideas and these do not seem to come from just popping some drug to keep you mind clear when you should be sleeping. So I said something like taking a drug to help give you new ideas – that could make sense (and thus my reference to shrooms which I have by the way never done). Because if that helped you devise some cool new things to do – that it what people look for in grant proposals. Elegant text about something boring – who cares. Not that the writing part of a grant is unimportant but I still do not see how most of these brain doping drugs would help with doing something interesting in science. Ideas without good text – unlikely to get a grant but possible. Good text without a good idea – I would hope no grant would be awarded.
But the quote does make me sound like I am encouraging hallucionagens, which was not the point … oh well. In this case, no criticism of the New Yorker – just wish they had included a bit more about why I said what I apparently said … I guess next time I should just say “Ideas are the key. Not churning out bad text at the last minute”
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 