Rethinking Cognitive Enhancement

There has been much recent excitement amongst neuroscientists and ethicists about the possibility of using drugs, as well as other technologies, to enhance cognition in healthy individuals. This excitement has arisen from recent advances in neuroscientific technologies such as drugs that increase alertness and wakefulness in healthy individuals or technologies that can stimulate activity in different parts of the brain - either via the scalp or via electrodes - raising the possibility of producing cognitive and affective improvements in otherwise healthy individuals. Despite this growing interest, there are conflicting views on the ethics of cognitive enhancement. Some argue that enhancement is not only an ethical pursuit but one that we have a moral obligation to pursue. Others are more skeptical about the ethical implications and long term effects of cognitive enhancement. Some neuroscientists argue that use of stimulants as putative enhancers will lead to misuse, abuse and addiction in some users, and might have undesirable long-term consequences.

This book critically explores and analyses the scientific and ethical debates surrounding cognitive enhancers. Including contributions from neuroscientists, neuropsychopharmacologists, ethicists, philosophers, public health professionals, and policy researchers, the book offers a multidisciplinary, critical consideration of the ethics of the use of cognitive enhancers.

Professor Ruud ter Meulen (1952) is psychologist and ethicist. He was Professor and Director at the Institute for Bioethics and the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. In 2005 he was appointed Chair for Ethics of Medicine and Director of the Centre for ethics in Medicine at the University of Bristol. He has directed a range of European projects in the field of biomedical ethics. He was co-ordinator of the ENHANCE project, dealing with the ethical, philosophical and social issues of enhancement technologies. He was also co-ordinator of the recently finished European EPOCH project on the role of ethics in public policy-making on new biotechnologies, with enhancement as a case, and of the European SYBHEL project on the ethical, legal and social issues of synthetic biology as applied to human health. He has published about 150 articles, book chapters and edited volumes on a range of topics in bioethics.

Wayne Hall is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research at the University of Queensland. He was formerly: an NHMRC Australia Fellow in addiction neuroethics at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research and the University of Queensland Brain Institute (2009-2014); Professor of Public Health Policy, School of Population Health, UQ (2005-2009); Director of the Office of Public Policy and Ethics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (2001-2005) at the University of Queensland; and Director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW (1994-2001). He has advised the World Health Organization on: the health effects of cannabis use; the effectiveness of drug substitution treatment; the contribution of illicit drug use to the global burden of disease; and the ethical implications of genetic and neuroscience research on addiction.

Dr Ahmed Dahir Mohamed is a registered psychologist, neuroscientist and author. He was the recipient of the Emerging Psychologist Award from the 2016 International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama, Japan for his work on the effects of mindfulness in young people. He was formerly a post-doctoral fellow in Developmental Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at the School of Psychology University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He obtained his doctorate in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, where the focus of his thesis was how to enhance cognition in young people. Dr. Mohamed was a recognized DPhil student at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, University of Oxford. In 2013, he was a visiting neuroscience and ethics fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford. Dr. Mohamed holds a first class honours degree in psychology from the University of Reading and he became a full chartered member of the British Psychological Society in 2013 and elected associate fellow in 2015.