The Statue of Liberty, an iconic symbol of American opportunity; courtesy of Wikipedia

Most every parent wants their child to grow up to be a neurosurgeon, a lawyer, or the next gen Mark Zuckerberg. That was especially true in my case, as a first generation child. When I was two, my parents came to the United States, “the land of opportunity,” seeking the success that they had only heard about in India. I grew up hearing their stories of hardship when they first moved here with an infant, without a car, without any extended family, and knowing very little working English. I witnessed them struggle tirelessly to make a life for themselves and they always said that without education you are nothing and will be no one. As a child, while my friends would go to sleepovers and camping trips with friends, my dad would spend time checking my math problems on the white board at home and my mom would make me spell 50 words correctly every night. But even with all that pressure, I never had the best GPA, I had to work incredibly hard to stay above the class average, and I almost always fell short of their expectations. So given the opportunity, would my parents have tried to enhance my cognitive ability?

This is another dilemma Chatterjee addresses—one of “eroding character” and “altering an individual,” and if “such interventions threaten essential characteristics of what it means to be human.” Taking a step back, most of us can relate to this and wonder, if we do modify a person’s state or prescribe antidepressants and other drugs, then aren’t we fundamentally altering a person and keeping them from being who they are, or are we instead enabling them to become their best selves? When someone is chronically on a drug, who is to say they would make different decisions if they weren’t always on said drug? If we believe that our actions define us, then how do we know that we are not, in fact, slowly changing the person and not just their temperament or their personality? I personally think that prolonged use of a drug does change a person. Take, for example, the case of antidepressants, which are known to protect people from the adverse effects of stress. The prolonged use of antidepressants could cause someone to make different decisions than they normally might have when they felt stress, and if these different decisions lead to different actions, then yes, I think you are altering a person by prescribing them a chronic drug. Others, however, do not share my opinion. In a qualitative case study done by interviewing parents of children with and without cognitive disabilities, it was found that some parents actually justified their child’s use of [ADHD] medication and felt that the “drugs were facilitating the expression of their child’s identity, not changing it.” Again, in the case of enhancing children, we’re led to wonder how we might be altering the trajectory of the development of the child’s personality and temperament: some believe that personality is set at a young age, which leads us to question whether there is an age after which enhancement may be less likely to alter personality, since the brain and personality, are less malleable after youth.

Is the decision to choose something like tDCS actually a choice?

First generation students sometimes feel pressure to succeed academically; image courtesy of flickr user Tim Pierce

Linda Geddes reports, “There are currently no laws in either Europe or the US to regulate the use of tDCS in people merely hoping to enhance cognition, and companies now sell the tDCS headsets online,” thus enabling those who choose the DIY route. In fact, with a bit of science background, coming up with your very own tDCS invention is a surmountable feat with common household materials, since it is essentially two sponges hooked up to a battery/ power source! In the competitive culture today, might parents feel the need to utilize any intervention they can to improve their child’s chance of succeeding? Perhaps the stakes are too high? Parents raising first generation American children like my own for instance, might feel additional pressures. A first generation student myself, I used to always question why I received so much pressure from my parents. Now, I realize it’s because they just want me to succeed and to not have to struggle the way they did just to put food on the table, so pushing me to succeed in academics was their utmost priority. They knew I wasn’t the brightest Crayon in the box, but given the chance, would they have considered enhancement? Has society influenced our need to enhance ourselves or our children because we know that, as Chatterjee suggests, “to not take advantage of cosmetic neurology might mean being left behind?” Is it a parental responsibility to enhance their children? Are we creating a new culture of millennials who will one day want to similarly enhance their children?