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‘Limitless’ asks a surprisingly relevant ethical question: What happens when drugs make us smarter?

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‘Limitless’ may have sold more tickets than any other movie this weekend with its story of a man (Bradley Cooper) who finds himself with startling mental powers after stumbling upon a new drug.

But for all the slickness of its premise, the film also raises vexing questions about the nature of identity and pharmaceutical enhancement. The NZT pills, as they’re called, turn the human brain into a kind of supercomputer, enabling users to crank out novels, think their way out of dangerous situations, conquer Wall Street and otherwise achieve alpha supremacy.

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On the surface the Neil Burger film is a cautionary tale: No drug can help us achieve that level of success, and if it did we wouldn’t want to pay the price that would surely accompany its use.

Or would we? Burger, speaking for a profile in last week’s Times, points out that most of us already use chemicals to enhance our performance, and barely bat an eye in doing so. ‘It’s a thorny question. You drink coffee and were able to get the job because you were more alert when you went into that interview,’ the director said. ‘And college kids are already using drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, repurposing them in much the same way as characters in the movie use NZT.’

Putting ourselves through a medical process to enhance mental capacity, in fact, may not be that different from what we do in the realm of cosmetic surgery -- it’s just that, ‘instead of a nose job, [you get] a brain job,’ Burger said.

In so doing, we raise an existential question about the nature of self. ‘It’s the question that baseball players face with steroids: Who hit the home runs, you or the steroids?’ Burger said.

Of course, the larger (and perhaps reassuring?) issue is that such drugs, no matter how much we refine them, may never be able to improve on the human brain’s key aspect. It’s similar to the question raised by IBM’s Watson. We can design a drug that increases efficiency, just as we can design a more ruthless computer processor. But can we design a drug that, on its own, can manufacture creativity where it didn’t exist before?

‘A lot of what drugs can do is quantitative enhancement. I have to remember all this material and I have to put it all on a test tomorrow. They’re making you into a really good accountant,’ Burger said.

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‘Someone was saying these [people on mental-enhancement drugs] will be the leaders of the world. But the leaders of the world come up with creative solutions. The way the drugs are being conceived seems to be about processing information faster. And that’s a very narrow way of thinking about it. Creative thinking comes out of failure, out of spacing out, out of staring at the wall and not processing a lot of information. It comes out of the juxtaposition of things that are completely wrong rather than things that add up.’

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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