The Underground World Of Neuroenhancing Drugs Analysis

In recent years, a new phenomenon has been sweeping through the country. People, mainly college students, are taking medications typically prescribed for ADHD in order to enhance their cognitive performance. In “Brain Gain: The Underground World of ‘Neuroenhancing’ Drugs,” Margaret Talbot chronicles the stories of people who have had firsthand experiences with these drugs and leads the reader to consider their implications and consequences. The very purposeful structuring, phrasing, and evidence all come together to craft a fairly convincing argument that these “neuroenhancers” are causing problems in which that the general populace is not yet aware.

One aspect of this article that sets it apart from the norm is the way it is constructed.

Rather than spending her time conceding and refuting, Talbot chose to introduce characters to her story. She tells the reader about a person, then go on to recount their stories, using a mixture of paraphrasing and direct quotes. By the inclusion of these character, Talbot was able to clearly illustrate scenarios and create tangible manifestations of the use of neuroenhancers, which allowed the reader to see the stories as they happened.
This method of anecdotes works to both strengthens and weakens her argument, to some extent. In an argument, it’s important that the audience feels as connected to the issue at hand that they can. These stories from real-life people who have had firsthand experience with drugs such as Adderall help Talbot make those connections. If the essay were all just opinions and statistics, the personal touch would be lost and the essay would come off as monotonous. Talbot wants her readers to look at what is going on and feel compelled to do something about it. One her main claims is that the long-term effects of these drugs on a person are largely unknown. As Talbot says, “the effects of piracetam on healthy volunteers have been studied even less than those of Adderall or modafinil.” (para. 23). By sharing the stories of users such as Nicholas Seltzer, who thinks that with the exception of people like brain surgeons taking licensing exams, “he couldn’t see a problem” with using neuroenhancers (para. 17) , Talbot is able to demonstrate that people are just accepting the drugs for what they are and not caring about what they might do in the long run.
With that being said, the structuring of the essay is also problematic.

At times, the author’s viewpoint is unclear, and as a reader, it’s hard to tell what the author really thinks until the end of the article. Too much time is spent recounting trivial details and not enough is spent refuting claims. It isn’t really until the last few paragraphs that the reader actually hears the Talbot’s voice come through. It takes some deeper reading to pick up little hints of the author’s tone in the main body of the essay, like how she talks about how Alex became “an ingenious experimenter” with his Adderall usage (para. 2). There is a hint of sarcasm in this phrasing, which you can find hidden in lots of other places. This clues the reader in to the condescending feelings that Talbot has towards the use of neuroenhancers, which is blatantly expressed when she says “Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.” (para. 26). The fact that you have to read the essay more than once in order to notice the subtle details like that makes Talbot’s claims slightly more difficult to fully grasp, which is less than desirable in an

argument.
Another strategy that Talbot employs to strengthen her argument is the inclusion of trivial details that superficially seem irrelevant but serve a meaningful purpose.

Every word in this piece is written for a reason; Talbot is trying to convey her arguments by manipulating the diction. In a way, what she does is subliminal messaging. Whenever she introduces a new “character,” she makes it a point to tell the reader something about that person that has very little to do with their cognitive drug use. Talbot is fond of setting up the scenes of her interviews by describing the people she met and the ambience of the place that they met. For example, she writes that she met with Alex in “an appealingly scruffy bar in the New England city where he lives” and describes Alex himself as “skinny and bearded, and wearing faded hipster jeans, he looked like the lead singer of an indie band. He was ingratiating and articulate and smoked cigarettes with an ironic air of defiance.” (para. 4). This gives the reader a clear picture of what Alex looks like, and that type of person is typically one who is not taken seriously (a “hipster” type). When recounting Nicholas Seltzer’s tales of habitual use of drugs such as piracetam, she very purposefully includes the fact that Seltzer considers himself to be a “transhumanist.” A transhumanist is described as one who is “interested in robots, cryogenics, and living a really, really long time [and] consider biological limitations that the rest of us

might accept, or even appreciate, as creaky obstacle to be aggressively surmounted.” (para. 13). While this little tidbit of information has nothing to do with the main topic of this essay, the strategic wording serves to condescendingly portray Seltzer as somewhat of a ridiculous person that has beliefs that would be considered strange to most people. By bringing this aspect of Seltzer’s life into the picture, Talbot is attempting to lead the reader to assume that all neuroenhancers are crazy. Her means of describing people force images into the reader’s brain that make them question the integrity of these people, which leads to them questioning the integrity of using neuroenhancers.
Despite the slight loss of personality that the structure of this essay possesses, Talbot is still able to convincingly convey her arguments. She connects her reader to the situation that needs addressing and works towards convincing them that something must be done. As Talbot says, banning neuroenhancers is not the solution; too many people are already too reliant on them. People need to break free by their own will or else consequences that are not even known yet could manifest themselves, or else they will live a life controlled by the forced productivity that cognitive enhancing drug use leads to.