Essay: What's So Great About Acuity?

As a child, I measured my mental development (and I was the sort of child, I confess, who found his own mental development fascinating) by the complexity of the jigsaw puzzles I was able to complete. As I learned to do puzzles with smaller, more numerous pieces, graduating from simple farmyard scenes to detailed panoramas of city skylines, I felt better and better about myself. The adults in my life seemed to feel better about me too. But then something unexpected happened. One afternoon when I was 10 or so, I finished a 1,000-piece puzzle of the Milky Way and came to the realization that, puzzle-wise, I'd done all that I could do—meaning all that a normal child should ever wish to do. I realized that to master more difficult puzzles would be a sign not of desirable growth but of troubling compulsion.

I think back to that fiendishly complicated puzzle of stars and planets and whirling gas clouds whenever I think about the promise of human-intelligence enhancement. How much quicker and more acute do people really want to be? How many more bits per cubic inch of gray matter do people wish they could store? People whose minds are generally healthy, that is. People who, for their age and condition, are already smart enough.

The devilish problem, of course, is defining "smart enough." Enough to accomplish what, precisely? To make a living or to make a killing? And smart enough to satisfy whom? An employer who wants you to do your work by quitting time or one who wishes you had finished it yesterday? Being able to do what must be done is liberating, but being able to do whatever might be done (or whatever your driven ego or pushy boss might conceivably demand) can be enslaving.

And does anyone really want to be brilliant all the time? Though heightened intelligence would seem to be a universally desirable goal, not all tasks and stages of life demand the amped-up cognitive speed and processing power the new regimens and medications may make possible. Becoming a parent, for example. I read somewhere once that many mothers and fathers suffer a rapid, appreciable drop in IQ after their babies are born. This, if true, is a huge gift from nature. Diapering, feeding and comforting little ones demands dumb endurance, in my experience, not penetrating cleverness. Thinking too clearly while cleaning up diarrhea on two hours' sleep in a house that you've just realized is one room too small and two times too expensive can make you suicidal.

And yet people dream of aping their computers, which grow measurably more agile every six months. Not wiser or saner or more truthful, those immeasurable human qualities that are extolled by priests and poets, but just better at handling elaborate graphics, say, or performing multimillion-variable calculations. Assuming that we can keep up with these machines, where will it take us as a society? When the shared ideal is to be like Mr. Spock instead of Dr. Spock, and to emulate Dr. Jonas Salk rather than Marcus Welby, M.D., who will stroke humanity's fevered forehead? No one, I fear, unless we use our brainpower to develop an altruism pill.