As discussed in class, cascades can be found in all sorts of life activities. Often when a person does something, he or she can influence his or her neighbor to do the same thing, and before we know it everyone around them has also chosen to do the same thing. This idea can be applied to a recent concern regarding healthy people’s use of cognitive enhancing drugs to help them focus and boost their brain power. In a recent Nature article entitled, “Professor’s Little Helper,”the authors, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir discuss the potential ethical questions regarding healthy people’s use of cognitive-enhancing drugs.  These drugs, including Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil, stimulate the nervous system and enable more neurotransmitters to be released in the brain. This enables a person to be more vigilant and focused. The drugs are primarily intended to treat certain neuropsychiatric cognitive disorders including Alzheimer’s, ADHD, schizophrenia, and narcolepsy.

 While it is certainly justifiable for most people with obvious cognitive disorders to take medication that enables them to become more focused and function normally, the use of these drugs in normally functioning individuals is more problematic. It is becoming more and more common for college students, scientists, and others, to take these drugs in order to help them focus (whether it be to study for an important exam, to stay late in the lab and complete an experiment,  to overcome jet-lag, and much more). Part of the issue at hand is that often these drugs may have long term side effects which are not immediately noticeable. Additionally, one may take Adderall to help stay up the whole night before an exam, but then when one goes off the drug, he or she will end up crashing and sleeping for most of the next day. The drugs can also be addictive and cause other mild side effects. Thus, one has to take many things into consideration before deciding whether or not to take such drugs.

The issue of cognitive enhancing drug use can easily be applied to the topic of cascades. What happens when many people start taking these drugs? One person does not want to feel left out, so that person will also end up taking the drug, causing a domino effect to occur, whereby everyone within a certain location or field will be on the drugs. While clusters may prevent the spread of the drug use, it is likely that someone may know someone in a different field/cluster and convince them to try the drugs as well, and then the use of the drugs can just spiral out of control. One of the primary reasons for this continuous spread is competition. People are always striving to be better than others, so if others are taking the cognitive-enhancing drugs, a person will feel pressured to also take the drug in order to keep up with his or her peers (even if he or she knows the potential side effects and would really rather not to). This is similar to a coordination game. If one person takes the drug, it may also make sense for their neighbor to use the drug because they have similar payoffs. However, this is not always the case (just because the drug has positive effects for one person, it may end up having only mild or negative effects for someone else). Therefore, while one may be tempted to immediately follow his neighbor, one has to strongly consider the payoff for their decision before deciding whether or not to start using the drug. Unfortunately, once a cascade of use of these drugs begins, it might be very difficult to stop. If everyone is on the drugs, then the “normal” level of intelligence and focus becomes substandard and it will become almost impossible for one person to take themselves off the drugs (because then that person will be significantly lower than everyone around them).

Therefore, it is clear that cascades can be very important in our daily decisions. Often the cascade can go in the wrong direction, but unless someone has a strong signal directing them otherwise, the cascade may be rather difficult to stop. Due to the potential cascade involved in taking these drugs, the ethics behind taking such drugs comes into question. One must determine whether it is fair to others (especially those who can’t afford the drugs) to use cognitive-enhancers if it puts them at an unfair competitive advantage. The common use of such drugs is a newly arising issue which may eventually have a significant impact on what is considered ‘academic excellence’ in society.

For more on this issue see The New York Times’ article “Brain Enhancement is Wrong, Right?”