We have heard it all before – a pill that can enhance our memory storage and recall.  The pill takes various forms over the years, from innocuous vitamins and herbs to concentrated caffeine pills that keep us awake and focused to isolated compounds that alter our neurochemistry.  The promises are alluring – take a pill or two and shorten the required study time from days or months to mere hours or minutes.  Perhaps this is would be closest, chemically speaking, to becoming like those science fiction stories where a protagonist can instantaneously download all the required skills to complete the mission (e.g. Matrix). 

The teaching or learning of new skills is a wonderful journey.  Unfortunately, even wonderful journeys consume vast amounts of time and require very dull effort.   The movie Matrix would not be so interesting if it showed Carrie Ann Moss’s character drilling over and over how to fly helicopters needed on a mission.  Far better to just have her say, “[Operator], I need a pilot program for a military M-109 helicopter,” and voila!  She then instantly and effortlessly knows how to fly.  What student, at one time or another, has not wished for such a download capability to speed past the tedious studying for storing and recalling facts and skills? 

The solutions are various.  Some swear by using a recording device and playing back lectures while doing other tasks and somehow retaining the knowledge afterwards.   Others swear by the technique of placing texts underneath pillows at night – learning by osmosis in the purest sense.  And then there are the drugs. 

Ginseng is a particularly bitter tasting root used for ages in Asian culture to strengthen bodies and health.  It is marketed today as variably as workout supplement, aphrodisiac, and memory enhancer.  Taken before a study session, it is believed to promote memory storage and recall.

Gingko biloba seeds are somewhat bitter and used in Asian culture to strengthen bodies and general health.  It is marketed today as variably as energy booster, aphrodisiac, and memory enhancer. Taken before a study session, it is believed to improve circulation, keep brain cells awake, and promote storage and recall.

Caffeine is a bitter stimulant primarily used to keep recipients awake and alert.  It is sometimes marketed as a memory enhancer, though primarily as an indirect study aid by boosting energy and alertness through an all night cram session.

There are several more herbs and compounds like the preceding samples, almost invariably bitter tasting, often of foreign or “eastern” provenance, and also consumed as a food/medicine/dessert.  But at least these are known and well tolerated in their consumed forms.  They are mostly harmless and not measurably or significantly effective.  In recent decades, there have been a few neuroscience compounds that are sure to eventually become marketed drugs.  These have been tested to reveal significant effects in the lab.

One example revolves around CREB.  When a pre-synapse nerve cell activates, it releases neurotransmitters across the synapse and into the post-synapse neuron.  If this is sufficient to trigger the post-synapse, calcium ions enter, activate several enzymes called kinases, which then activate cAMP response element binding proteins (CREB), which turn on gene expression to create more proteins that travel backwards to the pre-synapse.  These proteins make the nerve cells grow closer and stronger together.  See below.   

A closer and stronger synapse in response to a viewed image means the synapse “remembers” the image better, forming a stable long-term memory.  Researchers have already tinkered with varying the effectiveness of this process in fruit flies, sea slugs, and mice, variously enhancing and destroying their long-term memory formation.  While developing this research into useable drugs entails a long and complicated process, it is conceivable one day to simply call “Operator, give me some CREB enhancing pills and the M-109 helicopter manual,” and be up and flying in a few minutes.  It may not be instantaneous, but it can get pretty close. 

Why stop with M-109 helicopters?  Why not take a pill and become an expert poet, or a portfolio manager, or a lawyer, or a neurosurgeon?  Education expenses are ever rising and consuming larger portions of the average family’s disposable income.  Job skills are in perpetual need and education expenses are skyrocketing.  Providing students with good books and a ready supply of CREB enhancing pills seems like a sure bet. 

But there is always the fine print.  There are ethical concerns – what if a dictator issues bad books and forces people to remember false histories and forget past atrocities?  There are Socratic concerns that knowledge becomes too easy to attain and therefore imparts no wisdom – who wants to be treated by a sixteen year-old surgeon or represented by a sixteen year-old lawyer?  There are naturalist concerns – if the drugs work, then everyone needs to take them to compete, then everyone becomes addicted to some pharmaceutical miracle pill.  But let us leave these concerns aside since these are all subjective and debatable concerns that require far more expertise to resolve and are beyond the scope of this post.  Instead, let us magnify the fine print at the very end – logically, does the pill’s theoretical success necessarily result in a practical failure?  Does it work as a package?

Evolution as a model describes how organisms adapt as a whole to their environment.  Extended, it also describes how trade-offs balance out as an organism converges towards its optimal configuration.  This is why Olympic runners whose speeds leave the rest of us astounded elicit nothing but yawns from cheetahs, lions, wolves, and even Fido the family dog.  People do not run very fast compared to lions, cheetahs, and wolves because doing so is incongruous with the rest of our bodies, lifestyles, and needs.  Genetically engineering our arms and legs so we can run like cheetahs risks making us into cheetahs.  Cheetahs are endangered.  Humans are not.

What happens if our learning rate and memorization were accelerated?  Would our bodies and lives become as a motorcycle fitted with jet turbines?  Theoretically, the bike would ride much faster; practically, the controls would be unmanageable and the frame would disintegrate under the stresses.  One does not need imaginary scenarios to see this.  There are real people with eidetic memories able to store high-fidelity memories at a single glance.  These are the autistic savants.  And they are all considered talented yet mentally disabled.  The movie Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Charlie Sheen, provides a fairly decent depiction of an autistic savant – being pulled out of an institution and really spending the entire movie needing the assistance of one.  

When we speed on public roads, driving at speeds in excess of the speed limit, we get a ticket.  We can do what we like on a private road, but a public road has speed limits.  Exceeding these limits increases the risks of danger – not just to the driver from the risk of losing control of the individual vehicle, but more importantly from the lack of coordination with other drivers.  Public access roads are by definition shared by other drivers.  Safe driving is not just about keeping the car within the lane and within speed limits – it is about tracking and fitting and coordinating with vehicles in front, behind, and to the sides.  That is why we have signal lights, headlights, and brake lights.  We signal to all other cars what we are doing so everyone else can adjust their plans and expectations accordingly.  If we drive too fast or too erratically, we throw the entire traffic off balance. 

Learning is a function of tracking and adjusting to the reality around us.  Sound travels at a certain rate.  Objects fall at a certain rate.  Animals move at a certain rate.  The learning rate in living nerve cells in living beings in the world progresses at a rate to match these events.  Synaptic junctions act as coincidence detectors to track and remember correlations between sensory events such as the sights and sounds of someone speaking.  In an isolated lab with pre-filtered, sanitized, static data sets, having a machine learn faster provides results faster and within budget.  But invariably, setting such a machine loose in the world does not make a super fast, super smart entity but rather a very highly specialized and even disabled autistic savant of an electronic box.  At best.

Perhaps the reason our brains learn at the relatively and sometimes excruciatingly slow rate that they do is not because they cannot but because they automatically adjust to this rate as optimal given our environment.  Perhaps there is a hypothetical experiment to test this conjecture.  Suppose we take identical twins – or clones, it matters little since this experiment would never pass ethics bounds and would never be performed in real life.  Place one twin/clone from birth in an enclosed life simulator providing all tactile, auditory, visual, olfactory, etc. sensory stimuli run at normal speed.  Objects here fall at 9.8 m/s per second.  Place the other twin/clone in another enclosed life simulator, but run this one at double speed.  Objects fall here at, say, 19.6 m/s per second.  Sounds are all higher pitched.  Everyone walks faster.  Leave the twins/clones for a period of five years and then test them for learning speed.  If the twin/clone in the double speed environment even survives, this alone may provide evidence that learning rate is auto-adjusted to fit the environment.  If this is true, then tinkering with direct CREB enhancing drugs may not be such a good idea on its own, regardless of cultural, ideological, theological, or ethical concerns.  Its success would be its own failure. 

So when Carrie Ann Moss’s character dials up and calls for the instant helicopter flying skills package for download, her partner should just say, “No Thanks – I’m taking the stairs.”