Just take the pill!

Fish oil.  It seemed innocent enough.  Cod.  Who knew? 

It’s a gateway supplement.

All right, I said after the cod.  Why not?  A little B12.  Some D3.  Tiny caplets.  I wash them down with my multi-vitamin, silver formula, because, you know, in your “golden years” it makes sense to go silver.

Glucosamine for my gravely knees.  And some kelp.  What’s the harm?  Seaweed for goodness’ sake! 

Then, when the guy in the nutrition store said it would save my brain, it was a no-brainer (sorry!) to add one more supplement – a tiny dash of L-Tyrosine. 

And suddenly, I’m in league with Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. 

Hello.  My name is Carolyn, and I use performance-enhancing drugs.

It all began when I was a simple One-a-Day girl and University College London first published evidence of the declining intelligence of humankind.  Dr. James Thompson, honorary senior psychology lecturer, reported research detailing a substantial falling-off in man’s general brainpower between Victorian times and 2004.  Precisely, 1.23 IQ points per decade or fourteen IQ points total since 1884.

It was distressing.  And I couldn’t leave it alone.  Oh no.  When a simple “so what?” would have sufficed, I just had to get out my rototiller. 

It wasn’t long at all before I turned up this haunting piece of information:  Our smarts haven’t only been shriveling since Victoria waved her wand.  The fact is, our human intellect has been on a downhill march for the past, oh, I don’t know, 3,000 years!

That’s right.  In an article called “Our Fragile Intellect,” Stanford biologist Gerald Crabtree says that human intellectual fitness has seen a “slow but steady decay” since before Cleopatra kissed the asp!  Decay!

Crabtree blames it on our slothful lifestyle.  According to him our wits have been waning since we were freed from a state of 'survival by thinking.'

Evidently, up until then, all that looking over our shoulders, clubbing wooly behemoths and berry gathering kept our synapses snapping.

We must have been flippin’ brilliant back in the day to lose so much gray matter continuously and still be able to lift our forks to our mouths.

And now, in the age of high-powered juicers and Slingbox, we are careening toward imbecility.  And coupled with that, I’ve been coloring my gray for a long, long time.  

So I began reviewing my recent decisions – these stretchy bicycle pants, for example.  Really dumb.  And why did I cut my own bangs?  Dumber!

OK.  I had to accept it.  I’m getting dumberer.  Thank you Mr. Crabtree.  And thank you University College.  Thanks so much for bringing up a painful subject.   

On top of the constant barrage of “helpful” admonitions from our mothers and grandmothers that “as we age” multiple and sundry disagreeable and frightening things overwhelm us, we now have the scientific community calling us stupid and backing it up with research!

I had to do something.  So I did what any desperate dim-witted American would do:  I added another pill. 

Just the one.  L-Tyrosine.  “It supports mental alertness,” the clerk said.  “Enhances cognition.”  That’s all I wanted.  Some cleats for traction on the slippery slope.

How could I have known L-Tyrosine is a nootropic?  A performance enhancing “smart pill.”  I couldn’t have, I tell you! 

You remember Barry’s sincere face!  The replays of A-Rod saying “no” while nodding “yes.” 

“I never took performance enhancing drugs,” they said.  “Or, if I took them, I didn’t know I was taking them.”

Right.  I rolled my eyes too.  “I didn’t, but if I did…?!!”  Oh brother.  My high horse led that parade.

But humbled now, I beg your understanding.  You have to believe me.  We’re all human, you know.  We’re all slipping.

Like Rodriguez and Bonds, I was the victim of unscrupulous dealers.  Slippery, slimy, snakey sales persons lurking in the health supplement aisles of our most wholesome-seeming retailers!  And remember, my IQ was falling.

Yours is too. 

Hey…That’s right.  Yours is too!  Oh…  I see how this can work.  You have a couple of choices here.  Whip that supplement-free nag until the two of you can’t remember why you focused on the new, wittier me. 

Or join me for a future of clarity.  Mental acuity can be yours for the asking. 


Come on.  Take the pill.

Aldous Huxley got it right

Item:  Man uses mind to control rat’s tail. 

OK.  Set aside your common sense reaction:  A man decides to use his mind and he uses it for that?  To control a rat’s tail?!   

What about the rat’s breeding habits, or his choice of residence, for example.  Why not use your mind to control one of those more pressing rat proclivities? 

Or how about a man controlling his own impulse to browse the channels for hours on end while the cable guide obscures the picture from other viewers in the room?  What about that? 

Or what if such a man used his mind to remember someone’s birthday, as a suggestion, or her ring size? 

But I digress. 

The point of the news out of BBC Future is that a man in the United States has successfully used his mind to control a rat’s tail in Brazil.  It’s scientifically documented. 

Yeah, me too.  I’m still hung up on the why of it all, but let’s press on. 

It’s a breakthrough, you understand.  The man wired up in a lab here thought “twitch” into an internet connection with the rat’s brain in South America, and voila!  That rodent wagged his hairless appendage as though he thought to do it himself. 

Still feeling a little underwhelmed. 

And they don’t mention any concern regarding reverse signals, from rat brain to man brain.  Nevertheless. 

Very serious grown men with clipboards and grant money, neuroscientists at Duke University, Harvard and the Pentagon, are focused on such brain-computer interfaces.  They are hell-bent it seems, to take steps beyond the already established ability of human brains to commandeer computer cursors, artificial limbs and virtual drones. 

We can extrapolate with confidence that they want that rat to dance to whatever tune is stuck in their heads.  It’s a small world after all.  (Sorry.)  Achieving that pinnacle they most certainly will move on to bigger and more bizarre brain-to-brain interactions. 

Hold that thought.   

Item:  Researchers at the 2012 conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams report lucid dreamers sending signals to each other over the internet while in the dream state. 

These guys strap on their brainwave headbands and when the EEG recognizes they’re in the dream state via rapid eye movement, it alerts them.  The first one to get that signal becomes lucid - self-aware in the dream state - and signals his pal who’s sleeping in another room, or another state.  

These Avant guard techies even created a rudimentary competition in which the dreamer who signals his counterpart first, wins.  Now they’re exploring dreaming-brain-to-dreaming-brain connections via social media.  What a time saver!  Find your perfect mate while you sleep. 

The dream guys jumped ahead of the Pentagon guys and their pet Brazilian rat.  They established a conscious - at least lucid - contact between two human brains in remote locations.  The difference is that the dreamers aren’t trying to control each other, they just want to play. 

And finally:  

Item:  Google has opened a new service to let people control their email, blog posts and online photos posthumously, as concern grows over what happens to a user’s "digital life" when he dies. 

This service allows living Googlers to set up binding instructions for what happens to their electronic legacies when they pass into that great Ethernet in “the cloud.”  It heralds a common clause in wills of the future.  

And it’s worrisome for those of us who’ve had this experience:  One of my LinkedIn connections died a couple of years ago but he continues to ask for my endorsements.  “Does ‘John’ know about project management?” the screen prompts hopefully.  “Does ‘John’ know about Microsoft Word?” 

It’s creepy.  And by the way, “John” was creepy when he was alive.  I didn’t like him in the first place.  We started out as Facebook “friends” because we worked together and I didn’t want to draw his attention by declining his request.  Twisted, I know.  Then, he never even “liked” my posts or LOL’d one time!  I guess he wants sympathy endorsements now! 

In summary:  Mad scientists work feverishly toward methods of controlling us from afar.  Fun-loving researchers develop dazzling means to connect and entertain us.  And search engines allow us to communicate from beyond the grave. 

We have, indeed, a Brave New Electronic World.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley