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.

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

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