Cognitive Enhancements

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Cognitive enhancements come in many forms, starting as basic as a pill you can swallow for pain control, to as complex brain surgery and adding artificial parts to your brain. The question is, are these enhancements good or bad? That depends on many things, and people have very differing opinions about the topic. Following are some potential benefits and risks related to artificially enhancing the brain.
One of the many benefits of cognitive enhancements is the ability to lessen or even remove medical difficulties that stem from brain glitches or degeneration. According to Horstman (p.90-92), deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to greatly increase the quality of life for individuals that have disorders such as Parkinson’s, Tourette’s, depression, hyperactivity, and many psychiatric disorders. DBS is a non-invasive process where electrodes are placed deep in the brain to stimulate or block the brain’s communication.
Two of the areas that have been most helped by DBS are depression and movement related disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s Disease (Horstman p. 94-96). The pacemaker type machine that connects the implanted electrodes in these patients is improving, and has shown great success and even more future potential to stop the tremors in a Parkinson’s patient with the flip of a switch. Additionally, experimental DBS has shown almost immediate and profound affects on patients with severe depression. More research is needed to fine tune DBS, but it is a great way to target problems that deal with larger areas of the brain.
Another potential benefit of cognitive enhancements it the ability to reverse the “broken” senses, such as sight, hearing and feeling. Artificial retinas (Horstman, p. 107-8) are still i...

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...r effort by people who don't accept the reality of growing older when it is done just to increase memory or function. For Parkinson's or epilepsy I can see the definite benefit but brain surgery to "improve" your mental capacity? No, and I don't think it is in the same class as facelifts or plastic surgery like I read in some of the stuff I found. Of course I'm not in favor of that much either. Accept how God made you and how you age.

Works Cited

Firlik, K. S. (2007). Brainlifts. In Another day in the frontal lobe: A brain surgeon exposes life on the inside (pp. 252 – 264). New York: Random House.
Greely, H. T. (2010, July 14). Enhancing brains: What are we afraid of? Retrieved from http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=28786 Horstman, J., & Scientific American, inc (2010). The Scientific American brave new brain. San
Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass.

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