'There Is No Man Living Who Isn't Capable of Doing More Than He Thinks He Can Do' … With Cognitive Enhancement

摘要

Henry Ford's comment evokes the metaphor of 'unrealised potential'. Metaphors permit persons to assign salience from a concept to an unrelated issue, often through a highly affective association or image, and this often results in a reshaping of discourse around an issue. Pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE) appears to be relatively prevalent, perhaps increasingly so among university students (Arria et al. 2018; Ross et al. 2018), perhaps 20% of academics (Maher 2008), and a small but significant proportion of health care professionals (Franke et al. 2013; Sugden et al. 2010). Consumption of PCE by academics and health care professionals is a potential de facto endorsement of its acceptability and the possibility that it is increasingly normalized behavior (Pennay and Measham 2016). It will be recalled that smoking among doctors and health care professionals was, until relatively recently, normalized behavior utilized and even valorised in tobacco marketing.