"If you could take a pill that would help you study and get better grades, would you?"

"The stress of competing for top grades has led to a rise in students’ off-label use of so-called 'smart drugs' like Adderall, Ritalin, and modafinil, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But is this a negative development? Is the use of smart drugs cheating? Should their use as cognitive enhancers be approved by the FDA, the medical community, and society at large?"

From an announcement of a debate that will take place at George Washington University and be available later as a podcast.

When I was a young person, it was often a subject of conversation: Why don't they invent a smart pill? I think we imagined getting the knowledge uploaded in pill form, not that anyone said "uploaded" back then.

I'd be interested in hearing this debate, but just offhand, my thoughts are:

1. It might not be cheating, but it does put pressure on everyone to acquire the same advantage (like  performance-enhancing drugs in sports), especially if, as in sports, the performance of others affects your result (such as, in law school, where grades are curved),

2. If the idea is that there is an individual right to make your own choices about what to do with your mind, then the argument that you should be free to take a "smart drug" would apply at least as much to the idea that you should be able to take the psychedelic drugs that transform emotional, spiritual, sexual, and aesthetic experiences.

James Taylor explains that he wasn't using heroin "seeking ecstasy or oblivion. I was looking to get normal."

"The way I've come to feel about it is that I was probably, you know, like, rowing of some Viking boat across the seas in a former life, and, you know, when you sit me down in a sort of suburban context, I just, you know, my nervous system and my body and my entire wiring is just not ready for it. You know, I'm ready for something else. I'm ready for crisis. I'm ready for war. I'm ready for, you know, to battle the elements, but I, or to, you know, raid villages or something or defend villages, but I'm not comfortable, you know, on the couch watching baseball, no."

James Taylor — who's been off heroin for 32 years — talking to Marc Maron, who's been off alcohol for 15+ years.

I took the time to transcribe that quote — not easy, with all the disfluencies — because I think human beings have no end of troubles because our nervous system evolved under conditions entirely different from the world where we must live. We want our conveniences and comforts — the couch and the television and the absence of marauders — but we are organisms designed for a much rougher existence.

This is the second post of the day where I wrote something that cued a John Lennon song in my head. (Here's the first.) Now, what's playing — from "Instant Karma" — is "Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear." That's a beautiful, important insight, but from an evolutionary standpoint we are here to live in pain and fear. James Taylor is here because his ancestors rowed the Viking boat across the seas, raided and defended villages, and battled the elements, and the nervous system he inherited makes him feel ready for tasks that are not presented in his suburban home with the couch and the television.

He used heroin to blunt that useless, out-of-context readiness for things that are never going to happen. He wasn't, he said, "seeking ecstasy or oblivion." He was "looking to get normal," to medicate his nervous system into what would belong on a couch in front of a television showing the play-battles of other men, men who are using their out-of-context readiness in a more sensible way.

When he got off heroin, he threw himself into physical exercise, working out aggressively to produce the natural endorphins — "endogenous morphine" — that made him feel normal.

(I know some of you may think I'm getting this wrong, because he said "rowing of some Viking boat across the seas in a former life," and that seems to mean he thinks he's a reincarnated Viking, not that he's thought about evolution. But elsewhere in the podcast, he talks about evolution, and that's the basis for my assumption that "a former life" is used by the poet poetically, as a metaphor indicating evolution.)

The UW lab volunteers on psilocybin love the string cheese: "They find it very fun because it’s very stringy."

That's my favorite detail from this long article about the study of "pharmacologically-aided psychotherapy" here at the University of Wisconsin.

The subjects can "put on eye shades and headphones," "wear an anti-anxiety blanket," and listen to music that "ranges from contemplative, chanting and classical to Beatles arrangements with no lyrics." (What's wrong with lyrics? Too influential?)

There's a description of one 62-year-old subject's experience:

“I went down the DNA spiral and encountered my ancestry, my family, then the whole human race,” he said. Later, he saw himself and all humankind standing on a cliff. “We joined hands and jumped off. At that point consciousness ended, reality ended, ego ended,” he said.

Strangely enough, these researchers are not looking for the mystical details:  “We’re mainly interested in their blood and urine... This is a pharmacokinetics study.”