scholarly journals How pills undermine skills: Moralization of cognitive enhancement and causal selection

2021 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 103120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilian Mihailov ◽  
Blanca Rodríguez López ◽  
Florian Cova ◽  
Ivar R. Hannikainen
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
Causal Selection

scholarly journals How Pills Undermine Skills: Moralization of Cognitive Enhancement and Causal Selection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilian Mihailov ◽  
Blanca Rodríguez López ◽  
Florian Cova ◽  
Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Causal Contribution ◽  
Follow Up Study ◽  
Causal Selection

Despite the promise to boost human potential and wellbeing, enhancement drugs face recurring ethical scrutiny. The present studies examined attitudes toward cognitive enhancement in order to learn more about these ethical concerns, who has them, and the circumstances in which they arise. Fairness-based concerns underlay opposition to competitive use—even though enhancement drugs were described as legal, accessible and affordable. Moral values also influenced how subsequent rewards were causally explained: Opposition to competitive use reduced the causal contribution of the enhanced winner’s skill, particularly among fairness-minded individuals. In a follow-up study, we asked: Would the normalization of cognitive enhancement alleviate concerns about its unfairness? Indeed, proliferation of competitive cognitive enhancement eradicated fairness-based concerns, and boosted the causal role of the winner’s skill. In contrast, purity-based concerns emerged in both recreational and competitive contexts, and were not assuaged by normalization.

Mechanisms of Cognitive Enhancement by Incentive: Human Electrophysiological Evidence

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane E. Raymond ◽  
Risa Sawaki ◽  
Steven J. Luck
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
Electrophysiological Evidence

Berufsbelastung als Ursache für Cognitive Enhancement bei Hochschullehrenden

2011 ◽  
Vol 73 (08/09) ◽  
Author(s):  
C Wiegel ◽  
S Sattler
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement

From many to one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Laukkonen ◽  
Heleen A Slagter
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Enhancement ◽  
The Self ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Conceptual Processing ◽  
Current State ◽  
Contemplative Science ◽  
Open Monitoring ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
The Brain

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of meditation under the predictive processing view of living organisms. We start from relatively simple axioms. First, the brain is an organ that serves to predict based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, meditation serves to bring one closer to the here and now by disengaging from anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces predictive processing, in particular counterfactual cognition—the tendency to construct abstract and temporally deep representations—until all conceptual processing falls away. Our Many- to-One account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual meditation) on a single continuum, where each technique progressively relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the self. This deconstruction can also make the above processes available to introspection, permitting certain insights into one’s mind. Our review suggests that our framework is consistent with the current state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence in contemplative science, and is ultimately illuminating about the plasticity of the predictive mind. It also serves to highlight that contemplative science can fruitfully go beyond cognitive enhancement, attention, and emotion regulation, to its more traditional goal of removing past conditioning and creating conditions for potentially profound insights. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms combined with neuroimaging are needed to further our understanding of how different styles of meditation affect predictive processing and the self, and the plasticity of the predictive mind more generally.

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