Please read Part I to catch up on the plot of Limitless, a movie which is now serving as a springboard for a discussion on
intelligence.
...With all the psychological and physical skill enhancement happening to Eddie an interesting question emerges - to what degree could Eddie have attained these positive changes on his own, without the drug? Certainly one can say that Eddie was hardly using his full degree of "naturally accessible" skills to begin with.
Maximum performance has to do with attention. The first thing you have to do is manage fears, anxieties and worries so that your attention remains on the task at hand and not some past or future concern. Then you have to promote positive emotions like hopefulness to stay as motivated and persistent as possible. Only then do the nuts and bolts of cognition come into play. How much information can you remember, how well can you comprehend and synthesize it, how clearly can you communicate it to others? These skills vary from person to person, and it seems likely that the drug's main effect was on broadening the limitations of these sorts of concrete mental mechanisms. However, what should be said about our information processing is that not only can the emotional stuff help us to maximize our natural capacities, but it can feed on itself and create a positive cycle in which our seemingly finite skills are enhanced. If we're happy, we'll develop a lifestyle of exercise, healthy eating, and mental stimulation all of which (and we know this from research) changes the brain just like the magical medication that Eddie was taking.
The line between Eddie's "natural" capacities and those induced by the medication get even blurrier when one considers that the mediation may have helped Eddie to establish a routine of health and happiness, but that routine fed on itself and was (at least in the abstract) something entirely within the capabilities of the "normal" Eddie. It's not superhuman to eat well, run regularly, do puzzles, engage sexually and romantically with others, read (a lot, about everything). It's even less superhuman to choose to work instead of drink, smile instead of frown, and get goal-oriented and optimistic about the future instead of hopeless.
This road that I've been going down for the last few paragraphs cuts right down the center of the burgeoning debate on cognitive enhancement medications. Recall Ritalin, Adderall and other mentally sharpening medications that have been around for a few decades now and were initially prescribed for ADHD and other "below-baseline" individuals. What I mean by this, is that the mental health field initially operated under the assumption that medications (which are generally viewed with concern and skepticism) should be given to people that really struggle, that really do worse than others - "impairment" and "distress" are the magic words. Imagine the eight year-old who wiggles around in his chair during math class. He doesn't raise his hand to ask questions, he looks out the window and he disrupts his neighbors. He gets D's on exams, seems uncomfortable and cannot sit still let alone follow directions. He has ADHD and needs Adderall to bring him back to the "normal" with which his overactive brain naturally struggles. This makes sense. This is a philosophically easy scenario.
But imagine a second eight year-old who sits next to the ADHD classmate. His teachers don't notice him nearly as much cause he doesn't wiggly or disrupt. His mind occasionally wanders, however, and he has to fight off some boredom and confidence issues. He works hard and gets B's and a few A's - nothing too concerning, but nothing too spectacular either. Now, without bogged down in debates about perfectionistic standards, wouldn't the same pill that corrals his frenzied classmate, help him to focus on the whole lecture instead of 75% of it? Wouldn't that positively spiral into greater self-confidence and grades, and take off from there? What would be wrong with that?
The main argument against cognitive-enhancers (now that I've subtly laid out the argument FOR it) includes only one, rather obvious point - long-term health consequences. You don't take the pill, if that pill causes your brain to fry (in various ways) leading to problems, impairments, symptoms down the road.
"Limitless" doesn't comment on this sort of scenario in a clear manner. What it does is recycle age-old themes about the ills of drug abuse. As Eddies goes about executing his ultimate plan for long-term, sustainable success two things start to happen - his packet of pills starts to dwindle, and he begins to experience vague but significant symptoms of physical illness. After a few out-of-nowhere plot twists a clear comment emerges - this drug will kill you unless you figure out a way to take them indefinitely. In the end, what Eddie has done to troubleshoot this problem remains ambiguous. He seems to be a picture of perfect health, and it's heavily implied that he's figured out a way to free himself from threat (whether that's having engineered his own personal version of the pill, or weaned himself off it while having positioned himself for long-term stability - he's running for political office).
Back to the real world, and this proliferating issue of cognitive enhancement medications. The reality is that, as of yet, the jury is still out. We don't know. We'll need longitudinal, prospective studies that follow "normal" people popping these pills on a daily basis for years, if not decades, so that we can carefully track the performance effects (while carefully teasing out other variables that could impact performance and health but are unrelated to the mechanisms underlying the psychopharmacology).
