Watched the movie Limitless starring Bradley Cooper the other day.
Really enjoyed it.
But as well as being enjoyable, I found it thought provoking.
Firstly it is interesting to try to imagine what the impact will be when we have a pill that will make us more intelligent, or more charismatic, or something similar. Will it become widely available? Will it be expensive? What will happen to people who can’t afford it?
Sport is already blighted by performance-enhancing drugs. The reaction is to have mandatory testing and to penalise those who are caught using. Could something similar be applied? Will people be tested for performance-enhancing drugs when taking a test, during a job interview, appearing on a quiz show?
Secondly it makes you wonder how your own life would be affected if you could improve your own performance. I’m not talking here about using the other 90% of your brain (the theory that we only use a small proportion of our brains is a myth apparently). But I am talking about improving our focus, or our attitude, or simply trying harder.
We may not be able to use more of our brains at any one time. But we could use our brains more often! So we could trade time spent in front of the TV, or surfing the web, for time spend in a more productive pursuit.
Bill Cullen (Irish entrepreneur and motivational speaker/writer) in his book Golden Apples (subtitled “Six Simple Steps to Success”) does not extoll the virtues of searching for a performance-enhancing drug. But he does recommend (among many other things) that people cut the time they spend sleeping down to 6 hours a night (he says that he only needs 5 hours of sleep himself). And you then divert the extra time into being successful. He suggests that this can be done by taking 2 minutes off your alarm clock every week over a period of 2 years.
I must give that a try.