In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, what struggling junior or senior in high school wouldn’t welcome the edge a memory pill could offer? What about university students, overworked air traffic controllers, medical students, and aspiring actors whose livelihood depend on being able to recall large quantities of information?

The scenario of Todd the good kid who takes mind altering drugs to get a leg up on a test was all too reminiscent of an episode of Saved By the Bell. In the episode Jesse, an exemplary student like Todd, succumbs to the stress of final exams and takes caffeine pills to give her the energy to ace her tests. Both Jesse and Todd serve as cautionary tales of how ordinary “good” kids can become so overwhelmed with the pressure and the need to succeed that they’ll do whatever it takes, even giving in to drugs.

However, while the article suggests that stories like this can change the way we think about standardized testing and the workload adolescents are facing, I couldn’t help but to consider other dangers of mind altering drugs.  While pills such as Ritalin and Modafinil could definitely be found as enticing to the overachieving type, I think a different danger is in how mainstream and common popping these pills has become.  Yes, med students and actors may be taking these pills, but so are many other kinds of people such as the student who procrastinated a little too long on a paper or an employee who’s feeling a little tired.  With attitudes towards medicine shifting towards being so commonplace that it they are compared to getting a cup of coffee, the danger of cosmetic neurology becomes ever eminent.

Curious about just how nonchalant attitudes about popping these pills has become, I posed one of the questions to some undergraduate students I work with.  How do you feel about mind-enhancing drugs to improve test scores?

Without skipping a beat the group chimed in with a “you do what you got to do” response.