A friend who works in neuroscience once told me about a technique that could target the parts of the brain responsible for certain neurotransmitters directly. Instead of a pill that floods the whole system, precise stimulation that adjusts the balance.
My first question, which I put in Radical Next, was: do you think biohackers will abuse this to overstimulate themselves for productivity, the way people without ADHD take Adderall like Tic Tacs?
He laughed. Then he stopped laughing.
What's the pattern?
Every tool we've had for changing the mind has been used two ways: to heal and to get an edge. Coffee. Nicotine. Antidepressants. Stimulants. And now, screens designed by very smart people to hijack the reward system, which is brain hacking at scale, done to you, for someone else's profit.
The next generation is more precise. Non-invasive stimulation. Psychedelics in clinical settings, which show real promise for depression and trauma. Brain-computer interfaces reading intent. Each one arrives with the same two futures attached: relief for people who are suffering, and an arms race for people who aren't.
What worries me isn't the technology. It's the temptation, which I wrote about, to eliminate every perceived weakness. Sadness, restlessness, the slow days. Some of those aren't bugs. Some of them are how a human instrument tells you something's wrong. Edit them all out and you've built a very productive person who can't hear their own signal.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things, and I'm not a doctor, so these are about how we think, not what we take.
Separate healing from optimization. A treatment for someone in pain and an edge for someone at a desk are different ethical questions. Don't let the first one launder the second.
Protect the signal. Before you tune something out, ask what it was telling you. In my next book I write that our discomforts are data. Data is worth reading before you delete it.
And notice who's already hacking your brain. The most powerful brain interface in the world is in your pocket, and it isn't tuned to your benefit.
We'll hack our brains. We already do. The question is whether we do it to become more ourselves, or less.
What's the weakness you'd edit out if you could, and what is it telling you?
Related: Is off-grid the future, or a fantasy?
- Sam Rad, Radical Next (2025), Health chapter.
More like this on LinkedIn. Follow @samradofficial
