Alvaro Pascual-Leone, neurologist: Wanting to keep your brain young forever is foolishness'

"The human nervous system has been designed as an optimized machine, for swimming and storing clothes. If you swim very well, or modify the brain for that purpose, you're more likely to have your clothes stolen, says Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in the United States. In many ways, I think we're going to realize that it's a zero-sum game; what you win on one side, you lose on the other,"

"It's pure cognitive science. Raising expectations and ignoring the scale of the enormous challenges ahead allows us to face them head on, he explains. According to Pascual-Leone, we are in a very early stage in this science, in neuromodulation techniques, brain reading or brain modification, and in neurotechnologies in general. There is an almost religious belief that everything will be solved, but that won't be the case, far from it, and solutions will be offered that we will later see only create more problems,"

"I believe we'll have technologies to identify diseases earlier, treat them better, reduce disability, and delay their development, with significant impact, but we won't eradicate these diseases, although I hope I'm wrong, he continues. But to know if this is true or not, we're going to have to walk the path, and it's going to happen very quickly, and it will lead to very valuable advances."

Near-term advances in neuroscience are unlikely to produce generalized superhuman brain capacities. The human nervous system exhibits optimized trade-offs, so enhancing one function can cause losses in others. Neurotechnologies remain at an early stage, particularly in neuromodulation, brain reading, and brain modification. Inflated expectations coexist with substantial scientific challenges and the risk of solutions creating new problems. Elevated expectations can motivate tackling difficult problems directly. Anticipated benefits include earlier disease identification, improved treatments, reduced disability, and delayed disease progression, but complete eradication of neurological diseases is unlikely in the near term.

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