Virtuous Play: The Ethics, Pleasures, and Burdens of Brain Training

ABSTRACT

Through normative appeals of cognitive enhancement, the brain has become a site of both promise and peril. Displaying oneself as ethically sound may now include showing requisite care for cognitive capacities. Moreover, enhancing our cognitive reserves is framed as aspirational means of averting neurodegenerative disease and neoliberal precarity. Such demanding labours of self-care warrant close scrutiny. Promissory discourses proclaim our ‘neuroplasticity’, encouraging subjects to work on endlessly improvable functional capacities that hold labour market value. Yet a ‘fun morality’ is equally prevalent in today’s experiential economies. Neuro-enhancement is thus sold not as an ascetic chore, but an ecstatic potential. Hope, fear, pleasure, and ethical conduct are, therefore, all closely entwined in the ‘virtuous play’ of ‘brain training’, where commercial entities use digital platforms for game-based tasks designed to enhance cognitive abilities. These services are typically promoted through appeals to our dutiful biocitizenship. This type of virtuous play is increasingly the means by which subjects produce themselves as simultaneously pleasure-seeking, productive, and resoundingly ‘well’. However, this understanding of virtuosity is often narrowly derived—reduced to ‘active ageing’, corporate-style ‘neurohacking’, and ‘brain profiles’—that threaten to foreclose other ways of imagining well-being. In failing to recognize the neoliberal underpinnings of virtuous play we entrench burdensome attachments to emerging modes of personal enhancement. Against these seductive appeals of combining pleasure with self-improvement, we must cultivate a critical reflexivity regarding exactly how ‘enhancement’ is conceived, opening room for lines of possibility outside of currently dominant frameworks.

KEYWORDS:

• Neuroscience
• biocitizenship
• prosumption
• virtue
• self-tracking
• cognitive enhancement

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Gavin J.D. Smith, Maria Hynes, Martyn Pickersgill, Melissa Littlefield, Jenny L. Davis, and James Chouinard for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their generous suggestions, and the SaC editors for their valuable guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Matthew Wade is a Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Humanities, Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.

ORCID

Matthew Wade http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8401-2428