The Un-American Dream

Finding Cognitive Enhancement in a South Punjab Village

Let’s drown in the enticing waves of triviality. Maybe we can get a few million in funding while we’re at it, ignoring the context of what the world needs around us.

Self aware Artificial Intelligence is inevitable.

I let the thought marinate in my head while I sat in my clinic. I understood the ramifications, that the muscle in my head, according to Nick Bostrom, the author of “Superintelligence,” was soon likely to be irrelevant.

Nasreen called me. She smiled and said the itching was happening. It was a sign everything with her treatment was in order. When I had seen her two weeks prior, she was suffering from clinical anxiety, unable to move and always on a generic alprazolam, the type of pill every doctor in Pakistan prescribed from the company that gave him the most commission.

In the last two weeks, we had treated many of the women in my village suffering from anxiety and panic attacks, along with experimenting with stroke rehabilitation.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I had grown up visiting the village in Pakistan my father called home, occasionally even feeling nostalgic for it at night on my bed in American Suburbia. I was known as my father’s son there, expected to be a soul long gone from the simplicities of rural South Punjab life, expected to maintain an occasional remittance-based connection with it.

But instead here I was. Armed with a tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) device my co-founder and I had created at the Startup Shell incubator at the University of Maryland, we were effectively treating clinical anxiety in a small village in South Punjab.

The journey had begun years before, in American Suburbia, a theme that will arise throughout the saga because of its profound influence on us. We were obsessed with enhancement. From smoking weed out of a Gatorade bottle way earlier than a person should, to popping pills not prescribed to us, to drooling over the movie, “Limitless,” all we wanted was to be the best version of ourselves. A shortcut to being great.

Iconic butcher from my village making a deal for a goat, presumably, on a 70CC motorcyle.

Picking up and dropping off patients in the sweltering heat, on a 70cc motorcycle, proved what we did not desire to expect: the path to greatness was going to have more potholes than the roads denied care by a government recklessly focused on improving Lahore.

On the road to enhancing ourselves, these two immigrants had understood their roots. They had understood how poor they might have been had their fathers not made it to America. Maybe they would be eating once a day like their cousins. We had instilled in ourselves from this experience a commitment, a drive, to help the developing world in whatever capacity we could, to the extent possible.

This drive cemented itself when we read studies on this new technology. We had stumbled upon a gold mine. The research. It was there. Cost effectiveness. There. Scalability, results, safety, cosigns by some of the biggest institutions in the world, all there.

We began work at Startup Shell, combing the internet for information, learning electrical engineering and circuitry in what felt like a night. A microchip there, a resistor there, add one more here. And soon enough, with the help of 3D printing, we had created a world-class neurostimulation device. Being top students at top schools with SAT scores to be envious of didn’t hurt.

In a week, I was in Pakistan. We started a clinic in a practitioner’s office, marketing by word-of-mouth to the locals, testing the effectiveness and long-term viability of our treatment. It was very effective, to say the least. Nasreen went through two weeks of tDCS treatment for 15 minutes a day. Clinical anxiety gone, permanently. She doesn’t take medications anymore and lives a life free of mental illness. I voice message her nephew on WhatsApp every week, checking up on her. There are countless cases like this that we have treated in my village, a small one on the outskirts of Bahawalpur.

Our drive to make mental illness treatment in the developing world has just started. We’re planning to have multiple clinics by the end of 2016.