Who among us would not want to possess greater intelligence? Could a “smart pill” enhance your ability to focus, to reason, to reflect, or to commit to memory more information from this conference than you could hope to achieve by your natural effort? Perhaps a cognitive enhancing pill could help this writer to draft a more informative or compelling abstract, or at least overcome spellring errors. Surveys and sales figures suggest that students and professionals are increasingly using stimulant medications beyond their therapeutic indications for the purpose of enhancing mental performance. Pharmaceutical advances may in coming years offer even more potent drugs designed to boost brain power. While it is clear that developing therapies to improve cognitive capacity in patients with amnesia or dementia is a worthy goal, it is less clear whether society or individuals would benefit from a new pharmaceutical industry promising enhanced mental performance for the healthy. As available drugs increase in potency, their ethical implications intensify. Not only are there questions of safety, as no drug is without side effects and potential health hazards, but we should also consider what is meant by the goal of better brain performance, and by what means it would be sought. The brain circuits that we can artificially stimulate encompass only a narrow segment of the many facets of intelligence. Might drugs that rouse one aspect of thought also diminish or suppress other aspects of thought and feeling that we value as integral to being human? Might drugs that improve good memories also reinforce distressing memories or enhance our perception of pain? Might reliance on drugs to augment mental performance undermine the virtues of discipline, study, personal effort and commitment? Might unequal access to such drugs divide society into the “enhanced” and the “unenhanced?” If one’s academic or business competitors were to acquire a pharmacologic advantage, or if such drugs were shown to improve measurable categories of learning or to reduce mistakes in the workplace, would we be truly free to choose not to “enhance” our brains? In an age that esteems computational power, we must be careful not to reduce human thought to instrumental value. Paradigms of the brain that emphasize cognitive performance, although in some ways practically useful, cannot supply an understanding of the purpose of the human mind or the dignity of the person. I would like to suggest that a Christian perspective of human nature is helpful to evaluating these difficult questions. There is a biblical understanding of wisdom that transcends sheer intelligence. We must ask not only whether drugs that boost certain features of mental performance are safe and instrumental, but also whether they ultimately bring glory to God by increasing our capacities to know and worship God, to honor God by the way we live and think, and to love and serve our neighbor. The biblical authors understood that our problems are not primarily due to cognitive finitude but to fallen and flawed minds. Enhancing cognitive power, therefore, risks magnifying not only human accomplishment but also human error. For that, our need is not so much for a stimulant as for the Savior.