Question to the Room

Once again.  Can any of you name works of fiction, films, real-life stories, etc., in which people take drugs, or other  miscellaneous substances, to increase their intelligence?  I'm sure this has been done; I just don't know where.

I don't know.  What kind of Faustian bargain would you strike to increase your intelligence?  Jen mentioned one recently (scroll down to June 14); I don't have a very good sense of how either IQs or asses double in size, so I can't answer.  Smart pills that confer frigidity/impotence?  How about smart pills that make you an insatiable horndog?  That would probably make for better fiction.  What if they made you fairly amoral?  Or drastically increased your sensitivity to suffering?  Or made you really love showtunes?

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Metameat
Interstellar Pig by William Sleator had a character named Luap (spell it backward), a reptilian alien who had a symbiotic relationship with a slug in his mouth - when he ate spiders, the slug would get some premasticated food and in return release some brain hormones that temporarily turned his host into a genius.
waggish
Disch's Camp Concentration is very, very Faustian: criminals infected with Nietzsche-esque super-syphilis to make them brilliant. Mucho Faust refs.
Miranda Gaw
Flowers for Algernon is kind of the canonical example of this. There's also the Simpsons scene where Otto, the school bus-driving stoner, drinks a "smart drink" and realizes "I'm wasting my life."

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