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Comment by RevRal | Hacker News Reader

I've been interested in piracetam for a while.

Anybody with personal experience?

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam

I didn't notice any improvement on piracetam. The only things that I'm sure change my mental state are caffeine and modafinil. I highly recommend modafinil (brand name Provigil). It helps me concentrate, especially if I didn't get enough sleep the night before.

Is modafinil/Provigil available over the counter?

It depends on whose counter you're referring to. :-p

But generally, no.

Its precursor Adrafinil is not a controlled substance and easier to obtain over the internet. Same effects, different dosage requirements. Modafinil itself is schedule IV in the US and harder to obtain cough nubrain.com cough

That site seems really insecure. Got this MySQL error at one point:

  QUERY = UPDATE ec_customer SET `noOrders`=noOrders + 1 WHERE customer_id =

Their registration doesn't seem to be done through HTTPS. I'd be careful handing your CC info to them. Whoever wrote their software seems really incompetent.

No, but you can buy it cheap from India. If you google "modalert" -- the 4th link down, they have been around for years and will hook you up.

This doesn't sound sketchy at all.

Better use a disposable credit card number...

I can second its truth.

Thanks! Generic Modafinil for $2.20/200mg instead of the usual $6/100mg online for the branded stuff. I'd previously stuck with Adrafinil before, since it's $1/300mg online. The Olmifon packages I've gotten have been labeled at $0.15/pill over the counter in France.

But HOLY SHIT that was the sketchiest web checkout process I can possibly imagine that doesn't involve physical handoffs of unmarked bills.

So you start off with a normal inventory based shopping cart system, but then none of the 5 sketchy looking payment options is configured — instead you go to a separately hosted shopping cart system, and add a stack of gift certificates to that cart in bill denominations. To check out there you have to create an account with a sketchy credit-card-based Paypal competitor called AlertPay, who's signup process has questions about your Citizenship, DOB, and Occupation, ostensibly for some kind of Patriot Act compliance. After doing that you are redirected back to the second shopping cart system, where you have to click through two pages to generate each gift certificate UUID, which it warns you will only be rendered once. Then you add each gift certificate to the first cart until your balance is negative $15 to cover shipping. Now you can proceed to checkout.

You'd think it was the least-converting system ever devised, but the extra %600 discount on top of the standard overseas drug discounting is a powerful motivator.

SWIM doesn't know if it's a country-by-country thing but they noticed that if you ignore the gift certificate stuff and just carry on through as doing a "credit card" order, they'll take the details direct anyway. SWIM is not sure what the point of them mentioning the gift certificate stuff was..

Have you ever tried Adfrainil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrafinil

I have. It's not as strong as modafinil, and it's harder on your liver.

I tried piracetam, oxiracetam, and aniracetam 2-3 years ago and found them all to be vastly overrated. I knew a few journalism students that used to be heavy coffee drinkers that really liked piracetam+choline though. Piracetam is dirt cheap so you might as well see if you respond, but definitely stop taking it if you don't.

A supplement that's great for overall health with lots of research is Alpha Lipoic Acid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_lipoic_acid). I find it helps me concentrate for longer periods of time and acts as a mild mood stabilizer.

There're also: Huperzine-A, Vinpocetine, Phosphatidyl Serine, Phosphatidyl Choline, Ginko, Acetyl-L-Carnitine, Taurine, Magnesium. There's a list of them in the book 'The Brain Trust Program', also Ray Kurzweil's 'Fantastic Voyage'.

I finished a bottle of Huperzine-A a little while ago. Did apparently zilch for me - no subjective effects, no side-effects, no apparent effects on DNB, etc. (It was from Source Naturals, which is apparently reputable enough that I discount the possible of counterfeits.) In comparison, I did notice effects from piracetam, eg., or fish oil (http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/...).

I'm I tried Piracetam, Vasopressin, and Lucidril back in the '80s.

I was trying all sorts of nootropics, both straight-up drugs and nutritional supplements back then. Piracetam may have worked, but at the end of my experiments I found that about the best thing was boosting phenylalanine to help with caffeine.

Part of this may have been that getting a steady supply of many things (such as Piracetam) was both difficult and expensive in the USA.

I posted comments elsewhere in the thread. Briefly: Overrated, probably not worth the trouble, but at least pretty benign.

My roommate and I took it for about two months, also supplemented with choline. I didn't notice any improvement. My roommate noticed an improved ability to do mental math, but not enough of an improvement for it to be worth continuing to take.

Yes, I took it for several days and developed an annoying headache/feeling. It did not, at all, improve cognitive function. In my case it impaired it.

YMMV of course.

I've had far better luck with fish oil (Omega-3 supplements), taken every morning with earl grey tea. The fish oil helps me concentrate, while the tea releases caffeine more slowly than coffee does, preventing jitteriness and extending its duration.

I've heard that the headache is due to a lack of choline, and that most people should be taking a choline supplement with their racetams.

I think I read that as well, but decided against it because the literature wasn't convincing enough (i.e., hearsay on forum posts), and I wasn't thrilled with ingesting, and possibly becoming dependent on so many substances.

Choline is a natural compound, you can get it by eating eggs. Most people take it as a supplement the same time with piracetam, you can buy them combined as well. It's definitely discussed in research as well as forums:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7301036 "The results of these studies demonstrate that the effects of combining choline and piracetam are quite different than those obtained with either drug alone"

Thanks for the pubmed link, didn't see that.

As far as choline goes, I eat an egg every day, and get my vitamins and minerals from fresh fruits, veggies and legumes. Just as you can obtain Vitamin-C or choline from a supplement, so too can you obtain them from natural sources. From what I understand of nutrition, the natural sources deliver the same nutrients in ways that our bodies can metabolize better.

I'm open to trying piracetam again, but it just doesn't seem all that significant to justify even the extra cost of buying it (and the supplements) and becoming dependent on it. If someone here actually does think it's worth it, I'd be very interested in hearing from you, provided you don't own a nootropics business.

One egg isn't going to do it. One egg gets you <200mg of choline, if I remember my research right, while you need more like >1000mg/1g to really see piracetam's effects. My DNB scores improved more with piracetam+choline than just piracetam: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/...

Fish oil helps my mood too.

You may want to be make sure that the fish oil is molecularly distilled to minimize your exposure to mercury and PCBs.

Yes, very good point, the brand I get does do that (Nature Made Liquid Softgels Odorless 1200mg).

Or maybe not... http://thestockmasters.com/Fish-Oil-Supplements-PCB-03032010

Thanks for the link!

I'd certainly believe it. The amount of toxins man has put into the ocean is mind-boggling, so it's not a surprise if, even though they say on the damn bottle that they filter PCBs, that they're still there.

Edit: However, it looks like the one mentioned in the article is not the same one I use. The one in the article is Cod Liver oil. Still, that's no reason to assume the other one is safe, as this is quite a global problem.

Take a second look - it says Nature Made cod liver oil and odorless fish oil.

If only they said which ones DON'T have pcbs.

To make fish oil, you need fish that are low enough in the food chain to not have many PCBs. Fish oil is usually made from the menhaden fish (aka the alewife fish), which used to be plentiful all around the Atlantic coastline of the US, feeding on algae. With all those fish turned into fish oil pellets, there are massive algae blooms, and the food chain's getting disrupted.

See http://www.ethicurean.com/2009/03/23/menhaden/ and http://motherjones.com/environment/2006/03/ill-take-menhaden

Thanks for that! Any recommendations on alternatives? I find other sources of Omega3 (flax seed) to be not as good unfortunately...

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