Nootropics Survey Results And Analysis

Few notes: Modafinil was a massive productivity booster while I was at uni. I would occasionally do a 36 hour period of solid study or work or whatever to cover a whole bunch of content and take up to 600mg modafinil durin this period, sometimes followed by a normal 8 hr sleep, then repeat. It was wonderful; I covered huge sections of my curriculum efficiently. The only side effect I have ever really felt from modafinil is a slight bit of 'coke mouth' when taking a high dose, and a minor bit of jaw clenching a la MDMA at the high doses as well.

Now I use only when work is very busy and I have been stupid with my sleep, 100mg mane for a couple of the days of the week seems to work very well although I am not an 'every day' doser and always prefer to be around 36 hours from my last dose if I am going to drink or take any other substances (I find I don't get the sensation of drunk if still on modafinil)

Edit: to more directly respond to your post, as opposed to ramble, you note that caffeine doesn't do that much to your mental capacity. Modafinil doesn't really either. The studies that have looked at mental capacity, creativity etc whilst under modafinil cf. amphetamines cf. placebo have all shown decreasing returns for people of normal or high baseline cognitive function. Modafinil is not going to make you smarter. But if you take it in the right environment, it can make you a lot more productive

I'd hazard a guess that the level of enhancement both bring are about the same for many people... but that the drawbacks of caffeine are more or less something that everybody's used to.

For me, using adrafinil to get by on less sleep was considerably more desirable than using caffeine.

Then again, the drawbacks of caffeine are strong enough for me that I generally don't use it, so I might be an outlier.

I use modafinil quite regularly to defer sleep to work on projects through the night, and the difference from caffeine is very noticeable to me - to get the same effect from caffeine means jitters and noticeable increased heart rate.

Don't expect to get mental abilities above your normal rested self for either one of these. You should expect to be able to keep focusing for longer periods, including when tired, though.

More importantly to me than the immediate negative effects of caffeine is that I can take breaks from modafinil at any time, for any period of time, and feel no withdrawal. If I use large enough doses of caffeine to regularly make it through a night without sleep, and want to take a break from it, I need to step down my caffeine intake slowly or risk a week of intense headaches, diarrhoea, shakes in the evening, and fever.

Caffeine is nasty stuff...

-caffeine does nothing to me; I can drink a coffee in the evening and go right to sleep; I can drink water all day and have problems sleeping; It just doesn't have any effect on me at all as long as sleepiness and concentration are concerned

-when I take Moda, caffeine somehow starts having huge effect: one cup of coffee or tea even makes me focused and willing to do stuff and there is just no sleepiness regardless of how tired I am;

I am not sure if my reaction to caffeine while on Moda is what people usually feel when they drink a coffee or "energy drink" but the effect is awesome :)

I'm not sure that kind of thing would show up in this survey.

Yeah.. I know this is just hearsay and anecdotal evidence.

Edit: Here's a comment on this very post which reflects what I say above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249637

Personally I'd like to try it, but it's prescription-only where I live...

Ah yes, coffee enemas, the pinnacle of pseudoscience - and dangerous at that.

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

Some proponents of alternative medicine have claimed that coffee enemas have an anti-cancer effect by "detoxifying" metabolic products of tumors.[4] There is no medical scientific evidence to support any anti-cancer effect of coffee enemas.[2][5][6]

Coffee enemas can cause numerous side effects, including infections, sepsis (including campylobacter sepsis), severe electrolyte imbalance, colitis, polymicrobial enteric septicemia, proctocolitis, salmonella, brain abscess, and heart failure.[4][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] If the coffee is inserted too quickly or is too hot, it could cause internal burning[14] or rectal perforation.[15] Long term use of coffee enemas can lead to malabsorption of fat, fat-soluble vitamins, and calcium.

The use of coffee enemas has led to several deaths as a result of severe electrolyte imbalance, hyponatremia, dehydration, pleural and pericardial effusions.[8][16] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled that study participants must be warned of the risk of death from coffee enemas in studies that use them.[17][18]

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ask-the-science-based-ph...

Adderall wasn't as bad, but it just wrecked my physical state. Twitchy, nervous, jaw hurt, wouldn't eat. In low enough doses, adderall is probably as useful as a cup of coffee. Long term health risks though seem pretty bleak.

Wellbutrin is another wonder drug that's not always talked about. Increased my concentration, increased my sex drive, increased my athletic performance... But! The first week on a full dose and I wanted jump through a window. Does very weird things to your brain (epileptic seizures included). I described it as being able to feel things in my head that I shouldn't be able to. Started hearing lots of high pitched humming. Apparently all side effects, bleg.

I'll stick to coffee.

In the end, most user end up with a permanent tolerance that no amount of drug vacation will lower.

I'm not even mentioning here the whole issue of amphetamine disrupting vesicle pH gradient, causing dopamine leakage. Dopamine is very prone is auto-oxidation to quinone when they float free around in the cytosol.

I've heard people complain that amphetamines increase focus at the expense of creativity.

edit: Just saw him linked below, should've read first -_-

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/21/6/LB46...

Not feeling "performance anxiety" most likely does improve performance for most people.

Where you obtain this stuff is a mystery. Amazon used to ship it, but it appears and disappears. One interesting problem is what is merely OTC in one country is prescription only in another country. This is typical for all the substances in the list. This is typical for most substances, it seems, like stevia and perhaps a hundred food dyes.

Stuff I've tried with no measurable performance gain: caffeine, piracetam (headache), creatine, vinpocetine, choline, some others. Other than occasional headache, not much effect one way or the other.

When I was taking aniracetam, the anxiolytic effect was too strong to be placebo. Almost as strong as alcohol. I was genuinely surprised. It makes activities like staring at leaves fluttering almost magical. Eventually I gave it up because this effect wore off and it was too expensive.

Medical progress often starts with observations, and is confirmed by trials. Penicillin is one such example.

To discount the value of observations is to ignore an important part of the discovery process.

There is extremely limited data available around the use of nootropics for mind enhancement (as opposed to in medical use for treating illness). In the absence of of such data a survey like this indicates that there are a few things worth studying in more depth (and some supposed nootropics that seem worthless).

The author appears extremely aware of the problems with their methodology, and makes no attempts to hide these problems. To pull quotes:

The online nootropics community consists of mostly healthy individuals looking to use these substances to gain motivation or clearer thinking. They tend to “outpace” the scientific literature, using some substances that haven’t yet been shown to work, or haven’t been shown to benefit healthy individuals. ... " I would have liked to have some placebo nootropics to use as a comparison, but since I wasn’t running a trial, I didn’t have that option. I did, however, try to assess the placebo effect in a couple of sneaky ways." ... "I have very low confidence that these represent real effects rather than artifacts of the gymnastics I had to do to make the data correlatable at all, and I report them only to encourage other people to do more sober analyses."

I think attempting to do this - knowing that people will criticize the methodology - is admirable.

Your exhortation that he should spend more time on basic understanding of statistics is misplaced, because he understands these issues, but he has different philosophical views than you on how information should be gathered and processed. Specifically, it seems to be your view that information received with noise and bias should be given (literally) zero weight, that information should be ignored unless it comes in the form of peer-reviewed, random controlled clinical trials. His philosophical view is that all information should be given some appropriate weight, and that the costs to acquire information are relevant. Random, controlled clinical trials are costly, and so we will never have them on a variety of topics of interest to us. To account for this finiteness of resources, and to suggest which areas could be more fruitful for future formal trials, it seems wise to acquire that information which can be cheaply had. This is an attempt to gather that information.

I mean, obviously there is a bias in favor of people who use more nootropics and find nootropics more effective. But since all I was doing was ranking nootropics relative to one another, that should mostly cancel out. I'm not sure why respondents would, for example, be expected to be a group disproportionately likely to have a stronger response to modafinil relative to bacopa compared to the general population.

More pressingly, I'm not sure how I can avoid it besides gathering hundreds of people together and forcing them to try nootropics one by one in controlled conditions, for which I don't have the resources. Even professional studies that select their subjects ahead of time have atrociously high dropout rates. If you have an implementable idea for avoiding response bias on next year's survey I'm happy to go ahead with it, but "not collect any survey data at all because available methodology isn't perfect" seems strictly inferior.

I feel like I hedged myself pretty appropriately: " we can't get good data without way more effort and resources than anyone is willing to put in, but if we ran a survey we could at least get better anecdata", "This survey does not intend to rectify [the confusion as to whether nootropics work at all]", "a pessimist might say that [this is] extracting patterns from random noise", et cetera. But given the choice between giving up because it wasn't perfect and going ahead with hedges, I figured I might as well go ahead.

I especially invite comments from participants here who have a professional understanding of statistical studies in clinical trials of new medicines.

Scott has an M.D. and is currently doing his residency in psychiatry.

If only the author understood this. Then he might have written this in the fifth paragraph: "They tend to “outpace” the scientific literature, using some substances that haven’t yet been shown to work...people combine a bewildering variety of chemicals without being sure which ones work better than others or even whether any of them work at all.

This survey does not intend to rectify this state of affairs"

He might also have written in the conclusion: "Overall I was not too impressed with the results of this survey. No unexpected substances jumped out as promising, there was a very wide distribution from “useless” to “life-changing” in nearly everything except the -afinils, and it was very hard to find much of a dose-response relationship anywhere."

"Other goals for the future are to drag people kicking and screaming into reading directions so I know everyone’s rating off the same scale..."

Not every blog post needs to rise to the level of double blind clinical trial.

I note that Norvig is a really high bar, and that reading and discussing articles is not going to have that level of effect either. (Though what effect it does have, comes at less risk.)

Many people claim that taking modafinil allows them to lose a night's sleep and feel fine the next day. It seems unlikely that they'd be so completely wrong that modafinil is not doing them any short-term good at all. Like, the typical response to "lose a night's sleep" is "have a really obviously bad day tomorrow". It would be difficult for modafinil to make someone so totally oblivious, to their own performance and the comments of people around them, as to not notice this happening.

If modafinil didn't have any clinical studies backing it up, the anecdotal evidence would be enough to convince me with high probability that modafinil has short-term benefits for many people.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/1xglcg/a_survey_...

This wasn't meant to convince anyone to take nootropics.