As you mention GHB is addictive by many accounts. But having taken the prescription formulation (as of many others), it doesn’t seem to be addictive taken once- or twice-nightly at fairly high doses. Not that that’s any sort of suggestion anyone takes it recreationally or without prescription.
As for the stimulating effect you mention, yes. It has that. There’s a titration schedule when starting it, and counterintuitively that effect is felt more often at lower doses and it’s very unpleasant, like a waking dream with nausea and dizziness turned up to 9; you just have to ride it out. My guess is that at lower doses the sedative effects aren’t strong enough to keep one asleep against the stimulating effects.
That’s really interesting that Dexedrine lists at the top.
I wonder if it outperforms Ritalin due to the anti-anxiety component of Dexedrine. This would be similar to energy drink manufacturers including theanine in their beverages.
I don't think Dexedrine has an anti-anxiety component, beyond the general tendency of stimulants to be anxiolytic to people who really need them. I think amphetamines just work better than Ritalin does.
There are a bunch of different amphetamine and methylphenidate derivatives with different half-lives (Vyvanse, Concerta, Metadate, etc) and on average people pretty consistently find the amphetamines better than the methylphendiates regardless of half-life (though a few people have the opposite experience).
For what it's worth, I've been on all three, and the amphetamines worked noticeably better than Ritalin for me.
The desired window length may vary by what you're using it for. I work in IT and find I *want* 7-8 hours, and today I use Dexedrine XR for that purpose. Used to be Adderall, but Adderall rendered me sleepless long after the intended effect had worn off.
(I can only guess why Dexedrine doesn't do the same; my current guess is that, of the three (?) additional salts in Adderall, one of them metabolizes extremely slowly for for some reason.)
My friend, you're trying to solve something that isn't a mystery in the first place: these drugs have different actions and feel different, it's long been known that amphetamine is generally preferred, and it's long been known that dexamphetamine is preferred to Adderall's 3:1 d:l mix.
I'm truly not sure why one might start postulating something like "they must have added an anti-anxiety component" or "people must like how long it lasts" — no, it's just dexamphetamine there's no added anxiolytic, there are a dozen different formulations that last different amounts of time, 3-5 hours is not the usual desired length in any case, and *it feels different in the first place why would you try to find other reasons everyone knows amphetamine is preferred am I going insane*
IME Ritalin would cause extreme drops in mood and self loathing in addition to the focus effect. I'm talking crying and cursing myself while simultaneously cleaning and reading text books. Amphetamines never had that effect on me. No idea what chemistry was going on there.
I had a similar experience on Ritalin—mania, paranoia, and anxiety. Dexedrine just gives me a bit of paranoia—barricading my door at night—it works well for me overall though.
Having just switched *to* that in a part of the never ending quest to find The Thing That Will Work Forever, I'll, um, keep an eye out for that sort of thing.
So I'm glad you two shared that part of the potential experience. Thanks!
>That’s really interesting that Dexedrine lists at the top.
Amphetamine is addictive i.e. it makes you feel good. This is going to cause high ratings regardless of whether it helps in other ways. Scott mentions that amphetamine always gets stellar ratings (and methamphetamine higher ones) back in Know Your Amphetamines.
I tried Calm-Z from Amazon and the first pill had a large immediate effect but caused a continuous headache for 2 days. I recommend starting with half or a third of a pill and tapering up if it's well tolerated.
Calm-Z worked for me. Amazon stopped selling it and an alternative Zembrin product I bought didn't work. I now buy Calm-Z from https://drbvitamins.com/.
Technically nootropics are supposed to only be things that are safe, near side-effectless, and affect cognition rather than emotions, etc. Nobody sticks to that definition faithfully any more, so sure, whatever, why not?
Ok, that explains why alcohol and tobacco haven`t been listed. Concerning side effects, there is some evidence in cultural integration. As a youth, I was daring, but now I prefer substances with some generations of humans using them. Better the devil you know...
I was impressed that weight lifting ranks a fair bit higher than cardio of either kind. My teenage son started into weight lifting about six months ago and he says it's made a huge difference in his mental state.
I'd love to see studies comparing weight lifting to cardio and I wonder whether there are sex differences with regard to the benefit from each of those or if there aren't.
If someone said to me I had to become a regular runner or do daily HIIT classes to get the mood benefit, I'd find that pretty hard to stay motivated to do, but if someone said take up weight lifting, I could do that. Maybe we ought to be saying that to more people?
Also while I'm fantasizing about studies, I'd like to see Effexor up against weightlifting. Effexor always struck me as the nuclear weapon of antidepressants (from personal experience and seeing others taking it) and if weightlifting is more effective, wow, shouldn't we prescribe that a lot more? Maybe we just need to medicalize exercise regimes a bit more and people would stick to them? Like with follow-up visits the way we do med management and providing some insurance-covered coaching.
See my top-level comment. The survey does not ask if weightlifting was effective for depression, it merely asks about a vague "net benefit" (https://i.imgur.com/CvbGHrJ.png). People could (and probably are) rating weightlifting's effect on their physical appearance, not their mental health.
I guess if the survey had been done in a men's lifestyle magazine, I would agree with you. But this was a survey of nootropics, including mention of possible placebo response in the choices. With that frame of that survey, it would surprise me if many people rated weightlifting high because they liked how it made them look apart from any mental state benefits.
I also personally know some folks who would describe their experience of weight-lifting as life changing in terms of energy, focus, and mood -- so that predisposes me to reading that survey result as "the nootropic benefit of weightlifting" and not "the cosmetic benefit of weightlifting." Of course cosmetic benefits can also have mood benefits, but I don't imagine that accounts for all of it just given what we understand about the biological benefits of exercise generally.
Weightlifting has psychological effects you definitely don't expect. I remember many years ago when I first started diet+exercise that the biggest impact was... agency. I was young and so slightly lost, and it was something which was difficult, but showed results in proportion with the effort I put in. In a chaotic world that was pure gold.
Agree on the agency part. I barely lift at all each morning but it definitely makes my day better, and I try hard not to miss it on a work day. Long term there was a good benefit from realizing I wasn't as weak as I had felt, and seeing my capacity increase was sweet and proof I could change things. But I was having better days long before that.
Lifting weights is also the only thing that's ever cured my headaches once they start. As soon as my body reaches the "more oxygen needed!" phase I feel my head open up and I start to feel better. The stronger I've become the more reps it's taken. I suspect this is part of the same mechanism that makes my day better - I'm taking my body beyond some "slacker mode" threshold where it would otherwise linger.
Minor positive impact on my ability to fall asleep, just from imagining the next thing I'll be doing is waking up and lifting weights. This might be about distractions, since I noticed the same benefit from thinking about solving programming problems (vs. thinking about work problems which keep me awake).
Individual variation uber alles. Resistance training and HIIT are great for my mood. LISS is just a big no thank you.
Why do you feel you "must" lift? For aesthetics, yeah, I think you are right. For health and longevity, I think the latest Stronger by Science podcast makes a pretty good argument (against interest) that you don't.
I've tried it both ways. If I don't lift, my back starts hurting from sitting in a chair too often (and getting old of course), and my posture goes to hell. If I do a regular regimen of squats, deadlifts, and presses with a barbell, plus a little bit of dumbbell work for the arms, then my back doesn't hurt, I can breathe easier, move better, and any aerobic exercise I do get easier and more effective. It's 100% clear that for me, at least, the two are complementary and I need both, the aerobic stuff to keep the arteries flexible and the mind clear, and the shifting of dead iron around to build strength, resilience, and balance.
I'm not entirely sure why I despise weights so much. It may just be that it has to be done indoors in a smelly gym facing the wall, with dumfuk rap or some other twentysomething tunes blasting my ear. When I run I go on trails and I breathe clean air freshly synthesized an hour ago by trees, I watch small animals jump out of the way startled, I splash through streams or balance on logs, and hear nothing but the wind and water. I am alone with my thoughts and nature, and it feels restorative. Weight lifting just feels like work. Going to the office to do what must be done.
I did weightlifting for years without any noticeable effect on my mood or whatever, but I never interacted with anyone at the gym beyond the occasional spotting. My guess that there is a big effect for people who socialise there while lacking other venues for that.
It is perfectly possible to do both. And any weight lifter should do endurance stuff as any runner should train strength. Of course, all should do some stretching routine, coordinative stuff and meditating, before even considering having a beer.
Weightlifting is a strange one to me, people often seem to ascribe to it near magical impacts but I can't really tell. I wonder if it's because I've been doing it long enough that I just don't remember, and my baseline would be worse if I didn't have the experience? It also seems like the benefit is going to be more noticeable while in the numbers-go-up phase, and once you've started to hit plateaus that require turning it into a full time job to progress it becomes more tedious.
I would love to see someone do a study comparing video game speedrunning to various forms of physical exercise, personally. How much of the mental benefit is just due to seeing yourself improve on a challenging task using quantifiable metrics of progress?
The issue with the survey (https://www.nootroflix.com) is that it doesn't attempt to specify *what* exactly is being rated 1 to 10.
Weightlifting, for example. It's very easy to note physical changes in muscular hypertrophy from a few months of weightlifting. But did you actually notice it improved your mental health? Your physical health? Your bone density?
On the other hand, creatine and omega-3. I've been taking these for over a decade, because I KNOW they work. But there's no way I could ever notice an objective difference versus not taking them.
And then, Modafinil. I mean, obviously it's going to be rated high, because it's a drug, not a nootropic. You *feel* the effects.
"But there's no way I could ever notice an objective difference versus not taking them."
From a no-creatine base, try not lifting for 5 days while you creatine load, then go back to lifting. Guaranteed you would notice the difference just in the amounts you could lift.
I rated modafinil a 10, and I take only doses where subjective effects are almost zero. It could be that some people take if for whatever small high if offers, but I find that less productive. I'm basically using it as better coffee.
You should actually test effects of creatine. They are pretty visible .3-5pct boost is noticeable if you keep detailed stats and you are on a performance plateau
On the survey, I explicitely asked people: "For lifestyle interventions like diets, please only rate direct cogntive improvement.". You're right though, it was in small font, and a lot of people don't read instructions anyway. It could inflate the result a little bit, but given these specific instructions, and the fact that the survey is explicitely about nootropics, I'm pretty confident the a large majority of people actually rated the cognitive benefit.
This is cool. I like weightlifting the most in the moment of the exercise, but I think my mood is most improved after light cardio. I can actually feel pretty bad after heavy cardio, not emotionally, but in the amount of pain I feel. Weightlifting does seem to reduce aches and pains though, which is really good for day to day functioning. It's also a fairly short term goal setting system. Cardio, especially light cardio, requires a longer duration while weightlifting can be much faster for a similar effect. Finally, I wonder how much of the perceived positive effect is a kind of coping mechanism. You spend a lot of money on weights or a gym membership, so you think that the resulting effect of weight lifting is positive. I really like weight lifting, but I know some people, despite occasionally trying, can never actually establish it as a habit. In these cases, I wonder if they don't put down their effect of weight lifting at all, or they feel compelled to put a positive score because they feel like weightlifting is good for you. In my opinion, weightlifting would be much higher than the median score here.
I'm also curious about what 'trying to get more sleep' means. If I try to get more sleep, but someone is wrong on the internet and I stay up until 3AM arguing with them, do I still say that I'm trying to get more sleep? I'd guess that would make me feel subjectively bad.
I'm surprised meditation scores so low, comparable to a cup of coffee. I'd expect that to be very good for people's well being, but perhaps negative experiences during meditation are more common than I might think, or people just don't get the advertised effects.
I was having a debate about meditation in another forum recently. It seems perfectly captured by how much investment folks have in it. Such that some folk are so invested in it that I feel they will greatly overstate any effect it could have.
Personal investment seems like a component with any of these interventions. Why would meditation in particular have an exaggerated overstatement relative to these other interventions? In particular, Peloton bikes are jokingly referred to as a cult and their classes actually seem to produce that level of buy-in.
I've meditated for years, and I think I'm calmer, but that might just be because I was more emotional when I was younger, and I would have calmed down anyway. As far as the scientific benefits, they seem weak enough that they could still plausibly be overturned. I would still recommend meditating for 10 minutes a day, especially for people who need assistance with emotional regulation, which is most people. The plausible upside seems worth it, and the downside will be nil for most people
This is great stuff, but I still think there is a lot less homogeneity amongst people and the effect various substances or lifestyle interventions will have on them.
The idea of a singular bell curve or one split along neat and tidy lines such as race or sex seems like one of the biggest areas of research which is under explored and largely ignored.
Every study finds individuals for whom a drug works much better or much worse and somehow we just go with some average effect and ignore the variance as though it were not worth studying.
I think with certain categories of drugs the variance is rather small and fairly well understood to not be a factor and yet for psychoactive drugs we find a huge huge variance and for whatever reason pretend this is not important.
Meanwhile nearly every single patient with depression or anxiety or whatever is on some never ending journey of personal drug discovery to find out which anti-depressant is going to work well for them or not. This is a pie in the face level obvious event and it gets very little attention compared to drug vs drug average effect comparisons which are clinically meaningless as every psychiatrist jumps around from drug to drug seeking whatever is going to work for a given individual.
For an anti-depressant or nootropic to range from doing absolutely nothing for some people and being a literal life saver for other people seems like an area of research worth pursuing. Perhaps I'm just being ignorant and foolish to ignore the massive and huge research trend towards personalised medicine that has been all the rage for 15+ years? But it seems a bit isolated as a novelty while mainstream research continues on doing drug vs drug and drug vs placebo average effect size based methodologies.
I still think we might find multiple curves like a series of rolling hills if we could increase our granularity. My experiences and those of the people I've met over the years by far reflect this with some substances effecting people much more strongly than others. Even something as simple as the common mind altering drug ethanol are blatantly obvious and people have widely different tolerances, even within the same ethnic groups.
The focus on averages at all is seemingly absurd as essentially hardly anyone is going to have the average experience with any substance and very few drugs fall into an actual bell curve. If you map the effect size on a per individual basis you'll usually end up with a series of bell curves with some people getting a large effect and others a small effect. Certainly no curve is as 'smooth' as it appears and this visual statistical artefact is poisoning and limiting people's thinking.
These statistical summaries often hide information and this is done on purpose in many cases, the top multi-billion dollar criminal and civil cases have all been against large pharmaceutical companies using stats and other methods to hide or obscure data which led to tens of thousand of deaths.
As Scott has said many times...we need the raw data...but I think we also need charts which have the most raw version possible to present data as well as even something as simple as an 'average' or 'variance' or 'standard deviation' or 'regression curve' or 'best fit whatever' can hide important information.
Too often meaningless 'demographic' information is the search term used search for population variances when the answers are often in the raw data. We should be led by our observations, not by our statistics or baseless assumptions of artificial demographic categories.
If what I'm saying is wrong somehow...then why are so many of every psychiatrist's patients on a personal journey of trial and error? Often giving up before finding a solution, if there even is one for them amongst available drugs.
Everything you say is true, but you still have to start your journey of finding what's right for you by trying some specific thing, and the thing that works for most other people is a better starting point than the thing that almost never works for anyone else.
Nobody has ever been able to consistently figure out the factors that predict who different drugs will work for even when there are multiple teams throwing millions of dollars at the problem for eg SSRIs, they're not going to do it for nootropics and so this is the level we're stuck at for now.
I think his argument fails to: A) recognize the Bayesian importance of having a prior; B) formalize that the treatment effect can be better mapped to a multimodal distribution. Incidentally it seems that the recommendation engine works showing the similarity to a treatment cluster, thus acknowledging that individuals can have different responses.
Another thing that underperforms according to your model is trying to sleep less. It is hard to do. If the emphasis is on *trying*, that implies you don't have to wake up early in the morning for some other reason.
I am surprised it does so poorly. Makes me update against Guzey's position.
Sometimes an inadequate night's sleep can give me a sort of 'adrenaline shot', which feels like my body's way of getting me through the day. If sleep deprivation is bringing depressed people significantly above their usual baseline, I wonder if the body tends to take the message that long sleep = you are safe and secure, and can afford to relax; short sleep = you may be in a dangerous environment, and need to be ready to fight or flee as required. I can see how the latter would counteract some kinds of depression, albeit not in a sustainable way.
In my experience the first level of sleep deprivation isn't very self-evident. I feel tired but not so tired. It's not until I look at the quality of my work from such a day compared to a day with good rest that I see just how significantly impaired I was. I've stayed in that mode for extended periods without realizing it.
Are the people trying to get less sleep sleeping more or less than the people trying to get more sleep? My prior is on levels, not differences, being salient predictors.
My assumption was that that particular option was referring to Guzey's thesis, since it recently made the rounds in the community so I'd assume anyone talking about restricting sleep was inspired by his post.
If that's the case, Guzey says ~6 hours per night, so people ticking that option would be aiming for that. Rather than it being hypersomniacs trying to get from 10-12 hours to 8. But even then, it should have a positive effect.
They left out lithium, which has been life-changing for me at a 5mg otc microdose. It's very cheap and legal and available on Amazon.
It seems to improve both mood and cognition. I credit it with helping me get a perfect score on the SAT and perform really well at a programming job. The ideal dosing schedule is one with breakfast and one with dinner. That'd be 10mg/day of elemental lithium equivalent to 300mg/day [EDIT: 100mg] of lithium citrate which is about a third to a quarter [EDIT: 10%] of the long term maintenance dose for bipolar.
The recommendation engine wasn't too useful for me. Even though I told it every stimulant I ever took had to be stopped because of side effects, it still told me to take ALL the amphetamines and ALL the afinils. It's as if the population stats form priors that are too strong and it doesn't update enough on individual info.
Hi, I'm extremely interested in the topic of Lithium low dosing. Would you mind writing a bit about it here in reply to this comment ? Or at the least would you mind telling me :
1. how long it took to work
2. if you have any issue or difference when you are NOT taking them (and how quickly those signs come)
3. if you have any side effect
4. if you ever suspected you to have "non standard" mood prior to taking lithium, OR have any diagnostics in particular.
As some of those questions are deeply personnal, I totally understand if you want to answer by PM instead :)
What I'd really like to know is *who* this stuff benefits. For example; Inositol seems to help with depression in people with PCOS. Taking it with whey (which has alpha lacatalbumin) improves absorption. Since absorption is such an issue with inositol, I've always wondered what it might do if injected.
In any case, the point is that Inositol helps a very narrow range of people, but probably wouldn't help the general person with depressive episodes. The big problem with nootropic research (and, to a lesser extent, antidepressants in general) seems to be figuring out who will benefit from what without resorting to trial and error.
Also, it's interesting that nobody included provigil/nuvigil. Do those not have nootropic effects?
I'm curious as to how inositol compares to e.g., metformin or hormonal contraceptives. Someone close to me has struggled with PCOS for years and I don't believe any of her doctors ever mentioned this to her, that's despite getting little to no benefit from the first-line treatments.
Interestingly the top 2 drugs (Dexedrine and Adderall) are (I think) poorly compatible with Weightlifting and HIIT, as amphetamine salts are well known to increase heart rate and blood pressure.
Zembrin is known for its SSRI action, which is relatively weak, but it's also a blood brain barrier crossing selective PDE4 inhibitor. Combined with forskolin, synergistically increases cAMP levels which may affect long term potentiation. Neat to see it relatively high.
The red flag for me is Vegan rating higher than Vegetarian. I think you should expect that if Vegetarian diet is bad, Vegan diet should be worse. Perhaps people trying the Vegan diet were more ideological than the Vegetarians, leading them to be biased in rating it higher?
Not sure how this idea would map onto the Keto/Paleo/Carnivore set. Naively I'd expect Keto to be the least ideological, and Carnivore to be the most, but Paleo seems to do much better and Keto and Carnivore about the same.
I'd agree with your ideology ranking of keto/paleo/carnivore, but paleo is the least restrictive of the three diets in terms of food groups/macronutrient balance. Ketosis is pretty unpleasant for most people, and only a paleo person could avoid it.
(Also, I haven't checked exactly what the error bars mean, but the thick ones for vegan and vegetarian overlap, suggesting low confidence that vegan > vegetarian. And the probability of positive effect is slightly higher for vegetarian than for vegan.)
Scott, I vaguely think you had something like "Will I keep taking Zembrin?" on one of your prediction posts? If so, that may have biased your results relative to Troof's.
Makes total sense. Scott fans learn that Scott takes Zembrin, decide to try it on the grounds that Scott is disproportionally likely to choose good stuff, then tell Scott that they're taking it.
SAMe has been shown to work in RCT after RCT for what, exactly? I can find some articles on depression but an antidepressant is different than a nootropic.
Yes, but both SSRIs and bupropion are pretty high up on the list. I think everyone has forgotten the definition of nootropic and is voting off "makes me feel better".
People do seem to conflate cognitive and mood benefits a bit (which is reasonable, since improved mood can make you more productive). But bupropion is also a mild stimulant, and SSRIs rank quite a bit lower. The stuff at the top of the list, adderrall, Ritalin, modafinil, are all stimulants not especially known for improving mood. I think low ratings for SAMe probably just mean it has no noticeable nootropic/stimulant effect.
SWIM used armodafinil many many ~10 years and it is no longer effective.
Buproprion is a 'just-okay' bandaid solution for the dopamine reward system downregulation self imposed because of naive nootropic enthusiasm (still... armo isn't amp; that is 10 years use/abuse vs 6 months imnsho). I call this 'canary syndrome/consciousness' where one is willing to be the guinea pig for untested things like dopamine transport inhibiting "nootropics", heavy internet use lifestyle and other adhd-related, brain-degrading activities.
What you should emphasize (besides some negative testimonials to play it safe... for the children...) when increasing the total reach of this information is perhaps the CLASS of drugs they fall under (these below are not 'nootropics'):
Stimulants in order of abuse potential (Dopamine releasing agents and/or domapine reuptake inhibitors, 'antidepressant') All can be abused and are.
Phenibut, Xanax, Tianepetine:
more High Abuse candidates (anxiolytic, depressant, 'antidepressant')
For godsake nicotine ugh quit after 10 years I can't believe it took so long and I only used the patch as a nootropic. After the first month it was counterproductive.
I bought some Zembrin on the strength of your last post, and I don't know how to evaluate it.
I had been feeling sluggish because I'd had to give up caffeine because of my IBS; getting going in the morning suddenly got a lot harder and I was after a caffeine replacement. Zembrin in no way provided that kick, but with it I think I feel better, but that feels like a really poor measure.
The only data I really have is that at the end of the bottle I let it run out, and 2 days later patterned said "What's wrong? You look really miserable. Have I upset you?", so I got some more
Zembrin isn't a stimulant, so it's not really going to replace the coffee kick. Sounds like it might be having the mood-stabilizing effect of an SSRI though?
Sample size of one: I replaced my SSRI prescription with Zembrin after your survey, and it has very similar effects (including the same genital anethesia side effect, though less intense.)
I'm usually very inclined to blame things on the placebo effect, but 'impossible to feel pleasure on d*?&' isn't a plausible placebo effect for me. On top of that, years of trying different SSRIs and going on/off them makes me very clear on whether I'm on them.
I'm completely convinced that Zembrin is an over the counter SSRI. I suspect the difference in rating is a selection bias in the population answering the survey. SSRIs suck unless you need them, so if their survey had fewer anxiety/depression patients than yours it would make sense that they have less signal.
Call me Mr. Natural, but it seems to me a pretty good RX for optimizing brain function is regular exercise, good sleep sleep and meditation, my big 3, along with the healthy plant-based diet my doc recommended. There was a time when I used to find a couple of lines of good coke to be bracing, but those days have come and gone, as Brer Rabbit was wont to say.
Feels like we need a benchmark (or better, placebo control, but that's not realistic) for this kind of comparison. The ad-hoc Bayesian adjustment you did is a reasonable starting point. From there, seems like caffeine is a decent benchmark, just because it's available to anyone and a lot of people consume it without setting out to find nootropics. Then again, the sorts of people that take a nootropic survey might also consume caffeine in unusual ways. But 'things statistically better than caffeine after adjustments and controls' probably pins down a generally strong set of possibilities.
More dimensions would probably help too. 'Drug good VS drug bad' (yes, that's an over-simplification, and the justification for vagueness of question made sense for the first run at this) is a good starting point, but I'm sure there are several common nootropic dimensions that people are looking to improve from their subjective baselines. Energy/wakefulness? Mental clarity? Productiveness? Happiness/satisfaction with life? I'm sure there's a better taxonomy floating around.
About the same as the argument for Phenibut being a nootropic. Phenibut's use case in the nootropic arena seems to be "reduce anxiety, particularly the sort that impedes social interaction". In which case, yeah, that's what a lot of people use beer for.
Since human brains are meant for social interaction at least as much as they are for deep rational sciencey thinking, that's plausibly within the realm of nootropics.
I don't know how to categorise "reall. There is scant experimental and a lot of anecdotal evidence that beer (or maybe just small amounts of alcohol), with its disinhibiting effect, has a potential to make people think outside their boxes. Of course, the addiction risk makes it a very questionable nootropic. My bet is, there shall be more data on newer nootropics after a few generations to come. For my lifetime, I work with what has stood the test of time so far.
Dexedrine is definitely better than Adderall. I had to quit Adderall and switch to Dexedrine because the levoamphetamine is too anxiogenic. I can’t take more than 5 mg of Adderall without getting paresthesias but I can take a huge dose of Dexedrine without that effect.
In "Worth The candle" Kefir was described as weak alcoholic drink, in this survey it turns out nootropic. What other majestic qualities this liquid hides, I wonder. *drinks a glass of kefir*
Have you considered doing a scatterplot that combines your survey with Troof's? e.g. a cross around every data point. Then you can add a diagonal line (y=x), in which crossing the axis means that the two surveys are in agreement. Ellipses are an alternative to crosses and perfectly justified for large sample sizes.
If you send me the two datasets, I'd be very happy to do this.
> I think we have mostly gotten what we can get out of this methodology, without many big surprises
The methodology I hope might take us further is for individuals to conduct their own blinded experiments. I tried this last year, with Phenibut, Adrenafil, and Phenylpiracetam. I put three of each kind in identical bags, mixed them around, and then tried to guess two hours later which of the three I'd taken. In 12 trials I ran, I guessed which of the three I had taken on half the attempts. This suggested to me that the effects from these three are pretty indistinguishable from a placebo. In explaining how I formulated my guess (prior to checking the answer), I often struggled to find any words to subjectively describe what made me think it was one noontropic over another. Since I couldn't enumerate how my guesses came about, and since my ability to distinguish between them was only slightly higher than chance would predict, I eventually discontinued them.
More recently I've come into a script for Adderall, so I went to Amazon and ordered a bottle of placebo tablets that are the same dimensions as the Adderall. I'm in the process of 10 trials to see the extent to which I can differentiate between the stimulant and my placebo. If even 10 people were to double blind experiment on themselves and publish the results, I'd feel a lot more confident that we really understand the efficacy of any of these substances on performance.
Probably because it is attempted as a part of commitment to go out/socialize more.
Could it not just be that it's actually effective?
The answer to this question is found in researching "semen retention benefits."
Do you know if there's the same kind of addiction risk with GHB than with Phenibut?
As you mention GHB is addictive by many accounts. But having taken the prescription formulation (as of many others), it doesn’t seem to be addictive taken once- or twice-nightly at fairly high doses. Not that that’s any sort of suggestion anyone takes it recreationally or without prescription.
As for the stimulating effect you mention, yes. It has that. There’s a titration schedule when starting it, and counterintuitively that effect is felt more often at lower doses and it’s very unpleasant, like a waking dream with nausea and dizziness turned up to 9; you just have to ride it out. My guess is that at lower doses the sedative effects aren’t strong enough to keep one asleep against the stimulating effects.
I wonder where Oroxylum extract would place if it were included.
I predict the phenylpiracetam/bupropion/methylliberine area of slightly novel mild stimulants.
That’s really interesting that Dexedrine lists at the top.
I wonder if it outperforms Ritalin due to the anti-anxiety component of Dexedrine. This would be similar to energy drink manufacturers including theanine in their beverages.
I don't think Dexedrine has an anti-anxiety component, beyond the general tendency of stimulants to be anxiolytic to people who really need them. I think amphetamines just work better than Ritalin does.
That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
Could it also be that Dexedrine happens to fall more within the sweet spot of how long people want to work?
Dexedrine IR, Adderall IR operates in 3-5 hour windows, Ritalin IR operates in 2-4 hour windows.
3-5 hour range seems more in-line with the length of a single work bout.
There are a bunch of different amphetamine and methylphenidate derivatives with different half-lives (Vyvanse, Concerta, Metadate, etc) and on average people pretty consistently find the amphetamines better than the methylphendiates regardless of half-life (though a few people have the opposite experience).
For what it's worth, I've been on all three, and the amphetamines worked noticeably better than Ritalin for me.
The desired window length may vary by what you're using it for. I work in IT and find I *want* 7-8 hours, and today I use Dexedrine XR for that purpose. Used to be Adderall, but Adderall rendered me sleepless long after the intended effect had worn off.
(I can only guess why Dexedrine doesn't do the same; my current guess is that, of the three (?) additional salts in Adderall, one of them metabolizes extremely slowly for for some reason.)
My friend, you're trying to solve something that isn't a mystery in the first place: these drugs have different actions and feel different, it's long been known that amphetamine is generally preferred, and it's long been known that dexamphetamine is preferred to Adderall's 3:1 d:l mix.
I'm truly not sure why one might start postulating something like "they must have added an anti-anxiety component" or "people must like how long it lasts" — no, it's just dexamphetamine there's no added anxiolytic, there are a dozen different formulations that last different amounts of time, 3-5 hours is not the usual desired length in any case, and *it feels different in the first place why would you try to find other reasons everyone knows amphetamine is preferred am I going insane*
IME Ritalin would cause extreme drops in mood and self loathing in addition to the focus effect. I'm talking crying and cursing myself while simultaneously cleaning and reading text books. Amphetamines never had that effect on me. No idea what chemistry was going on there.
I had a similar experience on Ritalin—mania, paranoia, and anxiety. Dexedrine just gives me a bit of paranoia—barricading my door at night—it works well for me overall though.
Having just switched *to* that in a part of the never ending quest to find The Thing That Will Work Forever, I'll, um, keep an eye out for that sort of thing.
So I'm glad you two shared that part of the potential experience. Thanks!
>That’s really interesting that Dexedrine lists at the top.
Amphetamine is addictive i.e. it makes you feel good. This is going to cause high ratings regardless of whether it helps in other ways. Scott mentions that amphetamine always gets stellar ratings (and methamphetamine higher ones) back in Know Your Amphetamines.
Is Zembrin freely available.
Yes, there are a lot of Zembrin products for sale on Amazon, I think Calm-Z is the big one.
I tried Calm-Z from Amazon and the first pill had a large immediate effect but caused a continuous headache for 2 days. I recommend starting with half or a third of a pill and tapering up if it's well tolerated.
Calm-Z worked for me. Amazon stopped selling it and an alternative Zembrin product I bought didn't work. I now buy Calm-Z from https://drbvitamins.com/.
Did you the zembrin from nutricost on amazon? Nutricost is usually good (and cheap)
It was "Nutricost Sceletium Tortuosum Made with Zembrin"
Wow, you're right, they really did take it down, wonder why.
Is ayahuasca not a Nootropic? It's far more effective for me than anything on the list.
Technically nootropics are supposed to only be things that are safe, near side-effectless, and affect cognition rather than emotions, etc. Nobody sticks to that definition faithfully any more, so sure, whatever, why not?
Ok, that explains why alcohol and tobacco haven`t been listed. Concerning side effects, there is some evidence in cultural integration. As a youth, I was daring, but now I prefer substances with some generations of humans using them. Better the devil you know...
I was impressed that weight lifting ranks a fair bit higher than cardio of either kind. My teenage son started into weight lifting about six months ago and he says it's made a huge difference in his mental state.
I'd love to see studies comparing weight lifting to cardio and I wonder whether there are sex differences with regard to the benefit from each of those or if there aren't.
If someone said to me I had to become a regular runner or do daily HIIT classes to get the mood benefit, I'd find that pretty hard to stay motivated to do, but if someone said take up weight lifting, I could do that. Maybe we ought to be saying that to more people?
Also while I'm fantasizing about studies, I'd like to see Effexor up against weightlifting. Effexor always struck me as the nuclear weapon of antidepressants (from personal experience and seeing others taking it) and if weightlifting is more effective, wow, shouldn't we prescribe that a lot more? Maybe we just need to medicalize exercise regimes a bit more and people would stick to them? Like with follow-up visits the way we do med management and providing some insurance-covered coaching.
See my top-level comment. The survey does not ask if weightlifting was effective for depression, it merely asks about a vague "net benefit" (https://i.imgur.com/CvbGHrJ.png). People could (and probably are) rating weightlifting's effect on their physical appearance, not their mental health.
Weight lifting greatly improved my overall mood and mental stability long before I had visible gains.
I guess if the survey had been done in a men's lifestyle magazine, I would agree with you. But this was a survey of nootropics, including mention of possible placebo response in the choices. With that frame of that survey, it would surprise me if many people rated weightlifting high because they liked how it made them look apart from any mental state benefits.
I also personally know some folks who would describe their experience of weight-lifting as life changing in terms of energy, focus, and mood -- so that predisposes me to reading that survey result as "the nootropic benefit of weightlifting" and not "the cosmetic benefit of weightlifting." Of course cosmetic benefits can also have mood benefits, but I don't imagine that accounts for all of it just given what we understand about the biological benefits of exercise generally.
Weightlifting has psychological effects you definitely don't expect. I remember many years ago when I first started diet+exercise that the biggest impact was... agency. I was young and so slightly lost, and it was something which was difficult, but showed results in proportion with the effort I put in. In a chaotic world that was pure gold.
And even better, it has numbers that go up!
Agree on the agency part. I barely lift at all each morning but it definitely makes my day better, and I try hard not to miss it on a work day. Long term there was a good benefit from realizing I wasn't as weak as I had felt, and seeing my capacity increase was sweet and proof I could change things. But I was having better days long before that.
Lifting weights is also the only thing that's ever cured my headaches once they start. As soon as my body reaches the "more oxygen needed!" phase I feel my head open up and I start to feel better. The stronger I've become the more reps it's taken. I suspect this is part of the same mechanism that makes my day better - I'm taking my body beyond some "slacker mode" threshold where it would otherwise linger.
Minor positive impact on my ability to fall asleep, just from imagining the next thing I'll be doing is waking up and lifting weights. This might be about distractions, since I noticed the same benefit from thinking about solving programming problems (vs. thinking about work problems which keep me awake).
I hate weight-lifting. I do it because I must, but I'd rather run 10 miles -- in the rain -- than squat a 200 lb barbell even once.
Complete opposite here. God I fucking hate cardio, but I love me some weights.
Individual variation uber alles. Resistance training and HIIT are great for my mood. LISS is just a big no thank you.
Why do you feel you "must" lift? For aesthetics, yeah, I think you are right. For health and longevity, I think the latest Stronger by Science podcast makes a pretty good argument (against interest) that you don't.
I've tried it both ways. If I don't lift, my back starts hurting from sitting in a chair too often (and getting old of course), and my posture goes to hell. If I do a regular regimen of squats, deadlifts, and presses with a barbell, plus a little bit of dumbbell work for the arms, then my back doesn't hurt, I can breathe easier, move better, and any aerobic exercise I do get easier and more effective. It's 100% clear that for me, at least, the two are complementary and I need both, the aerobic stuff to keep the arteries flexible and the mind clear, and the shifting of dead iron around to build strength, resilience, and balance.
I'm not entirely sure why I despise weights so much. It may just be that it has to be done indoors in a smelly gym facing the wall, with dumfuk rap or some other twentysomething tunes blasting my ear. When I run I go on trails and I breathe clean air freshly synthesized an hour ago by trees, I watch small animals jump out of the way startled, I splash through streams or balance on logs, and hear nothing but the wind and water. I am alone with my thoughts and nature, and it feels restorative. Weight lifting just feels like work. Going to the office to do what must be done.
I did weightlifting for years without any noticeable effect on my mood or whatever, but I never interacted with anyone at the gym beyond the occasional spotting. My guess that there is a big effect for people who socialise there while lacking other venues for that.
It is perfectly possible to do both. And any weight lifter should do endurance stuff as any runner should train strength. Of course, all should do some stretching routine, coordinative stuff and meditating, before even considering having a beer.
Weightlifting is a strange one to me, people often seem to ascribe to it near magical impacts but I can't really tell. I wonder if it's because I've been doing it long enough that I just don't remember, and my baseline would be worse if I didn't have the experience? It also seems like the benefit is going to be more noticeable while in the numbers-go-up phase, and once you've started to hit plateaus that require turning it into a full time job to progress it becomes more tedious.
I would love to see someone do a study comparing video game speedrunning to various forms of physical exercise, personally. How much of the mental benefit is just due to seeing yourself improve on a challenging task using quantifiable metrics of progress?
The issue with the survey (https://www.nootroflix.com) is that it doesn't attempt to specify *what* exactly is being rated 1 to 10.
Weightlifting, for example. It's very easy to note physical changes in muscular hypertrophy from a few months of weightlifting. But did you actually notice it improved your mental health? Your physical health? Your bone density?
On the other hand, creatine and omega-3. I've been taking these for over a decade, because I KNOW they work. But there's no way I could ever notice an objective difference versus not taking them.
And then, Modafinil. I mean, obviously it's going to be rated high, because it's a drug, not a nootropic. You *feel* the effects.
"But there's no way I could ever notice an objective difference versus not taking them."
From a no-creatine base, try not lifting for 5 days while you creatine load, then go back to lifting. Guaranteed you would notice the difference just in the amounts you could lift.
I rated modafinil a 10, and I take only doses where subjective effects are almost zero. It could be that some people take if for whatever small high if offers, but I find that less productive. I'm basically using it as better coffee.
You should actually test effects of creatine. They are pretty visible .3-5pct boost is noticeable if you keep detailed stats and you are on a performance plateau
On the survey, I explicitely asked people: "For lifestyle interventions like diets, please only rate direct cogntive improvement.". You're right though, it was in small font, and a lot of people don't read instructions anyway. It could inflate the result a little bit, but given these specific instructions, and the fact that the survey is explicitely about nootropics, I'm pretty confident the a large majority of people actually rated the cognitive benefit.
This is cool. I like weightlifting the most in the moment of the exercise, but I think my mood is most improved after light cardio. I can actually feel pretty bad after heavy cardio, not emotionally, but in the amount of pain I feel. Weightlifting does seem to reduce aches and pains though, which is really good for day to day functioning. It's also a fairly short term goal setting system. Cardio, especially light cardio, requires a longer duration while weightlifting can be much faster for a similar effect. Finally, I wonder how much of the perceived positive effect is a kind of coping mechanism. You spend a lot of money on weights or a gym membership, so you think that the resulting effect of weight lifting is positive. I really like weight lifting, but I know some people, despite occasionally trying, can never actually establish it as a habit. In these cases, I wonder if they don't put down their effect of weight lifting at all, or they feel compelled to put a positive score because they feel like weightlifting is good for you. In my opinion, weightlifting would be much higher than the median score here.
I'm also curious about what 'trying to get more sleep' means. If I try to get more sleep, but someone is wrong on the internet and I stay up until 3AM arguing with them, do I still say that I'm trying to get more sleep? I'd guess that would make me feel subjectively bad.
I'm surprised meditation scores so low, comparable to a cup of coffee. I'd expect that to be very good for people's well being, but perhaps negative experiences during meditation are more common than I might think, or people just don't get the advertised effects.
I was having a debate about meditation in another forum recently. It seems perfectly captured by how much investment folks have in it. Such that some folk are so invested in it that I feel they will greatly overstate any effect it could have.
Personal investment seems like a component with any of these interventions. Why would meditation in particular have an exaggerated overstatement relative to these other interventions? In particular, Peloton bikes are jokingly referred to as a cult and their classes actually seem to produce that level of buy-in.
I've meditated for years, and I think I'm calmer, but that might just be because I was more emotional when I was younger, and I would have calmed down anyway. As far as the scientific benefits, they seem weak enough that they could still plausibly be overturned. I would still recommend meditating for 10 minutes a day, especially for people who need assistance with emotional regulation, which is most people. The plausible upside seems worth it, and the downside will be nil for most people
I don't think meditation is even more exaggerated than the others. I think it is as exaggerated as the others. Especially by those for whom it works.
This is great stuff, but I still think there is a lot less homogeneity amongst people and the effect various substances or lifestyle interventions will have on them.
The idea of a singular bell curve or one split along neat and tidy lines such as race or sex seems like one of the biggest areas of research which is under explored and largely ignored.
Every study finds individuals for whom a drug works much better or much worse and somehow we just go with some average effect and ignore the variance as though it were not worth studying.
I think with certain categories of drugs the variance is rather small and fairly well understood to not be a factor and yet for psychoactive drugs we find a huge huge variance and for whatever reason pretend this is not important.
Meanwhile nearly every single patient with depression or anxiety or whatever is on some never ending journey of personal drug discovery to find out which anti-depressant is going to work well for them or not. This is a pie in the face level obvious event and it gets very little attention compared to drug vs drug average effect comparisons which are clinically meaningless as every psychiatrist jumps around from drug to drug seeking whatever is going to work for a given individual.
For an anti-depressant or nootropic to range from doing absolutely nothing for some people and being a literal life saver for other people seems like an area of research worth pursuing. Perhaps I'm just being ignorant and foolish to ignore the massive and huge research trend towards personalised medicine that has been all the rage for 15+ years? But it seems a bit isolated as a novelty while mainstream research continues on doing drug vs drug and drug vs placebo average effect size based methodologies.
I still think we might find multiple curves like a series of rolling hills if we could increase our granularity. My experiences and those of the people I've met over the years by far reflect this with some substances effecting people much more strongly than others. Even something as simple as the common mind altering drug ethanol are blatantly obvious and people have widely different tolerances, even within the same ethnic groups.
The focus on averages at all is seemingly absurd as essentially hardly anyone is going to have the average experience with any substance and very few drugs fall into an actual bell curve. If you map the effect size on a per individual basis you'll usually end up with a series of bell curves with some people getting a large effect and others a small effect. Certainly no curve is as 'smooth' as it appears and this visual statistical artefact is poisoning and limiting people's thinking.
These statistical summaries often hide information and this is done on purpose in many cases, the top multi-billion dollar criminal and civil cases have all been against large pharmaceutical companies using stats and other methods to hide or obscure data which led to tens of thousand of deaths.
As Scott has said many times...we need the raw data...but I think we also need charts which have the most raw version possible to present data as well as even something as simple as an 'average' or 'variance' or 'standard deviation' or 'regression curve' or 'best fit whatever' can hide important information.
Too often meaningless 'demographic' information is the search term used search for population variances when the answers are often in the raw data. We should be led by our observations, not by our statistics or baseless assumptions of artificial demographic categories.
If what I'm saying is wrong somehow...then why are so many of every psychiatrist's patients on a personal journey of trial and error? Often giving up before finding a solution, if there even is one for them amongst available drugs.
Everything you say is true, but you still have to start your journey of finding what's right for you by trying some specific thing, and the thing that works for most other people is a better starting point than the thing that almost never works for anyone else.
Nobody has ever been able to consistently figure out the factors that predict who different drugs will work for even when there are multiple teams throwing millions of dollars at the problem for eg SSRIs, they're not going to do it for nootropics and so this is the level we're stuck at for now.
Yeah, Heroin works for everyone but somehow the people consuming it seem to have something better to do than post here. This is no forum of losers.
I think his argument fails to: A) recognize the Bayesian importance of having a prior; B) formalize that the treatment effect can be better mapped to a multimodal distribution. Incidentally it seems that the recommendation engine works showing the similarity to a treatment cluster, thus acknowledging that individuals can have different responses.
Another thing that underperforms according to your model is trying to sleep less. It is hard to do. If the emphasis is on *trying*, that implies you don't have to wake up early in the morning for some other reason.
I am surprised it does so poorly. Makes me update against Guzey's position.
Sometimes an inadequate night's sleep can give me a sort of 'adrenaline shot', which feels like my body's way of getting me through the day. If sleep deprivation is bringing depressed people significantly above their usual baseline, I wonder if the body tends to take the message that long sleep = you are safe and secure, and can afford to relax; short sleep = you may be in a dangerous environment, and need to be ready to fight or flee as required. I can see how the latter would counteract some kinds of depression, albeit not in a sustainable way.
In my experience the first level of sleep deprivation isn't very self-evident. I feel tired but not so tired. It's not until I look at the quality of my work from such a day compared to a day with good rest that I see just how significantly impaired I was. I've stayed in that mode for extended periods without realizing it.
Are the people trying to get less sleep sleeping more or less than the people trying to get more sleep? My prior is on levels, not differences, being salient predictors.
It's a good point.
My assumption was that that particular option was referring to Guzey's thesis, since it recently made the rounds in the community so I'd assume anyone talking about restricting sleep was inspired by his post.
If that's the case, Guzey says ~6 hours per night, so people ticking that option would be aiming for that. Rather than it being hypersomniacs trying to get from 10-12 hours to 8. But even then, it should have a positive effect.
If only Walter White had sampled his own product (yes I know meth isn't on there), perhaps he could have cured his cancer.
But you might want to check out Requiem for a Dream first.
They left out lithium, which has been life-changing for me at a 5mg otc microdose. It's very cheap and legal and available on Amazon.
It seems to improve both mood and cognition. I credit it with helping me get a perfect score on the SAT and perform really well at a programming job. The ideal dosing schedule is one with breakfast and one with dinner. That'd be 10mg/day of elemental lithium equivalent to 300mg/day [EDIT: 100mg] of lithium citrate which is about a third to a quarter [EDIT: 10%] of the long term maintenance dose for bipolar.
The recommendation engine wasn't too useful for me. Even though I told it every stimulant I ever took had to be stopped because of side effects, it still told me to take ALL the amphetamines and ALL the afinils. It's as if the population stats form priors that are too strong and it doesn't update enough on individual info.
In what sense is 10 mg/day orotate = 300 mg/day of citrate? I'm not an expert on this but my calculations are different by like an order of ten.
The label says 5mg of elemental lithium (as orotate), not 5mg of lithium orotate.
But also I was off by a factor of 3 because I forgot that the citrate ion has a charge of -3. I'll show my work this time.
Google says Lithium citrate is Li3C6H5O7 with a mass of 209.923
Lithium has a mass of 6.941
209.923 / (3*6.941) = 10.08
So 10mg of lithium from amazon equals only 100mg of lithium citrate.
Hi, I'm extremely interested in the topic of Lithium low dosing. Would you mind writing a bit about it here in reply to this comment ? Or at the least would you mind telling me :
1. how long it took to work
2. if you have any issue or difference when you are NOT taking them (and how quickly those signs come)
3. if you have any side effect
4. if you ever suspected you to have "non standard" mood prior to taking lithium, OR have any diagnostics in particular.
As some of those questions are deeply personnal, I totally understand if you want to answer by PM instead :)
Thanks!
1. Very quickly (within 15 minutes)
2. Bad mood, low motivation
3. No side effects on me, probably. I have some psoriasis that is listed as a potential side effect but it started before I started taking lithium.
4. Mild to moderate depression diagnosis and some social anxiety.
Yeah right now the recommender system only takes into account ratings, not issues you had. Good idea to include Lithium.
What I'd really like to know is *who* this stuff benefits. For example; Inositol seems to help with depression in people with PCOS. Taking it with whey (which has alpha lacatalbumin) improves absorption. Since absorption is such an issue with inositol, I've always wondered what it might do if injected.
In any case, the point is that Inositol helps a very narrow range of people, but probably wouldn't help the general person with depressive episodes. The big problem with nootropic research (and, to a lesser extent, antidepressants in general) seems to be figuring out who will benefit from what without resorting to trial and error.
Also, it's interesting that nobody included provigil/nuvigil. Do those not have nootropic effects?
Provigil is on there under the generic name, modafinil
Do you have a link on inositol for depression in people with PCOS?
I found this: https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/25/23/5566/htm
I'm curious as to how inositol compares to e.g., metformin or hormonal contraceptives. Someone close to me has struggled with PCOS for years and I don't believe any of her doctors ever mentioned this to her, that's despite getting little to no benefit from the first-line treatments.
Interestingly the top 2 drugs (Dexedrine and Adderall) are (I think) poorly compatible with Weightlifting and HIIT, as amphetamine salts are well known to increase heart rate and blood pressure.
Out of curiosity, what's your avg BPM while walking with and without Adderall?
Scott, FYI the Doctor's Best Zembrin linked from the lorien psych page is no longer available at amazon.
I considered taking nootropics. But then I realized it would be like Bo Jackson taking steroids. What's the point?
Sorry. I've been dying to use that joke for a long long time.
Zembrin is known for its SSRI action, which is relatively weak, but it's also a blood brain barrier crossing selective PDE4 inhibitor. Combined with forskolin, synergistically increases cAMP levels which may affect long term potentiation. Neat to see it relatively high.
The red flag for me is Vegan rating higher than Vegetarian. I think you should expect that if Vegetarian diet is bad, Vegan diet should be worse. Perhaps people trying the Vegan diet were more ideological than the Vegetarians, leading them to be biased in rating it higher?
Not sure how this idea would map onto the Keto/Paleo/Carnivore set. Naively I'd expect Keto to be the least ideological, and Carnivore to be the most, but Paleo seems to do much better and Keto and Carnivore about the same.
Vegan might be catching some people who were allergic or sensitive to dairy and didn’t know it.
I'd agree with your ideology ranking of keto/paleo/carnivore, but paleo is the least restrictive of the three diets in terms of food groups/macronutrient balance. Ketosis is pretty unpleasant for most people, and only a paleo person could avoid it.
The results don't say vegetarian bad, vegan less bad; they say vegetarian somewhat good, vegan a bit better. The rating system is explained as:
> 0 means a substance was totally useless, or had so many side effects you couldn’t continue taking it.
> 1 - 4 means subtle effects, maybe placebo but still useful.
> 5 - 9 means strong effects, definitely not placebo.
> 10 means life-changing.
You can also see on this chart that the vegan and vegetarian diets are both assigned >70% probability of having a positive effect: https://troof.blog/posts/nootropics/ratings_effective_full.jpeg
(Also, I haven't checked exactly what the error bars mean, but the thick ones for vegan and vegetarian overlap, suggesting low confidence that vegan > vegetarian. And the probability of positive effect is slightly higher for vegetarian than for vegan.)
Scott, I vaguely think you had something like "Will I keep taking Zembrin?" on one of your prediction posts? If so, that may have biased your results relative to Troof's.
Makes total sense. Scott fans learn that Scott takes Zembrin, decide to try it on the grounds that Scott is disproportionally likely to choose good stuff, then tell Scott that they're taking it.
Curious, I've been doing hardcore weightlifting and I'd hardly place it above placebo.
Probably because I did not think at the time that it might have nootropic effects.
exercise has proven benefits (https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity/basics/pa-health/index.htm) and so i'd expect it to do well just because of that.
Cardio vs Weightlifting could be just people who did weightlifting were more likely to actually keep trying or something.
SAMe has been shown to work in RCT after RCT for what, exactly? I can find some articles on depression but an antidepressant is different than a nootropic.
Yes, but both SSRIs and bupropion are pretty high up on the list. I think everyone has forgotten the definition of nootropic and is voting off "makes me feel better".
People do seem to conflate cognitive and mood benefits a bit (which is reasonable, since improved mood can make you more productive). But bupropion is also a mild stimulant, and SSRIs rank quite a bit lower. The stuff at the top of the list, adderrall, Ritalin, modafinil, are all stimulants not especially known for improving mood. I think low ratings for SAMe probably just mean it has no noticeable nootropic/stimulant effect.
I know people who do say it has a stimulant effect, but you're right that this could be much rarer than the study-proven antidepressant effect.
"Adderall is not especially known for improving mood" is not a statement I thought I'd see Scott let pass.
I thought depression can cause worse cognition, so fixing the depression might improve cognition. Like curing a nutritional deficiency.
On the other hand, being happy makes people more stupid and best analytical thinking is not done in relaxed mode.
SWIM used armodafinil many many ~10 years and it is no longer effective.
Buproprion is a 'just-okay' bandaid solution for the dopamine reward system downregulation self imposed because of naive nootropic enthusiasm (still... armo isn't amp; that is 10 years use/abuse vs 6 months imnsho). I call this 'canary syndrome/consciousness' where one is willing to be the guinea pig for untested things like dopamine transport inhibiting "nootropics", heavy internet use lifestyle and other adhd-related, brain-degrading activities.
What you should emphasize (besides some negative testimonials to play it safe... for the children...) when increasing the total reach of this information is perhaps the CLASS of drugs they fall under (these below are not 'nootropics'):
Dexedrine, Amphetamine, Ar/Modafinil, Ritalin, Bupropion:
Stimulants in order of abuse potential (Dopamine releasing agents and/or domapine reuptake inhibitors, 'antidepressant') All can be abused and are.
Phenibut, Xanax, Tianepetine:
more High Abuse candidates (anxiolytic, depressant, 'antidepressant')
For godsake nicotine ugh quit after 10 years I can't believe it took so long and I only used the patch as a nootropic. After the first month it was counterproductive.
Basically exercise is #1
I bought some Zembrin on the strength of your last post, and I don't know how to evaluate it.
I had been feeling sluggish because I'd had to give up caffeine because of my IBS; getting going in the morning suddenly got a lot harder and I was after a caffeine replacement. Zembrin in no way provided that kick, but with it I think I feel better, but that feels like a really poor measure.
The only data I really have is that at the end of the bottle I let it run out, and 2 days later patterned said "What's wrong? You look really miserable. Have I upset you?", so I got some more
Zembrin isn't a stimulant, so it's not really going to replace the coffee kick. Sounds like it might be having the mood-stabilizing effect of an SSRI though?
Sample size of one: I replaced my SSRI prescription with Zembrin after your survey, and it has very similar effects (including the same genital anethesia side effect, though less intense.)
I'm usually very inclined to blame things on the placebo effect, but 'impossible to feel pleasure on d*?&' isn't a plausible placebo effect for me. On top of that, years of trying different SSRIs and going on/off them makes me very clear on whether I'm on them.
I'm completely convinced that Zembrin is an over the counter SSRI. I suspect the difference in rating is a selection bias in the population answering the survey. SSRIs suck unless you need them, so if their survey had fewer anxiety/depression patients than yours it would make sense that they have less signal.
Call me Mr. Natural, but it seems to me a pretty good RX for optimizing brain function is regular exercise, good sleep sleep and meditation, my big 3, along with the healthy plant-based diet my doc recommended. There was a time when I used to find a couple of lines of good coke to be bracing, but those days have come and gone, as Brer Rabbit was wont to say.
Feels like we need a benchmark (or better, placebo control, but that's not realistic) for this kind of comparison. The ad-hoc Bayesian adjustment you did is a reasonable starting point. From there, seems like caffeine is a decent benchmark, just because it's available to anyone and a lot of people consume it without setting out to find nootropics. Then again, the sorts of people that take a nootropic survey might also consume caffeine in unusual ways. But 'things statistically better than caffeine after adjustments and controls' probably pins down a generally strong set of possibilities.
More dimensions would probably help too. 'Drug good VS drug bad' (yes, that's an over-simplification, and the justification for vagueness of question made sense for the first run at this) is a good starting point, but I'm sure there are several common nootropic dimensions that people are looking to improve from their subjective baselines. Energy/wakefulness? Mental clarity? Productiveness? Happiness/satisfaction with life? I'm sure there's a better taxonomy floating around.
I don’t see any SARMs but I skimmed it really fast.
Where is beer (or any alcoholic beverage)? And where is cutting down on drinking? Am I on the wrong planet here?
About the same as the argument for Phenibut being a nootropic. Phenibut's use case in the nootropic arena seems to be "reduce anxiety, particularly the sort that impedes social interaction". In which case, yeah, that's what a lot of people use beer for.
Since human brains are meant for social interaction at least as much as they are for deep rational sciencey thinking, that's plausibly within the realm of nootropics.
I don't know how to categorise "reall. There is scant experimental and a lot of anecdotal evidence that beer (or maybe just small amounts of alcohol), with its disinhibiting effect, has a potential to make people think outside their boxes. Of course, the addiction risk makes it a very questionable nootropic. My bet is, there shall be more data on newer nootropics after a few generations to come. For my lifetime, I work with what has stood the test of time so far.
Had not thought of categories, esp ease of accessing. Well done, very useful.
Dexedrine is definitely better than Adderall. I had to quit Adderall and switch to Dexedrine because the levoamphetamine is too anxiogenic. I can’t take more than 5 mg of Adderall without getting paresthesias but I can take a huge dose of Dexedrine without that effect.
In "Worth The candle" Kefir was described as weak alcoholic drink, in this survey it turns out nootropic. What other majestic qualities this liquid hides, I wonder. *drinks a glass of kefir*
Have you considered doing a scatterplot that combines your survey with Troof's? e.g. a cross around every data point. Then you can add a diagonal line (y=x), in which crossing the axis means that the two surveys are in agreement. Ellipses are an alternative to crosses and perfectly justified for large sample sizes.
If you send me the two datasets, I'd be very happy to do this.
> I think we have mostly gotten what we can get out of this methodology, without many big surprises
The methodology I hope might take us further is for individuals to conduct their own blinded experiments. I tried this last year, with Phenibut, Adrenafil, and Phenylpiracetam. I put three of each kind in identical bags, mixed them around, and then tried to guess two hours later which of the three I'd taken. In 12 trials I ran, I guessed which of the three I had taken on half the attempts. This suggested to me that the effects from these three are pretty indistinguishable from a placebo. In explaining how I formulated my guess (prior to checking the answer), I often struggled to find any words to subjectively describe what made me think it was one noontropic over another. Since I couldn't enumerate how my guesses came about, and since my ability to distinguish between them was only slightly higher than chance would predict, I eventually discontinued them.
More recently I've come into a script for Adderall, so I went to Amazon and ordered a bottle of placebo tablets that are the same dimensions as the Adderall. I'm in the process of 10 trials to see the extent to which I can differentiate between the stimulant and my placebo. If even 10 people were to double blind experiment on themselves and publish the results, I'd feel a lot more confident that we really understand the efficacy of any of these substances on performance.
So, are you up to the max dose yet?
Phenibut tastes real bad, I don't see how you could incorrectly guess it.