Nootropics Survey 2020 Results
852 people put weird chemicals in their bodies and tell me what happened
Thanks to the 852 of you who took the 2020 SSC nootropics survey.
I asked people to rate various nootropics on whether they “worked” or not, deliberately leaving the question kind of vague. This is using a broad definition of “nootropics” - any supplement or taken-outside-the-usual-medical-system drug that’s purported to have mental health effects. Most of the chemicals I asked about were supposed stimulants, anxiolytics, or antidepressants.
I'll start with the headline results, then go into details:
I tried to include a mix of common and well-studied nootropics as a baseline, plus some newer rarer substances nobody had looked into before. Predictably, the common substances got large sample sizes, and the rare substances got small ones. I excluded etifoxene, RGPU-95, and white jelly mushrooms from the graph because the sample was so small that the confidence interval would have covered the entire displayed range. A few substances on there are based off only 5 - 10 data points. I did a sort of ad hoc Bayesian adjustment where I assumed a prior of "average" for every substance and let the data try to push it away from that, which helped the numbers swing around a little less wildly.
Results were generally predictable and unexciting (with one exception I'll get to soon). People thought stimulants worked better than non-stimulants, addictive substances better than non-addictive substances, and well-known mainstays better than new experimental chemicals. As on previous surveys, branded combination pills did worse than individual substances. For example, Nootropics Depot's Dynamax, a mixture of several fancy types of caffeine and caffeine-like chemicals, did significantly worse than ordinary caffeine. Nootropics Depot has a lot of smart, careful people, so I don't think they bungled the mixture. I think people just expect more out of branded products, and penalize them when they don't perform better. Since all tests were open label, I have no way of knowing how much of the results were just expectation effects.
I also asked people how many times they took each nootropic. I'd hoped to get some measure of whether people thought it was helpful enough to keep taking it, but in retrospect it mostly tracked whether a nootropic works instantly vs. only after many months.
The most-stuck-with nootropic was nicotinamide mononucleotide, a substance which is supposed to delay aging if you take it every day indefinitely.
Zembrin Is Interesting
Going back to the graph above, kanna (another name for the sceletium tortuosa plant), gets a respectable showing at 5.4. This is more impressive than it looks - I mentioned before that this was a combination of well-known mainstays and new substances I was actually interested in studying. Kanna was the highest-ranked of the new substances.
But I and many other people have had good results with Zembrin, a concentrated extract of kanna advertised for low mood and anxiety. So I asked respondents to specify whether their kanna was Zembrin or something else. Of 37 kanna users, 20 used Zembrin and 17 used something else. The subgroup who used Zembrin reported a mean effectiveness of 6.88, which beats out modafinil to make it highest on the list. After ad hoc Bayesian adjustment, it was 6.72, second only to modafinil as the second most effective nootropic on the list. This really excites me - I've felt like Zembrin was special for a while, and this is the only case of a newer nootropic on the survey beating the mainstays. And it's a really unexpected victory. The top eight substances in the list are all either stimulants, addictive, illegal in the US, or all three. Zembrin is none of those, and it beats them all.
Based on these preliminary results, I wrote up a short page about Zembrin on my professional website, Lorien Psychiatry, and I asked anyone who planned to try it to preregister with me so I could ask them how it worked later. 29 people preregistered, of whom I was able to follow up with and get data from 22 after a few months. Of those 22, 16 (73%) said it seemed to help, 3 (14%) said it didn't help, and another 3 (14%) couldn't tell because they had to stop taking it due to side effects (two headaches, one case of "psychedelic closed-eye visuals"). Only 13 of the 22 people were willing to give it a score from 1-10 (people hate giving 1-10 scores!), and those averaged 5.9 (6.3 if we don't count people who stopped it immediately due to side effects). That's a little lower than on the survey, but this was a different population - for example, many of them in their answers specifically compared it to prescription antidepressants they'd taken, whereas the survey-takers were comparing it to nootropics. Although these findings are not very useful without a placebo control, they confirm that most people who take Zembrin at least subjectively find it helpful.
The small amount of research that's been done on Zembrin suggests it works by inhibiting the serotonin transporter - ie it's an SSRI. A South African plant being a natural SSRI is pretty cool. Does this explain the positive results?
I'm not sure. SSRIs are very effective for a lot of people. But Zembrin outperformed modafinil and phenibut on the survey. I have never heard even the most extreme fan of SSRIs (possibly me, honestly) claim people like them more than modafinil or phenibut. So this is either a bias (people think it's cool to be taking a new experimental plant, but don't like taking prescription medications with a bad reputation), or else Zembrin is either not an SSRI, or not just an SSRI. Of note, there are ways to prepare kanna (the plant Zembrin comes from) that make it kind of a recreational drug of abuse, though not a very addictive one. This suggests it has something more than just SSRI activity.
Also, most people (including me) report effects after only a few days taking Zembrin, which would be very early for an SSRI. Possibly the much-hyped SSRI+PDE4 augmentation effect is real, and Zembrin accomplishes it, but super low confidence in this.
I did ask respondents whether Zembrin caused them any sexual problems - something SSRIs are famous for doing. One person said yes, nine people said no, and ten people said they weren't sure or hadn't used it long enough to tell or something. Three people (12.5%) of the people who read about it on my website reported sexual side effects, but they’d read my essay on it (which included the possibility of sexual side effects), so this is a contaminated sample.
Sublingual Modafinil Is Not Very Interesting
I'd heard some rumors that modafinil worked better when taken sublingually - both because it absorbs better, and because it absorbs faster, meaning you're not stuck in 24-36 hours of Sleeplessness Hell. I asked people if they'd tried this. 95% of modafinil users hadn't. Of the 25 people who had, 13 said it was better, 12 said it was worse. They usually used doses between 50% and 100% of the oral dose. I asked for comments on this, and the only one I got was from someone who tried it once at 50% of the oral dose, and said it was terrible and lasted much longer than orally. Probably different people have different pharmacodynamics here, but don't expect this to make it last less time.
Do Caffeine Alternatives Avoid Tolerance?
Theacrine is a purine alkaloid (ie close relative of caffeine) that gives the same kind of kick caffeine does. Some people have argued you should use it in place of caffeine because it doesn't produce tolerance the same way caffeine does. I asked survey respondents if this was true for them. Most people, including most theacrine users, passed on this question and felt they didn't have a really good sense of how fast tolerance built on it, but I got twelve brave souls willing to take a stand. 4 said they didn't develop any tolerance, 7 said they got some tolerance but less than caffeine, and 1 said they got exactly as much tolerance as with caffeine. So maybe some weak support for the claim? Hard to say.
I also asked about methylliberine, a similar chemical. Here only two people would tell me anything, but both of them said it was tolerance-free.
I also asked about how people experience modafinil tolerance. Of the 291 people with an opinion, 37% said they developed tolerance after a few days, 23% after a few weeks, 8% after a few months or years, and 32% said they never experienced tolerance. Obviously people are all over the chart here, and I think that reflects a real difference - when I talk to people about this and try to qualitatively understand their experience, I get pretty much the same wide range of answers. The good news is that almost everyone who developed a tolerance says that it was reversible after a little while off of it. Of 196 people who answered this question, 68% found it fully reversible, 27% found it partially reversible, and only 5% said it didn't reverse at all.
Overall Opinion Of Nootropics
I asked people how their experience experimenting with nootropics had been, and what effect it had on their lives. The results were:
18% strongly positive
61% modestly positive
15% no change
3% negative because they wasted time and money
2% negative because of side effects
Vendor Recommendations
I asked people to recommend good nootropics sources. Here are all the places with more than three recommendations:
3 recs: ModafinilXL, CosmicNootropic
4 recs: Liftmode
5 recs: Eufinil
6 recs: Science.bio
7 recs: BuyModa, LiftMode
48 recs: Nootropics Depot
I endorse the obvious conclusion of these rankings.
There was also a section to anti-recommend sites and companies you didn't like. The only place to get two anti-recommendations was NootropicsSource, so stay away from them, I guess.
Thanks Again For Taking The Survey
Thanks again to the SSC community for taking this survey. No thanks to the broader nootropics community, who totally ignored this even though I tried to advertise it pretty heavily in a lot of nootropics subreddits and forums and chat rooms - 95% of respondents ended up being SSCers. I was disappointed in this because probably only a tiny fraction of SSCers use weird nootropics, whereas the nootropics community would be a data gold mine. If any of you are heavily involved in the nootropics community and have good ideas for how to get people outside this blog more involved next time, please let me know in the comments here or by email.
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P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
+1 to this
do you still want people to preregister with you if they try Zembrin after reading this?
Not really, I feel like I've exhausted what I can get from having a higher sample size for the same terrible experimental methodology. If you want to run a double-blind trial on yourself I'd be interested.
Running a double-blind trial on yourself for a drug whose effects are meant to kick in after days or weeks seems difficult. How would you manage this?
As long as you don’t need the results quickly, just randomize in longer blocks of time (say, 2 weeks) rather than randomizing on a day-to-day level.
Gwern's written-up (in impressive detail) some blinded (double-blinded?) experiments he's done with 'nootropics' if you're interested in a detailed answer.
Makes sense! In that case you might want to edit the preregistration bit out of the Lorien page about Zembrin so people don't email you about it.
Under sublingual modafinil, ". Of the ~25~ people who had, 13 said it was better, ~25~ said it was worse. " Assume that's 12 people who said it was worse? Or maybe everyone thought it was worse and 13 thought it was also better in someway, you tell me
Thanks, fixed.
Are any of these good as appetite suppressants? E.g. I've read that 5-htp works that way for a lot of people. Ideally, someone who's trying to control their appetite would have several substances that work, and they could rotate among them so they avoid tolerance issues.
Just use dextroamphetamine. Super clean pharmacology. Use it for a short period then stop ASAP.
Versus pure Dextroamphetamine, how would you rank Adderall or Methylphenidate for appetite supression? Also - is there any added value to stopping and switching between the two?
Similar to Laurent's question: Let's say you're going to get a rx for ADHD anyway. Are there some that are better for appetite suppression than others? And would you have to take weekends off from the drug or something like that?
When I was broke with no health plan the doc used to prescribe me a combo of slow and quick release dex. It was the best. Then I moved and I couldn't get a doctor to prescribe it for me.
Some evidence for Berberine (in mice).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33415147/
getting so engrossed in an activity that you forget to eat works for me.
Modafinil has been reported to have a mild appetite-suppressant effect, but I use it and have never experienced same.
Microdosing performed very well on this survey. There is a recently published self-blinding citizen science placebo-controlled trial to explore benefits of psychedelic microdosing. There was essentially little to no difference from placebo: https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878
*If* we were to accept that benefits of microdosing are best explained due to placebo (and I am not saying the case is settled by any means), what would that imply about the rest of the nootropics on this list?
I agree that's concerning! I think these numbers are all (generously) a combination of reality and hype, and psilocybin gets a lot of hype.
Another possibility is that the people taking this survey are not representative of the general population, and the sorts of people who read this blog are much more responsive to psilocybin than average. Rationalist/SSC types tend to be much less neurotypical than the average person.
This is funny because I just started taking Zembrin based on the older SSC post recommending it.
Can you link that older post?
I guess he is talking about this post
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/11/anxiety-sampler-kits/
>The most-stuck-with nootropic was nicotinamide mononucleotide, a substance which is supposed to delay aging if you take it every day indefinitely.
Some of the same research that found it delays aging in mice also found that it accelerates tumor growth in mice... I'd very much like to believe in an anti-aging pill, but it seems too early to say NMN is both safe and effective.
Anything that delays aging should also accelerate tumor growth - my (extremely oversimplified) impression is that aging is in part an anti-cancer mechanism ("cells can only divide X times, then they die"). I'm not sure this is the mechanism behind it accelerating tumor growth (it must just unrelatedly be carcinogenic), but if it is, it's not really unexpected.
This is not accurate. Cellular senescence is an anti cancer mechanism. Human aging is vastly more complex than cellular senescence. Indeed, the problem is that cellular senescence, which is a specific cellular mechanism to halt cell division when the genome of that cell becomes "untrustworthy", is called "senescence". It is one among many things that happen with age relevang to whole organisms. Most of the problems of aging are problems arising by living beyond the age of ancestral extrinsic mortality, beyond our warranty period, not as a side effect of any aging programs. Aging is mostly about the accumulation of various forms of damage. Preventing or otherwise ameliorating many of these forms of damage are likely to reduce cancer risks (other than by living longer we are more likely to get cancer).
"Aging is mostly about the accumulation of various forms of damage." I am far from an expert, but I recently heard an interesting argument against this idea. The argument goes that if aging were due to the accumulation of damage, we would see a very long tail in the distribution of human lifetimes due to random differences in how much damage different people accumulate - there would be a tiny handful of people living to be 1,000, for instance. Whereas what we actually observe is a pretty much a cutoff at about 120 years, thus implying some kind of programmed process that's meant to kill us around then. What would you say to this?
We *do* see a long tail in the distribution. It just ends around 120. If you want to see what programmed death looks like, look at the octopus. They have programmed death. They all die in a very narrow window. And more importantly, with the octopus, you can break the death program by doing neurosurgery and removing the senescence gland. They then live about 30% longer and die from being beyond their warranty period and then their aging looks an awful lot like ours (dying from numerous causes, slow decline). The programmed aging hypothesis is largely discredited in the aging field at the moment (though there are still adherents).
Isn't natural human death also largely bimodal? People either die in their 60s of cancer, or their 90s due to damage accumulation. This does reek of programmed death in the 90s (I'm assuming cancer is not a form of programmed death).
No. It is not bimodal except for a tiny bump in infancy related to birth defects http://www.science-of-aging.com/timelines/images/gompertz-mortality-curve.jpg
What you say is consistent with my previous impression, but this data looks very suspect. It's smoothed in a suspicious way, with for instance at least 3 data points in the "75-84" bin. And why would the bins need to be so coarse anyway with such a large sample size?
It was the first google hit for gompertz mortality curve. Here is another. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Lenart/publication/334604816/figure/fig1/AS:783401053327362@1563788774854/Gompertz-and-Gompertz-Makeham-models-provide-similar-fit-A-Comparison-between-curve.ppm
These are all public data. You can pull it and make whatever bin sizes you want.
We might see a very long tail in the distribution of damage that a single cell accumulates. But because of the law of large numbers, the overall damage across all cells will most likely be very similar between people in the same age range.
Hey Scott, if you want to know more about how aging works and how they are trying to fix it, there is a decent, basic overview at https://www.lifespan.io/aging-explained/ . What you describe is telomere attrition, one of the causes, but it is not the only one. It's honestly pretty fascinating, and my amateur impression of the field is that there is a good chance we might see real, FDA approved therapies in the next 5 to 20 years.
Those stories where an evil wizard sacrifices a thousand virgins to attain immortality start to sound really silly when you can just look at a chart of the causes of aging and go, man, all he needed to do was take some pills and get some injections!
I got the same impression from Aubrey de Grey 14 years ago.
I see phenylpiracetam is high on the list. I have personally never noticed anything taking it, but I stuck to ~100 mg doses.
I have heard many reports of it being quite a strong stimulant for which a tolerance builds up quickly, but some say that this is a side effect and it should be taken regularly for long-term effects (according to the Russian instructions?). What is your take on this?
I have seen a noticeable stimulant effect with 200-300mg that lasts a few hours. Some days I have taken 300mg in the morning and another 200mg in the afternoon. I never take it more than 3 days a week (usually less) to avoid tolerance. The stimulant effect is comparable to ~200mg caffeine but maybe fewer side effects. Hard to tell for sure.
Why didn't you include nicotine? As a former smoker and current vaper I know that nicotine helps focus and attention. Of course smoking (and maybe vaping) have some nasty side-effects along with difficult addiction, but so do some of the other substances you surveyed.
> Of course smoking (and maybe vaping) have some nasty side-effects along with difficult addiction, but so do some of the other substances you surveyed.
Also, there's Nicotine gums and patches with (purportedly) a lot less of the addiction problems. (The addictive properties of cigarettes seem to have a lot with the other substances that ride along in tobacco, and little to do with Nicotine, to my understanding.)
I’m pretty sure it’s the nicotine that’s addictive. The stuff that comes with the tobacco causes lots of health problems.
See for eg.: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
"Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties” - the addictiveness coming from MAOIs (eg. Khalil et al 2000, Khalil et al 2006) & possibly other compounds present in tobacco" ... "My take away is that there is addiction but it’s drastically overestimated by almost everyone and may been conflated with the habit-formation capability;"
You left out the part about those reports coming from animal studies. The NIH and Mayo Clinic and numerous other credible sources say that nicotine is itself addictive. As a former smoker and current nicotine user (vaping), and someone who has used both patches and gum to attempt to quit, I know giving up nicotine in any form is difficult and unpleasant. Legions of smokers and former smokers tell the same story.
However my comment was not intended to start a debate about how addictive nicotine is. I was asking why it was not included in the list of nootropics, since it’s probably second only to alcohol when it comes to mind- and mood-altering substances people use. Smoking (and patches, gum, vaping) improve alertness and concentration and create a feeling of calm (in many smokers/nicotine users, anyway). That seems worth adding to the survey even though we know that smoking (like drinking and taking LSD) can be harmful when overdone.
"As a former smoker and current nicotine user (vaping), and someone who has used both patches and gum to attempt to quit, I know giving up nicotine in any form is difficult and unpleasant."
I'm curious because this statement is a little ambiguous. Is it difficult to switch from cigarettes to vaping? Is it difficult to switch from vaping to patches or gum? Is it difficult to go from patches/gum to no nicotine? All of the above? (and if so, what's the relative difficulty of each?)
I don’t know to measure or describe “relative difficulty.” Most smokers have significant difficulty quitting, but many manage to do it (I have myself, several times). Smoking cessation gets pushed hard in American society, and an entire industry exists to help people quit.
The one time I quit for long enough to call it quitting (20 or so years) I quit cold-turkey, with my wife who also smoked, when we had a baby on the way. That seemed easy when I remember it. I resumed smoking 20 years later by bumming just one at a bar and the next morning I bought a pack and got right back to a pack-a-day habit.
Besides the addiction to nicotine, which one can feed with any source (smoking, vaping, patches, gum), smoking cigarettes habituates smokers to rituals and behaviors (cigarette with coffee, cigarette with a drink, etc.), and one gets used to the taste, the feeling, the whole experience of smoking. Switching from cigarettes to gum or a patch will allay the worst withdrawal symptoms (headaches, dizziness, anxiety, obsession with getting another fix) but it doesn’t eliminate the habits and associations, which are not necessarily unpleasant.
Dropping cigarettes for gum or a patch (I’ve done both, several times) works up to a point — no nasty withdrawal symptoms — but it doesn’t stop the craving. When I used gum and patches I would think about smoking and persuade myself I could smoke just a few cigarettes a day, which has always led to resuming smoking because it’s more satisfying than patches or gum. I think every smoker I’ve known who tried patches and gum had the same experience.
Vaping seems better because along with the nicotine fix it has the flavor (former smokers tend to use tobacco-based vape flavors) and the sensation of smoke in the mouth and lungs. Anecdotally lots of people switch fairly easily from cigarettes to vaping. I have only had one cigarette in the three years since I started vaping (a social occasion, though I admit it tasted good and I wanted to buy a pack after that one cigarette).
I switched to vaping when I moved back to the USA after a period of living overseas because my wife hated the smell, I was feeling some bad effects on my health, and smoking has been marginalized and taxed to the point that it’s inconvenient and even embarrassing — the stigma takes most of the enjoyment out of it. Standing far away next to a trash can puffing away alone starts to feel pathetic. With more and more places banning smoking, vaping is apparently tolerated. A landlord or hotel cleaner can’t detect vaping, but you can’t hide the scent of cigarettes.
At this point in my life (I’m 60) I am content to live with nicotine addiction and the almost-the-same experience of vaping. I know I shouldn’t do it at all, but to paraphrase Churchill I don’t trust a person without vices, including myself. There’s nothing more tedious to me than people telling me why I shouldn’t smoke, as if I didn’t know that better than them.
Fuck – this is scary in how closely it matches my own experiences!
I smoked cigarettes, probably on-average around one (1) pack a day, for about a decade.
I tried to quit many many times but always relapsed. I've never tried patches, but expect them to be miserable. I've tried gum a few times, but it was comically easy for me to not think about chewing the gum slowly (as I think 'my mouth' just 'thought' it was regular gum or candy). The few times I tried gum I overdosed (i.e. ended up taking an effective dose FAR larger than what I wanted to) and I very much dislike stimulant 'overdoses' (e.g. including 'cold medicine', caffeine, and anything 'speedy').
But then I quit – it was, at first, just another attempt, but maybe I was finally _sufficiently_ disgusted with my habit? Anyways, it stuck that time, for many years – and with no appreciable need to exert willpower at all!
But then I accepted a cigarette after (and while) I was drinking (alcohol) and BAM – I was back to smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day, tho I could, with significant effort, keep it down to about one half of a pack a day for short periods.
But, as you mention, smoking is gross, isolating, inconvenient, expensive, pretty widely prohibited in many areas, and just generally terrible, besides the actual direct pleasure of its use. I also much more readily noticed the very significant health effects.
I tried vaping and that's what I've stuck to since. It, like gum, for me anyways, is also easy to 'overdose' on. Smoking a cigarette feels like an actual physical 'drag' added to my body (via my damaged lungs, throat, mouth, and nasal cavities I imagine) but vaping produces, if at all, an extremely attenuated version of the same feelings. I think I mostly just notice its effects on my heart beat, blood pressure, etc.. When I was trying to find a good vape pen/system/whatever, I kept finding info about 'custom vaping mods' – those seem much more likely to be akin to smoking; some people seem to be trying to _really_ closely replicate smoking without the smoke!
But I'm extremely confident that: (a) quitting nicotine again, long-term, would be very difficult (but then _trivial_ once I'm in the right whatever state something something, if I could ever reach that state again); (b) vaping is MUCH MUCH less bad than smoking cigarettes.
At this point, I'm more focused on cutting back on my vaping, as it is still somewhat expensive, and otherwise similarly bad in some of the ways smoking is (tho MUCH less so). But it seems like an acceptable vice as-is overall (for me)!
Ever tried Champex or similar? Worked like a charm for me. Basically just clogs up the nicotine receptors so you can't get any pleasure from cigarettes, which makes them awful and unsatisfying. After that I made sure every time I'd get a craving I'd focus on how awful and unsatisfying those last few smokes were. Smoking is awesome though. It almost forces you to meditate every hour or so. Brisk fall mornings on the deck with a cup of coffee and a smoke. Nothing but the sounds of the birds. I don't regret smoking, but I'm glad I quit.
No, I've never tried any 'cessation' medication. I'm wary of taking something that denies me a way to satisfy 'cravings' but doesn't stop or mute the cravings themselves!
Yes, the meditative aspect is awesome. That's one reason why I think a lot, maybe most, people already practice 'meditation' – there's lots of similar rituals people perform that probably have a lot of the same effects (good and bad) as formal/traditional meditation.
I didn't really have a problem switching from cigarettes to vaping – but I was pretty motivated!
I hated the gum – none of the satisfying rituals/experiences of smoking, and way too easy (for me) to 'overdose', which I find VERY unpleasant. (I would often get very physically uncomfortable, to the point of vomiting, when I smoked 'too many' cigarettes too.)
I haven't tried patches – or maybe once? I wouldn't expect it to work well – smoking/vaping/chewing-gum provide intense bursts of nicotine administration and I think a relatively constant release (which is what I'm assuming patches do) to NOT help breaking/hijacking habits/rituals. With vaping, I think it's very helpful that I can hijack smoking habits/rituals by just substituting a vape pen (which is even roughly shaped/sized like a cigarette) for a cigarette.
But yeah, generally, quitting/switching involves not just overcoming nicotine withdrawal, but possibly withdrawal for other chemicals (where there are any), and very much a good portion of breaking old habits and giving up pleasant or satisfying rituals.
I spend a portion of every year chewing nicotine gum and I stop for about 3-6 months at a time because it's addictive as a motherfucker. It's very easy to find yourself popping them like candy. I'm very skeptical of the idea that's it's not very addictive. Maybe relative to meth or opioids something?
"Of those 22, 15 (73%) said it seemed to help, 3 (14%) said it didn't help, and another 3 (14%) couldn't tell because they had to stop taking it due to side effects (two headaches, one case of "psychedelic closed-eye visuals"). Only 13 of the 22 people were willing to give it a score from 1-10 (people hate giving 1-10 scores!), and those averaged 5.9 (6.3 if we don't count people who stopped it immediately due to side effects)."
13 people gave it an average of 5.9; of those, 3 people scored the thing but had to stop due to side effects. So (10 * 6.3 + 3 * x)/13 = 5.9, yields x = 4.57. In this case I wonder why people who have to stop due to headaches and psychedelic effects still give it a 4.6.
Or maybe 13 people gave it an average of 5.9; of those, 1 person scored the thing but had to stop due to side effects. So (12 * 6.3 + 1 * x)/13 = 5.9, yields x = 1.1 (probably doesn't work because it's not an integer but anyway), in which case this seems a bit risky.
I tried to keep all scores in place even if they were dumb because once I start disqualifying scores it introduces bias. There was someone who had to stop it immediately who gave it a 5, because 5 was average and they felt like they couldn't judge it fairly because they had to stop immediately.
Is adrafinil the same as modafinil?
It's a prodrug of modafinil - it's converted to modafinil within the body. This doesn't necessarily mean it's exactly the same - the pharmacokinetics matter! - but it's very close.
As someone who has tried both adrafinil and modafinil, there is a massive difference. I barely felt anything from adrafinil, whereas modafinil was orders of magnitude more effective.
Would strongly suggest separating out adrafinil from modafinil next time around! Modafinil was too ‘peaky’ for me, whereas adrafinil is a much smoother experience. Plus the legality aspect - letter of the law might seem like a quaint thing when experimenting with nootropics, but modafinil is a scheduled drug in the US which restricts it for teetotalers and those who carry federal security clearance. Adrafinil is a legal alternative.
The problem with adrafinil is you can't take as high a dose because of possible side effects. Also it's hard to figure out what the equivalent dose is.
The afinils seem to make my allergies worse, and I often seem to have acne breakouts after taking them. I usually only take modafinil/armodafinil during Fall/Winter now.
I'm always impressed with how tedious and unhelpful the nootropics community is and being pretty enthusiastic about nootropics myself, I really wish this weren't the case. Nootropics Depot's u/misteryouaresodumb is probably the only thing the community actually has going for it. Otherwise the main voices in the nootropics seem to be your human infomercials like Dave Asprey.
Re: Zembrin/Kanna, the guy who waves the PDE4 inhibition flag most passionately seems to be the pseudonymous Abelard Lindsay who as far as I know has now started using Ibudilast instead. His product he sells uses artichoke leaf in this way but I believe quercetin was also on the table at one point... I'm pretty sure that cAMP is brought up in these discussions as well.
I've been "taking" caffeine for 30 years via different drinks and I guess my tolerance is through the roof because it basically does nothing to me. For example, I usually have a 1-2 cups of coffee or tea within a short period of time of going to bed. According to Fitbit I basically never have a bad nights sleep.
I wish this wasn't the case so I could actually use caffeine in constructive ways.
I second this, have drunk around 6-10 cups of tea a day for my entire adult life, and caffeine does nothing for me (even if I come off it for a while). I can have a cup of coffee and a nap quite happily.
Why not start to gradually wind down on your caffeine use? Cold turkey is probably a terrible idea, but slowly winding down should work. I deliberately keep my caffeine intake low; I try to get through the work week with only one large helping of caffeine on Mondays to (try to) kick my circadian rhythm into 'work week' mode, and some moderate caffeine on Saturdays to power through my private chores, and otherwise hold off, which works pretty well. When I have a longer stretch of vacation, I tend to take more of it, then gradually wean myself back off it once I'm back to my regular schedule. I'm sure I have some caffeine tolerance, but it seems to be quite negligible; my Monday dose of one caffeine-packed soda (Fritz-Kola), which is about the equivalent of one cup of coffee, wakes me up so well there's actually a slight risk I'll have some trouble falling asleep the following night, heh.
I can't speak for AFluffleOfRabbits, but for me it's a case of the world where I'm able to effectively dose caffeine not seeming *so* much more attractive than the world where I enjoy my multiple cups of tea per day.
In general, I sleep well and don't have any problems becoming alert when I wake up. (Of course, that's not to say I *always* have as much energy/alertness as I wish)
For both of you - did caffeine ever work for you? If not, you may not be tolerant, you may have high natural resistance. That's what I have. I can drink no caffeine of any description for months and then have two cups of coffee, and I won't react at all. I have literally never had a caffeine buzz, and I can drink two cups every day for a week and quit completely with no effects. It's genetic - a number of other family members have the same experience (or a slightly lesser form of it - no caffeine buzz, but caffeine late at night impacts sleep, which it doesn't for me).
I suspect I'd get an effect if I tried energy drinks or something else meant to deliver amazing loads of caffeine; I haven't, because I'm fine not using caffeine.
I think I'm similar. Like you I have quit caffeine for months in the past and still don't get a buzz when I come back to it. I do get withdrawal though (if I go cold turkey I get a headache the next day).
> For example, I usually have a 1-2 cups of coffee or tea within a short period of time of going to bed.
Some people are fast caffeine metabolizers and so it doesn't disrupt sleep. There are genes associated with this that I saw on my 23andme profile.
* I've tried the optimized caffeine pills and they're great but man I just love coffee. I take L - theanine with the coffee sometimes
* Phenibut also works for me at reducing anxiety but never took it more than 1-2x per week at low dose because some people get addicted? (I never felt anything resembling addiction).
* Would love to try Modafinil but really weary of ordering on these websites as it's supposed to be a prescription and just not sure what im getting
* going to try Zembrin because of this post!
** imo LSD and shroom macrodosing shouldn't be done over long periods of time and can be really risky for the mental health of some people who would try it
Proproanolol is a non-addictive anxiolytic that worked well for me plus had a large performance-enhancing effect in Starcraft. Not sure if the latter was due to the beta-blocking or the membrane-stabilizing.
With regards to psychedelics and mental health, NEVER take psychedelics if you are taking lithium. Lithium combined with psychedelics can cause psychosis and seizures in some people. Also check Psychonaut Wiki for drug interactions for any drug you're considering taking.
How are Americans legally obtaining modafinil, psilocybin, and LSD, or are they illegally obtaining it or are the users not American?
Illegally.
Wikipedia says that Provigil contains modafinil. Couldn't a doctor be prescribing Provigil?
Yes, in theory, but I know these people and they're mostly getting it illegally.
A friend’s neurologist reluctantly prescribed her Provigil a few years ago for her migraines. She described it as almost magical, not just for the migraines but for her overall mental state. But he would only give her a two week prescription. If people take modafinil long-term, what is it about Provigil that makes doctors gun shy?
I managed to successfully order modafinil from India.
I wish to strongly warn people than in certain European countries modafinil and subtances derived or precursors of it are considered highly addictive dangerous controlled psychotropic drugs. I want to bang in people's thick skulls this thing. You will get crucified.
I got some legally as a prescription for my tiredness (but it hardly helped me). Adrafinil is related and more likely to be legal without prescription (but its effect is delayed and reputedly it doesn't work as well).
I'm an American and I legally got a prescription for Modafinil. It didn't have a big effect for me.
There are plenty of legal RC analogues of LSD and psilocybin that can be bought off the clearnet. 1P-LSD, 1cP-LSD, and ALD-52 are virtually identical to LSD, and 4-AcO-DMT is virtually identical to psilocybin. There are also a number of variants of these tryptamine psychedelics that are also legal, like 4-HO-MiPT, 4-HO-MET, ETH-LAD, and AL-LAD that Alexander Shulgin tested on himself and wrote about in his book TiHKAL.
In the case of psilocybin, Psilocybe cubensis spores are actually legal in most states in the US, besides California, Georgia, and Idaho. You just can't legally grow them.
"second only to modafinil as the second most effective nootropic on the list"
Does it mean "the third most effective nootropic on the list"?
I think he meant it's the second most effective nootropic on the list. But I agree that he didn't word it quite right if that's the case.
Thanks.
I think it's important to have a completely objective measurement of the effectiveness, like whether your chess rating goes up or down. (otherwise wireheading will probably end up #1)
If there were any low-hanging fruit for improving the brain, evolution would probably have already done it, EXCEPT vis a vis energy tradeoffs. Evolution wanted to conserve calories, but we don't care about wasting calories anymore. That's probably why stimulants like modafinil and caffeine score so high. They would reduce the brain's bias towards conserving energy. (it's also probably a part of the reason why there's a north-south cline in IQ, even within turkey or within italy or within japan. The colder it is, the higher your basal metabolic rate needs to be, the more calories the brain will evolve to burn. The opportunity cost of burning more calories in the brain is zero when you need to burn those calories anyway just to not freeze.)
That's a good idea. Chess accuracy scores are probably lower variance than the actual outcomes, but they can still be biased up or down a lot depending on the circumstances of the game, so you'd still need a sample size of many games. Open games and complex endgames tend to result in lower accuracy. Closed games and book endgames tend to result in higher accuracy.
and by higher accuracy i mean lower average centipawn loss
I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but I don't think it's entirely right - see eg https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653 and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/towards-a-bayesian-theory-of-willpower
I understand that some level of non-tradeoff bad mutations stay in the gene pool in spite of evolution, and different people will have different failures that can be remedied by different drugs. So there can be non-tradeoff low-hanging fruit to fix at the level of individual variation, which was not what I said in the OP.
What I should have said is we shouldn't expect the same nootropic to work well for most people most of the time unless it has something to do with a tradeoff where the present circumstances are very different from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (e.g., abundant calories or the rarity of predators). I notice that the high ranking nootropics are all stimulants (which reduce our evolved bias to conserve calories) and anxiolitics (which reduce our evolved bias to be scared of hidden tigers):
Modafinil: stimulant
Caffeine: stimulant
psilocybin microdose: both?
phenibut: anxiolytic
bromantane: both
LSD microdose: both?
Phenylpiracetam: both
Dynamax: stimulant
Is there any good nootropic that is neither stimulant nor anxiolytic? I tried Sulbutiamine a few times and noticed a significant effect that couldn't really be classified along either of those dimensions, but it doesn't rank highly in the surveys so it's probably an individual quirk. Biochemically it probably ought to be filed with the stimulants under "things that increase energy output", but subjectively it didn't seem like much of a stimulant.
Psychedelics in general are far more anxiogenic than anxiolytic. I've tried microdosing 1P-LSD for studying purposes, and it often gave me horrible anxiety.
"it's also probably a part of the reason why there's a north-south cline in IQ" Haven't these populations interbred like a ton since these evolutions supposedly occurred? This just-so story would make a lot more sense for completely separate populations, which they obviously have not been for at least 200+ years
It is wrong to assume mixing thoroughly enough to produce regional homogeneity even across a distance of a few hundred miles.
Before the industrial revolution most people never travelled more than 15 miles from their place of birth. Until relatively recently, Italy and Germany were divided into tiny duchies and city-states.
Even in the present day, all the factors that cause people to migrate have different effect sizes on different people. Lots of smart people get recruited by big tech companies to go work in silicon valley, for example. Whites in west virginia experience a brain drain, and become genetically less intelligent than whites in places like silicon valley and washington DC.
Also, in the real world, nobody mates at random. There's a very high degree of assortative mating, which is good because it produces a wider variance in ability levels, and the returns on ability are basically exponential rather than linear. Both income and the probability to become an inventor are exponentially related to IQ.
In the rainforest, animals form distinct subspecies across distances of only a few hundred meters. Just so stories about how they're probably mixing enough to produce homogeneity definitely prove too much in that case.
Surprised rauwolscine has not made the list. Any thoughts on this or still too rare to include?
@Scott s/sceletium/Sceletium/ it's a genus. Also S. tortuosum doesn't sound much harder to grow than the average succulent houseplant.
Has anybody other than me tried Galantamine? Really helps to focus and improves my mood, but sometimes makes me strange, like a bit carefree or so.
I tried it at night to help lucid dreaming, minimal results. Never considered trying it during the day.
I thought of trying this after using Champix to give up smoking. That was making me so focused, productive and happy; weaning off of it became nearly more difficult than quitting to smoke. Afterwards I made some research into it and discovered Galantamine has similar properties with regards to nAChRs (happiness and focus) plus it's a cholinesterase inhibitor so maybe some intelligence bump? So I'm not sure if it's placebo or not but really works for me.
I'm an engineer with zero years of medicine training (last biology class was in high school) so I'm probably completely talking nonsense, but I believe it's worth a try.
50mg (the maximum safe dose) of vitamin B6 worked for me for lucid dreaming.
Have you ever tried Calea ternifolia? It can supposedly induce lucid dreaming.
I'm also posting this on the Monday predictions post, but seeing if I can get Scott's attention by posting to the newest on. Scott, what's your exercise routine?
(140 jumping jacks, 25 pushups/situps, 15 reps of weightlifting), repeated 3x/day. I'm not claiming this is a great exercise routine, or trying to convince other people to do it, or claiming it has any good qualities whatsoever, it's just what I've been able to stick to and what makes me feel good.
Awesome. Thanks, Scott. Keep up the good work (and workouts).
Can you be more specific about "weightlifting"?
Scott's getting JACKED.
Looking forward to the posts from his Mr. Hyde-ian alter ego, Swole Alexander
>Of those 22, 15 (73%) said it seemed to help, 3 (14%) said it didn't help, and another 3 (14%) couldn't tell...
For all the other numbers to work out, it's probably 16 (73%).
Do you think you will release the dataset here? I'd probably not sort through it but I liked seeing Gwern/Jacobian's analysis last time around
Saffron? We are having Risotto Milanese for dinner. I used saffron to make it. I buy it in bottles that hold 1 gram net weight and cost about $15. Pretty pricey for a supplement.
I had the same thought. Using psychoactive amounts of saffron would probably be the most expensive habit possible.
If you really want to get altered off your spice rack, nutmeg will also do it. But from what I hear the comedown will make you wish you were dead, which is why nutmeg isn’t a controlled substance.
BTW, the risotto was delicious.
Nutmeg = marijuana + flu
Regarding getting people outside the blog, I don't know if you did this already, but mentioning past surveys and some sample of their results would probably help significantly. A couple of predictable high rating substances (to establish some validity on the survey) and a couple with unexpected ratings (for the "people are wrong on the Internet, I must go here and correct that" effect).
Also, to get them to read that far at all, it's probably better to not use the word Survey prominently in the title. That often triggers an almost subconscious "skip this time sink" response in reddit and other forums. Phrase it as a question, with "(Nootropics survey 2021)" at the end if at all.
I'm curious about exactly what the "ad-hoc Bayesian adjustment" was that you did. Could you post the formula? Maybe some experts (not me) can critique it.
I'm also interested in this (not sure whether Scott gets notified for a reply comment, but it's probably best not to clutter the surface comment level).
It looks like Liftmode is listed under both 4 and 7 recs?
Zembrin sounds really interesting. However, I'm already on an SSRI. Would you recommend taking Zembrin instead of, in addition to, or not at all?
Depends how well the SSRI is working, and whether you have any side effects that make you want to cease the SSRI.
I've seen at least one Amazon reviewer saying that getting off SSRIs and trying Zembrin was the best thing they did.
I took Zembrin three days back for the first time, and didn't take it the day after. I think I experienced strong withdrawal effects. Has anyone else had the same experience?
I took it for a month and a half and discontinued because I didn't notice any effect, but the week discontinuing I had pretty bad depressive symptoms. Not 100% sure this was caused by the zembrin, though
If Zembrin was a miracle drug, I'd expect it to be getting 5 stars on Amazon, but the Zembrin products I'm seeing are in the 4.0-4.2 star range.
Nootropics Depot folks have been testing a lot of them and said almost al of them are fake and don't contain Kanna. fwiw
One thing that's always made me hesitate to finish the SSC survey is it's length. Maybe a shorter survey specifically aimed at the nootropic community would work? Or frontloading the nootropics questions?
I think I might have a milder form of ADD. (ADHD without hyperactivity). Have any of you guys tried something on this ? Did it help you to get your chores in time, not forget where your car keys are etc ?
I have had a good experience with Adderall for my ADHD without hyperactivity. I'm not sure if this answers your question or if you're just asking about novel nootropics.
That helps too, thanks. But my question was rather about stuff I could buy over the counter. Preferably in Slovakia or Austria.
I didn't do the survey, I think. Finding vendors is annoying, so for modafinil specifically:
- Eufinil was legit, it's gone now. It didn't even exit scam so that's nice. I think it might've been the one which switched owners at one point; I had to testify to the police. That's when I learned it's non-optional, which seems to be against freedom of speech(?). Not recommended, use BTC if possible. F@#$ the whole concept of prescriptions.
- Dinosupplies was also legit, also gone now. There's some site using the same name, probably a scam.
- BuyModa, my last order was from there, it also seems to be legit - although it scared me by delayed tracking info - compared to what they claim. They shipped normally, so wtf it's a stupid policy to delay this.
Overall, _somehow_ I didn't ever get scammed yet.
Can you take Zembrin if you're also on an SSRI?
I got curious about Theacrine -- does anyone know if you can use Cupuaçu seeds to brew something like coffee? Or a related question: if one has Cupuaçu, how do you turn it into theacrine at high enough concentration to act something like coffee?
I like catnip from time to time when I can get it. When eaten, it is good for the digestion.
Also silver vine is even trippier, but hard to find.
If Zembrin acts as an SSRI could it reduce the effects of classic psychedelics in the same way that other SSRIs are sometimes reported to do?
Also generally curious about this. I currently microdose LSD and would be interested in swapping it for Zembrin if it provided a similar but more consistent mood lift and without the other more annoying effects like racing thoughts and mild anxiety increase. However I’d still like to have the option of macrodosing classical psychedelics if the mood strikes me.
Bromantane isn't talked about much, but I think it's very interesting. It didn't perceptibly affect my mood or focus short term, but seems to greatly reverse amphetamine tolerance over the course of a week of taking.
Seeing some great results with L-Tryptophan and L-Tyrosine. Same as good as the best SSRIs and SNRIs available but much less side effects. A trick: taking it every other day can work completely different than taking it daily!
My Modafinil tragedy
This is probably the only place where people might care about this experience. I haven't written about it anywhere else. After four years taking boring Prozac with no noticeable improvement, I decided to self-medicate and take 100mg of Modafinil (eugeroic medication over the counter was one of the perks of living in a developing country). First time, I felt like a superhero. I wrote to my doctor back home: "I feel like I think normal people do!".
My life changed immediately. I changed. From shy, morose, monogamist nerd to risk-taking philanderer. I became reckless with heightened libido. I gambled and lost money in the stock market. I did a triathlon. I ran through a police checkpoint. I partied hard. I had affairs. I did cocaine, then rivotril to sleep. I made terrible investments and lost all my savings and my inheritance. I alienated friends and made "party friends" that disappeared into the ether. I drank.
Sounds fun - and it was, for the most part. Be the losses were awful. And the hurt, and the guilt, and the toll on my health.
My memory became spotty and I couldn't recall events from recent past, even ones from before my Modafinil phase. I lost trust in my memory forever.
That lasted five years. Drug resistance made all less fun. Eventually I weaned myself off of it.
Do I regret taking it? Yes, because I was ill informed of the power of it and the profound effect it would have on my personality. Maybe if I was aware, I could have modulated my behaviour, paid attention, asked friends to keep me in check. I was a runaway train.
I'm good now (on Wellbutrin+Exsira), happy. Memory is still screwed up - I have massive gaps and I'm afraid I won't be able to form new ones, which is terrifying.
Caveat emptor applies.
Dang, thanks for sharing.
That sounds like it would be amazing ... if I took 1% of what you did?
I was quite astonished to see caffeine so high up in the list, because I think it's not supposed to be up there (in fact I have a hunch that a lot of the compounds' effectiveness in that list are mostly overrated by their users), but then again I'm actually not that surprised why people report it to be working for them after all. I'll say why that is in the end of my post. It's gonna take a while til I get there, just so you be warned.
I've consumed coffee, tea or caffeinated soft drinks most of my teenage and adult life and in recent years I've come to be very aware of mechanisms of its tolerance built up and the daily cycle of milder withdrawal symptoms. I think most coffeine users lack awareness of the withdrawal symptons. There seems to be a missing link in their reasoning that prevents them from going from "without my two cups of coffee in the morning I can't get going" to "and I think the amount of sluggishness and bad mood I feel in the morning is directly correlated to my daily regular caffeine intake. maybe I should quit using this drug."
In my early 20s I got the occasional cluster headaches, and I thought that was a normal thing to have, my mom had it, and she took aspirin/paracetamol/caffeine combination painkillers against it, and so did I. Because it was what I knew, what I grew up with. My mother took unhealthy amounts of this painkiller, in hindsight I'm pretty sure why she had suffered from headaches. It was the coffeine in these painkillers, the withdrawal of coffeine gives me cluster headaches and since I probably share the same genes that are responsible for my issues with this drug with my mother, she might have had the same issue. She literally destroyed her stomach with the asparin that was in those painkillers.
Once I realized that there was this connection and got my confirmation from experts, scientific papers, health education websites and from the freaking package leaflet of coffeine tablets that you can buy in pharmacies here in Germany, where it clearly list all the withdrawal symptons of a caffeine addiction, I knew exactly what the right thing to do was. Quit caffeine and never use it again. Easier said than done, since approximately over 90% of the world's population ingest it more or less regularly in some for or another. It's just everywhere.
And also if it wasn't for the flavor of drinks like coffee and tea which you need to have acquired a taste for in your youth and that you either love or hate, and I do love their taste, I would have quit caffeine once a few years ago and never looked back. But the lack of alternatives that are don't contain sugar, are readily available in grovery stores and do require this acquired taste, makes it hard to stay away from them. I love stuff like Ginger Ale, Tonic Water etc. but they contain sugar, and I want to cut that out as well. Water, herbal infusions are too bland. Fruit juices are acidic and contain sugar, bad for my teeth as well. There's just not a lot of choice, I think coffee and tea if it wasn't for the coffeine are pretty beneficial drinks. But I digress. I just wanted to make clear, that I keep on relapsing, I've been addicted to caffeine many many many times, and every time it's a real hassle and pain to wean myself off of it. And it just sucks.
I think it must be my genetics but I always tend to consume more and more and more to the point where I could drink a cup of coffee right before going to bed and fall asleep without problems. In my later periods of addiction I actually did that to not have withdrawal symptons during my sleep and get a better sleep and be able to get out of bed the next morning. I knew this couldn't be right, this can't be healthy, not for my body and especially not for my mental health, and most of all it makes no sense. It just seems to stupid and ridiculous. Why take a "stimulant" that loses all its stimulating potency over a relatively short amount of time of maybe 1-2 weeks? I'm actually fine with coffeine not doing anything stimulating anymore, because I actually prefer a steady and calm state of mind throughout the day and I can kinda achieve that when I was a high rate consumer of coffeine, I just had to constantly drink coffee. Yet, being on it is not as enjoyable of a life than beint completely sober.
Let me tell you what the difference are for me: on coffeine my mornings are slow, it takes significantly longer for me to get ready for work, because -surprise!- I need to drink at least 1-2 cups of coffee to get going. When sober I often times wake up BEFORE my alarm clock even goes off, on the weekends I wake up naturally around the same time I get up during the work days. It takes me less time to get ready and leave the house when sober. My mood is more stable. I feel great. While being hooked on coffeine I only felt great with a cup of coffee in my hand. Oh and of course I tend to go to bed earlier when I'm sober, but that doesn't mean I can stay up late if I have to. I just don't do that very often because I don't feel like it. When I was on coffeine I stayed up way past midnight on a regular basis.
Currently I'm off coffeine, and I hope I can stay away from it. I will try to be 100% strict. Not even a coke or a pepsi, because last time it started with just a coke once and a while. But even one coke gives me a headache the next day, and if I drink another one and another one, the fear of the withdrawal sets in and I'm trapped again.
I tried to talk my mother out of taking the painkillers, but she wouldn't listen. I might sound like a crazy person to her. I have a colleague who comes in to work late a lot, and he consumes a lot of coffee. I made the suggestion to cut down on coffee, told him about adenosine receptors and my story. He wouldn't listen. I try not to push this onto people, but if I see that someone is struggling with symptons that look like coffeine withdrawal and I notice that they consume large quantities of caffeinated beverages, I tell them about what I know and about me. Since I follow your blog and I was interested in nootropics a while I ago, I thought sharing my thoughts and experience might be of interest.
My greater thoughts about these "enhancing" substances especially those that build up a tolerance is that they are pretty useless if taken regularly. The speficic mechanism of tolerance, their use cases, etc all vary, some might not even have an effect that is distinguishable from a placebo, but let's assume we are dealing with substances that DO have a measurable stimulating effect in the ballpark of caffeine. Even then I think they come with a toll, they might be useful on rare occasions as a last resort. But as a "life enhancer" they are crap.
Let me compare caffeine's tolerance mechanism to that of LSD as I have been experimenting with it recently. LSD comes on very strong and tolerance builds up really fast. It makes it so that you simply cannot experience it's psychedelic effects every day, you have to wait at least a week between trips, ideally two. If you have an abundance of LSD, you'll realize pretty quickly that you can't space out as much as you'd like to, it forces you take long breaks, because it just doesn't work anymore. And the severity of its effects doesn't even make you want to use it that often anyway. Caffeine on the other comes along as a much more milder drug, heck it's not even considered a drug by the general public. It comes off as one that is VERY compliant with a life in which you have a regular job, it's the grease that makes capitalism run smoothly. But I think it isn't, I think that's a lie. LSD gives you no withdrawal symptons, not even a hangover except the effects of dehydration the next day. It's nothing compared to the splitting cluster headaches and depression a portion of the population experiences without their coffeine fix. Steal all coffee machines in an office building and that company becomes dysfunctional withing a day. But if all the staff took a trip on Sunday, they show up on Monday ok. Just think about it. It's crazy.
Ok, maybe some of them won't show up because they had to be put under observation in a mental health clinic and some won't show up because they realized they are wasting their life at that job... :D
LSD is just one example of a drug that has a very high tolerance build up and little to no withdrawal or hangover in contrast to caffeine. The extreme psychedelic effects of LSD are not relevant for this comparison. Looking at it from that angle makes it much easier to maintain a functional life, imo. My point being I think humankind would be much healthier and more productive and much happier without caffeinated beverages. There's simply no net benefit to widespread use of drugs with the similar effect/tolerance/withdrawal profiles as caffeine. (I don't think there's probably no net benefit to microdosing LSD either, it's a fun drug for weekends if you can handle it, but nothing more, this wasn't meant to replace one with the other.)
Ops, I just realized that I didn't mention why caffeine gets so overrated by their users. At least I only partially answered it. The mechanisms of caffeine addiction and its wide range of withdrawal symptoms are widely unknown to most of its users. They have a vague idea that they "need" their coffee fix, but they mistake that fix to feel as normal as a non-caffeine addict for a boost. As simple as that. Similar deception happened with tobacco smokers back in the dark ages of before all the information campaigns about its health risks began. People simply think "I'm not addicted, these aren't withdrawal symptoms. Me feeling like shit is my base level." Sad really.
This is great. May I know how to find your audience for your survey? 800 responses looks like a good sample.
I'm curious: Why isn't Ketamine considered a Nootropic?
A potent N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor Antagonist, it's extremely useful as a general anaesthetic, however at low/micro-doses (over days/weeks) it's proven to be extremely impressive at treating Chronic Neuropathic Pain, Clinical Depression, Suicidal Ideation & some forms of PTSD.
How exactly it works is still ambiguous (a neuroactive drug that isn't fully understood, "Quelle Suprise!" ; )~ ), but it's a confirmed Thalamic/Hypothalamic stimulant (increasing Dopamine production in the Ventral Tegmental Area, within the Substancia Nigra) & a remarkable Neuroplasticiser (effectively turning back the clock to a more youthful brain). It stimulates Metacognition & narrows "on task" concentration, while also seeingly increasing sensory bandwith (much like LSD microdoses).
Unfortunately, the majority of studies (specifically) investigating it's neurostimulant effects seem to be statistical, small group (<60) &/or preliminary (with typically little funding for confirmation studies). Part of this is due to restrictive governmental regulation, which dates back to the 1960s & - like so many other dangerous if misused neuroactive drugs - urgently needs revision based on current data.
reading you has a similar effect as taking nootropics. even better.
There used to be a website called CureTogether that was like an ongoing survey in this style. For each condition, it asked:
* What symptoms does your condition have?
* What treatments have you tried?
* How well did they work?
* What side effects did you have?
Then you could view the most effective/popular treatments (such as MDMA for social anxiety, or exercise for depression). Anyway, it was sold to 23andMe, who killed it off, and I've missed it ever since.
I really wish this functionality could be resurrected on a new site (possibly in a nonprofit form that won't sell out?) but I don't have the web development skills to do it myself.
Kanna (mesembrine) is SSRE rather than SSRI, which makes it more similar to MDMA:) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874111005113?via%3Dihub