![]() Somewhat ironically given the stereotypes, while I was in college I dabbled very little in nootropics, sticking to melatonin and tea. Keep this in mind if you are minded to take the experiments too seriously. So my hypothetical alcohol experiment might have tremendous internal validity (it does prove that I am sadder after inebriating), and zero external validity (someone who has never tried alcohol learns nothing about whether they will be depressed after imbibing). For example, alcohol makes me sad & depressed I could run the perfect blind randomized experiment for hundreds of trials and be extremely sure that alcohol makes me less happy, but would that prove that alcohol makes everyone sad or unhappy? Of course not, and as far as I know, for a lot of people alcohol has the opposite effect. The above are all reasons to expect that even if I do excellent single-subject design self-experiments, there will still be the old problem of “ internal validity” versus “ external validity”: an experiment may be wrong or erroneous or unlucky in some way (lack of internal validity) or be right but not matter to anyone else (lack of external validity). (And the corollary - if someone else’s experiments always work, they’re not telling you everything.) And wasted some must be to coin a Umeshism: if all your experiments work, you’re just fooling yourself. You don’t know in advance which ones will pay off and which will be wasted. The best you can do is read all the testimonials and studies and use that to prioritize your list of nootropics to try. It’s tempting to list the nootropics that worked for you and tell everyone to go use them, but that is merely generalizing from one example (and the more nootropics - or meditation styles, or self-help books, or “getting things done” systems - you try, the stronger the temptation is to evangelize). Yerkes-Dodson law see also “Chemistry of the adaptive mind” & de Jongh et al 2008) which may imply that the smartest are those who benefit least 2 3 but ultimately they all cash out in a very few subjective assessments like ‘energetic’ or ‘motivated’, with even apparently precise descriptions like ‘working memory’ or ‘verbal fluency’ not telling you much about what the nootropic actually did. There are so many parameters and interactions in the brain that any of them could be the bottleneck or responsible pathway, and one could fall prey to the common U-shaped dose-response curve (eg. These anecdotes should be considered only as anecdotes, and one’s efforts with nootropics a hobby to put only limited amounts of time into due to the inherent limits of drugs as a force-multiplier compared to other things like programming 1 for an ironic counterpoint, I suggest the reader listen to a video of Jonathan Coulton’s “I Feel Fantastic” while reading. ![]() ![]() A record of nootropics I have tried, with thoughts about which ones worked and did not work for me.
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