Reddit: Nootropics or human experiences on Reddit?
Once Eric Matsner told me that he takes about 40 Nootropics pills a day. He is 27 years old and he is absolutely healthy. He had not been sick for several years, and all this thanks to the nootropic pills. More importantly, the regime must optimize the hell out of its brain, smooth out just above the devastating effects of aging, sleep deprivation and hangovers.
I would not say that this guy is obsessed with his health.
Matsner is the founder of Nootroo, one of the most companies that develops nootropics to improve brain performance. Depending on your needs, nootropics can include anything from Adderall to caffeine, with an array of unregulated and largely untested chemicals, such as noopept between them. The nootropic idea has been known since the 70s, however, it gained popularity relatively recently, especially among Silicon Valley buildings and the Soylent-guzzling kit.
What do you really know about the supplement industry? But if you are looking at the buzz around nootropics, then there is something interesting that you need to know. Online communities, combined on forums such as Longecity, Bluelight and especially subreddit /r/nootropics, have become a massive experiment in crowdsourcing.
Although DIY science is very imperfect, but these self-identifiers have found a legitimate gap in the pharmaceutical industry: drugs to improve the brain for healthy people do not fit into the FDA category, which means that pharmaceutical companies do not test these drugs. The experimenters on themselves go where the pharmaceutical companies dare not go.
However, you should not be ahead of ourselves.
Productivity Drugs
The definition of what is a nootropic will be depends on who you ask about it. The substances that caused the greatest concern in the media with abuse news were acquired by Adderall, Ritalin and modafinil, a wakefulness drug given to Air Force pilots during long missions.
A number of nootropist enthusiasts claim that drugs, such as modafinil, with potentially disastrous effects are not considered nootropics. Or, at least, they distort the nootropics, which include drugs that for a long time have a small but cumulative effect, by optimizing cognition. “The correct analogy is a complex interest. You are not going to make a million dollars a day, ”says the co-founder of Nootrobox. “If you can be 10 percent more productive during your 20s, then the amount of bandwidth you can achieve is phenomenal.”
Many popular nootropics include Bacopa Monnieri grass to improve memory, peptide noopept to combat cognitive decline, and L-theanine, an amino acid commonly found in tea. Nootropics can be either plant-based or synthesized in the laboratory. There are many, many others listed in /r/nootropics for a truly impressive FAQ for newbies. But the two recommended cognitive eschancers are caffeine and L-theanine. In other words, coffee and tea. How original, isn’t it?
Amy Arnsten, a neuroscient at Yale, has a different opinion: “I don’t think there is any drug that will make you Einstein if you start Homer Simpson.”
Science or Pseudoscience?
Although caffeine and L-theanine turned out to be ineffective for Bradley Cooper in unlimited type of superpower, they show that / r / nootropics are quite sober in their assessments of science.
The manual for beginners opens with a 12-point warning about the risks associated with the falsification of brain chemistry. In his research papers, individual lists of substances examine the evidence for and against their effectiveness. Take for example the record about piracetam:
“One researcher showed that piarcetam increases the cognitive decline for 20 years, although the authors prefer to draw conclusions carefully, given the small sample size in the piracetam group.”
Individual yarns themselves are freer, but those for unproven substances are labeled with a high risk. Subreddit has actually become a source for free industry.
Moderator u/MisterYouAreSoDumb shared with me that a drug testing program was organized to ensure the availability of the ingredients listed on the labels.
Given all the expressions among its members, the group makes every effort to help its members use the nootropics responsibly.
The Problem of Crowdsourcing Clinical Trials
Although we agree that people have the right to decide whether to take such a risk, there is another glaring problem of using their results as data: a placebo effect. A patient who receives a sugar pill can improve their scores almost miraculously. At the same time, a college student who is given an alcoholic beer will be drunk.
“Everything that is not controlled by placebo is probably not worth anything,” says Arnsten, a neurologist at Yale University .. “My job is related to how stress contributes to higher knowledge. If you take something, and you think it makes you better, and you relax, the placebo effect can be very strong. ”
In fairness, it should be noted that Redditors are sometimes blind compared to placebo, blind placebo-controlled trials and even tried sporadically. But a pseudo-anonymous online forum can hardly be considered the best place for tests that need to track dozens or even hundreds of people.
Difficult factors, as well as all external influences that may affect the outcome of the study, are also difficult to select in single-person studies. Work that seems to be unbelievably tense during the week may become lightened a week later. Depending on what week you conduct a brain test, your results will be very different.
To the credit of the community, it is responsible for all these problems. In one thread, asking: “Is this a dangerous sub-deed filled with pseudo-science?”, One of the users answered rather briefly and succinctly:
“I think it is worth bearing in mind while browsing here – this is the labrat substrate. What we do is often done only in guinea pigs before. We are people, testers for non-medical reasons, and everyone should know for himself how ready he is to go. ”
The Self-Experimenters
Nootropics are quite difficult to regulate; they remain a gray area to explore. “In the US, we have no categories for improvement. Even if they have tests that exist, there is no FDA category for them, ”says Matzner. And he is right.
The FDA is set to approve drugs for treating disorders. You have Adderall for treating ADHD or modafinil for narcolepsy. However, he has no restrictions for the regulation of substances that optimize the brains of perfectly healthy. If pharmaceutical companies that do not see cannot find a way to adopt and approve a new class of drugs, then why risk all the money when developing?
Arnsten also points out that experiments usually begin with small rodents, whose higher bark is completely different from human ones. But no commission is allowed to take responsibility for the tests on a person. Perhaps it is here that comes a large number of experimenters who want to take the risk. At the very least, these communities demonstrate that the market for cognitive enhancers is indeed real and popularized.
So if you need more of nootropics this day at Reddit – welcome to subreddit:
So all of them can help you with this global question for Best Nootropics 2019
See ya!