[ExI] Which nootropics work best?

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Mar 17 15:17:02 UTC 2011


...On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] Which nootropics work best?

On 2011-03-17 11:56, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> ...
>
>> It's a fad.

>...Like web surfing (a former Swedish minister of communications actually
said that in 1996).

>...I'm convinced we could make worthwhile nootropics that affect brain
health and growth, but we need a regulatory climate that makes R&D on them
possible. As long as only therapeutic drugs are allowed, the useful
enhancers will not be developed. -- Anders Sandberg


Our current regulatory environment is ideal: we have arbitrarily large
numbers of volunteers willing to put up their own money and use themselves
as test subjects.  In the nootropic race the clear leader so far has been
caffeine.  Nothing else is in the same category.

In the very long run, the effectiveness of any nootropic can be roughly
estimated by its market success. 

The pathway forward will be to get people to do blind studies on themselves
and record their results in some publicly accessible forum.  I don't hold
out much hope we could make that work well enough to extract the signal from
the roaring internet noise, but it isn't clear to me how changing the
regulatory environment would help that.

spike







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