Regardless of whether you make it yourself - is there anything to this truBrain thing? Is this something we should all be doing? I'm looking for opinions/experiences from the HN community in general.
This was a nice breakdown of the unit costs, but I surprised by the author's conclusion. Even with a cheap value for his time ($25/hr), he's only saving about $15 dollars a year.
That said, kudos for explicitly including labor/time costs in the calculation.
I initially included a calculation more specific to my life, but with most of my money coming in during the summer and the rest of the year spent in college I had a weird result that I thought might be unhelpful for the average reader. I chose to just give a simple value calculation instead.
I think you should also consider the risk of getting bored when you do everything yourself. If the stuff really helps, you might not want to risk stopping because it's too much work.
It's a hassle. I took a full stack of nootropics daily (a larger stack than what's described here, close to 20 pills / day) for about a year and ultimately just decided it was too much hassle. There are benefits, but laziness overruled. I may actually try this since having it all prepackaged for me is completely worth the difference in cost.
It's funny to me that no one has ever claimed to have accomplished anything globally significant while using nootropics to my knowledge.
Mood elevators or stimulants, sure. Hitler was all into those. But, nootropics? I mean, I guess it depends on where you draw the line of what is considered one.
> It's funny to me that no one has ever claimed to have accomplished anything globally significant while using nootropics to my knowledge.
These drugs are not always legal to use by normal people (eg. modafinil) and even when they are, why would you admit them? And even when they admit them, you haven't heard of them (the Nobelist who found NGF credits NGF for her scientific productivity; the only reason you don't hear of NGF supplementation is that it is insanely expensive and you could only afford it if, well, you had your own lab synthesizing NGF).
We know that a lot of scientists and other such researchers use amphetamines and modafinil because they say so in surveys like the famous one in _Nature_; yet you do not hear 20% of them publicly thanking modafinil for helping them get their experiments or work done.
Adderall is generally included under "nootropics", and is a stimulant. Its precursor was Benzedrine, which was used by some names you might recognize: W.H. Auden, James Agee, Graham Greene, Philip K. Dick, John-Paul Sartre, Paul Erdös, Jack Kerouac. The latter wrote "On The Road" in three weeks while under its influence.
Again, probably not nootropics, but they serve the same function: wake your brain up enough to accomplish something you may not have had the cognitive ability to do without it.
TruBrain gave me a month's supply to try it out (http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#trubrain) and I'd say that, as one would expect since it's not including any heavy-duty stimulants, the effects are weaker than modafinil or nicotine. I think it's more effective than just a normal piracetam+choline stack, but it's hard to be sure. (But on the plus side, it's legal and doesn't come with any concerns about legality (for modafinil) or addiction/social-disapproval (nicotine).)
