

Smart Drugs: Fenn Lipkowitz and his Amazing Lifelog - wslh
http://quantifiedself.com/2011/12/fenn-lipkowitzs-amazing-lifelog

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tomwalker
I am familiar with smart drugs from a medical perspective.

I am not 100% convinced that it is not primarily a placebo effect.

I think that the benefit Mr Lipkowitz received from improving his diet may
have had a larger role that taking supplements.

~~~
varelse
It's certainly not a controlled experiment, but at the same time, I can report
apocryphal success with daily doses of 500 mg of Tyrosine, a teaspoon of
flaxseed and fish oil, 200 mg of CoQ10, 240 mg of Gingko biloba, and 10 mg of
vinpocetine along with several other innocuous supplements that may or may not
have a role here.

The upshot: several weeks in I got hit with three gnarly race conditions in
30,000 lines of GPU code. 3 days later, the bugs were all fixed and overall
performance was up several percent. I'm good at what I do, but the speed at
which these bugs were vanquished floored me. These were _nasty_ hard to
isolate, seldom occurring problems and I picked them off one by one on
seemingly gut instinct alone.

Which is to say I do think something's going on here, but it's hard to isolate
exactly what. More data is needed but I'm reluctant to attempt to _fix_ what
is apparently not _broken_.

As for the raw diet. I _love_ the raw diet. But unless you're Demi Moore,
Alicia Silverstone, Woody Harrelson, or living in a cooperative situation with
a bunch of fellow raw foodies, it's just way too much work. That said, upping
the consumption of green leafy vegetables, and correspondingly reducing the
consumption of sugar and animal products in this day and age is a no-brainer
(i.e. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead).

Amusingly, the picture of Mr. Lipkowitz on his blog site is taken at the
Googleplex - a place that served some of the most healthy food I've ever eaten
- to some of the fattest, out of shape and unhealthy nerds I've ever seen in
14 years in the tech industry.

