
Non-Pharmacological Cognitive  Enhancers – Current Perspectives [pdf] - mantesso
http://www.jcdr.net/articles/PDF/6186/13392_CE%28RA1%29_F%28T%29_PF1%28VSUAK%29_PFA%28AK%29_PF2%28PAG%29.pdf
======
mikedmiked
Less detail than I hoped but a lot of sources.

Be wary of tCDS - no long term studies. Also 'no such thing as a free lunch'
\- see gwern :
[http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics](http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics)

Not included and should be: very bright light.
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gdl/my_simple_hack_for_increased_ale...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gdl/my_simple_hack_for_increased_alertness_and/)

~~~
reubenmorais
Very bright light will definitely mess up your circadian rhythm if you're not
very careful, and has been linked to all kinds of adverse health effects:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-
illumination#Health_effec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-
illumination#Health_effects)

The best solution I found for increasing alertness is also the hardest, but it
works for me: go to sleep at the same time every day, don't linger in bed
after waking up, and exercise in the morning.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
It's all about periodization. You want bright in the day, and dark in the
night. Most places are too dim for me in the day, and too bright in the night.

There's also the color temperature of the light, which I definitely notice. I
use f.lux/redshift as well as red light bulbs at night, and sleep with
blackout curtains. On the flip side, I find it hard to wake up in a pitch
black room, so I set two clip lamps aimed at me on a timer instead of an
alarm.

What would be really nice is to have light bulbs that adjust both brightness
and color temperature to mimic the sun. It would be interesting if mimicking a
tropical sun cycle would help with seasonal affective disorder.

------
adamiscool
Is anyone aware of a similar sourced survey of the literature for
pharmacological cognitive enhancers i.e. nootropics?

~~~
xq
Disclaimer: have been an /r/nootropics moderator for most of its life. Am
basically inactive now, but sometimes answer modmail.

Be wary of Longecity (and /r/nootropics to a lesser, or at least different,
extent). There are some Longecity users in the Brain Health forum who will
seem to know what they're talking about if you haven't read through
introductory neuroscience and pharmacology textbooks. The same is true in
/r/nootropics, but there are a greater concentration of knowledgeable users
and bad science tends to get readily downvoted. I know I have said some
ridiculous things in the past on both forums, and /r/nootropics has been more
willing to call me out for indulging in anecdotal evidence.

The Longecity forum also seems to have a slightly more experimental tone to
it, given that Longecity as a whole is not a nootropics community but a life
extension community. There's a tradition of doing "group buys" of new
substances from overseas. /r/nootropics has gotten more openly experimental in
the past couple years, but I don't believe anyone has tried to organize a
group buy yet.

But yeah, the sibling comments have exhausted the options that exist today. As
far as I'm aware there aren't any _expansive_ surveys that span the whole of
nootropics / cognitive enhancement. There are papers that compare specific
classes of new substances or techniques, but no comprehensive treatment of the
idea of cumulative/permanent pharmacological brain enhancement yet. For now
we're stuck with two slightly quirky online forums (which both skirt the line
between self-help and wannabe academia) and wading through the literature
ourselves. There's also examine.com and wikipedia as starting points.

~~~
adamiscool
Thanks, I'm familiar with all those sites and they are great resources for
subjective experiences but as you said the data often need to be taken with a
grain of salt. It's actually a little surprising nothing like this has been
done yet in academia given the increased interest in the topic in recent
years.

~~~
xq
> as you said the data often need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's
> actually a little surprising nothing like this has been done yet in academia
> given the increased interest in the topic in recent years.

Definitely. I probably should have emphasized, not the limitations of
anecdotal evidence, but the danger of untestable, excessive or irrelevant
speculation.

It's super easy to treat metaphor or simple models as truth when the reality
is much more complex and, as such, relatively unstudied. The biggest issue
with online nootropics communities is not that people share their experiences,
it's that readers often take the average of experiences and generalize it into
a pseudo-neuroscientific model.

Not only does this reflect terribly on the nootropics and practical
transhumanist milieus, it does a disservice (as a third-order effect) to
people such as yourself who just want palatable, accurate, expertly distilled
information. The rampant generalization diminishes the validity of the entire
field from a public perspective, which slows scientific progress in those
places with the ability to generously allocate resources, which in turn delays
the amount of time it takes for a significant body of literature to arise
which might warrant a canonical survey or introductory paper collection.

It's a shame, and I have no clue what to do about it, or if there even is
anything that can be done within the context of places like /r/nootropics or
Longecity. Here's hoping that systems like Experiment.com do what they aim to.

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charlieflowers
I'd love a TL;DR (fully admit I'm lazy).

