It’s pretty well-known that getting older and settling down dulls the brain. Aging past 25 years or so, or getting married, tends to kill productivity in many brainy disciplines, the most obvious and well-studied being mathematics. With almost no exceptions, if you haven’t done interesting things in maths before your early-30s, you never will.

I’m 33, and I now have a kid and wife. I work in software, where we crave a delicate state of deep, intense concentration (which we call hack mode), which is getting harder and harder for me to find as I age. Fortunately for me, these productive states are not as elusive and ephemeral as it is for mathematicians. Still, my capacity drains away with time.

Lately, I’ve heard about chemicals (I hesitate to call them “drugs”, with all the connotations that brings about efficacy, legality, and such) that affect the thinking meats for the better. A guy coined the name “nootropic” in 1964, and I’ll use that name from now on to refer to them. In particular, some people claim that piracetam, 2-(2-oxopyrrolidin-1-yl)acetamide, aids cognition and memory. There are plenty of studies of piracetam’s effects on sick people, with generally good results and few or no bad side effects. The scientific results for healthy people are still out, but the anecdotes are generally good.

“Good” is a bit vague here. Most are self-administered one-patient “studies” with no control and no good metrics for cognition. Science, it ain’t. But, with no known side-effects and enough people taking it, it can’t hurt to try it, I thought. At worst, I’m out a small amount of money (and enriched a charlatan somewhere in the world). At least it’s not amphetamines, I suppose.

Piracetam is available only as prescribed in many places, but in the US and Canada, the drug authorities have so far taken no position on it, and so it’s available by mail-order or occasionally at vitamin shops.

I bought a bottle of 60 pills off of Amazon with some retailer that has good reviews and a brand that doesn’t have any complaining web pages about them. The pills are 800mg each.

I read that one should take a large dose at first, to ramp the levels to something useful, and then fall back to a smaller dose. At night, with water on an empty stomach I took two pills, to make 1.6 grams. My sleep was normal, and I felt no change.

The following morning, no change also, and I again took 1.6g, at 9AM. I’ll continue this twice-daily two-pill dosage for another two days, then drop back to one 800mg pill, once per day.

28 May 2009, 12:02 #