Nootropics Survey Results And Analysis

I'm sorry, but that's a terrible comment.

Medical progress often starts with observations, and is confirmed by trials. Penicillin is one such example.

To discount the value of observations is to ignore an important part of the discovery process.

There is extremely limited data available around the use of nootropics for mind enhancement (as opposed to in medical use for treating illness). In the absence of of such data a survey like this indicates that there are a few things worth studying in more depth (and some supposed nootropics that seem worthless).

The author appears extremely aware of the problems with their methodology, and makes no attempts to hide these problems. To pull quotes:

The online nootropics community consists of mostly healthy individuals looking to use these substances to gain motivation or clearer thinking. They tend to “outpace” the scientific literature, using some substances that haven’t yet been shown to work, or haven’t been shown to benefit healthy individuals. ... " I would have liked to have some placebo nootropics to use as a comparison, but since I wasn’t running a trial, I didn’t have that option. I did, however, try to assess the placebo effect in a couple of sneaky ways." ... "I have very low confidence that these represent real effects rather than artifacts of the gymnastics I had to do to make the data correlatable at all, and I report them only to encourage other people to do more sober analyses."

I think attempting to do this - knowing that people will criticize the methodology - is admirable.

Many say modafinil gives you an ability to focus deeply on things for long periods of time, which caffeine doesn't really do. The downside appears to be that the "big picture" view sometimes seems to be lost.

I'm not sure that kind of thing would show up in this survey.

Yeah.. I know this is just hearsay and anecdotal evidence.

Edit: Here's a comment on this very post which reflects what I say above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249637

> What might big-time convince me to try out a nootropic substance would be an objective demonstration that someone with typical abilities (say, someone who goes into online discussion with a known propensity to believe what's on Reddit without checking it) can become a person with thoughtful insight (say, someone like Peter Norvig) at adult age simply by ingesting the nootropic.

I note that Norvig is a really high bar, and that reading and discussing articles is not going to have that level of effect either. (Though what effect it does have, comes at less risk.)

Many people claim that taking modafinil allows them to lose a night's sleep and feel fine the next day. It seems unlikely that they'd be so completely wrong that modafinil is not doing them any short-term good at all. Like, the typical response to "lose a night's sleep" is "have a really obviously bad day tomorrow". It would be difficult for modafinil to make someone so totally oblivious, to their own performance and the comments of people around them, as to not notice this happening.

If modafinil didn't have any clinical studies backing it up, the anecdotal evidence would be enough to convince me with high probability that modafinil has short-term benefits for many people.

Scott is well aware of all those issues. Something is, however, generally better than nothing. This is not a randomised clinical trial, not even close. It's not even a longitudinal correlational study. It's an opt in survey with a small sample. Unless you get huge effect sizes you're going to be have low certainty of anything and all it's really useful for is suggesting things for people to try or treatments to be prioritised for testing in higher powered studies.

I especially invite comments from participants here who have a professional understanding of statistical studies in clinical trials of new medicines.

Scott has an M.D. and is currently doing his residency in psychiatry.

Be careful, in the country I live in (Austria) it is illegal to import prescription drugs. Customs made me pay a fine of about 60$ for trying to import Melatonin (and I didn't get the Melatonin either).