381–390 of 447 posts
Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams. Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams. That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.
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I would have taken a well-calibrated photo of the cup each time without looking, maybe with a color card in the bottom, and only entered results at the end of the trial. Given that there is no documentation of whether the events during the hour of test time were more or less stressful than those before it, and no taking the time of day, diet and exercise, sleep, location (quiet island or next to a construction site),…
> As a note, I have no idea why he bothered trying to guess what he had taken. What possible value could that have in this type of experiment? It gives a hint of how well the blinding worked.
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Citizens science used to be much more common and there were several publications initially built around the concept. Unfortunately, the idea has all but been obliterated by inadequate public education and the chronic lack of time that now embattles the middle classes.
fortunately* citzen science was replaced by solid methods... this is a long fancy self reported post on a metric that is easily figured out by biomarkers (stress levels). what's the consequences if the author decided to make some claim about a substance?
Citizens scientists rarely post “facts” but rather interesting avenues for research or further investigation. Part of being an educated citizen scientist is to understand the limitations of your knowledge, data, and methods.
Quacks and cranks, on the other hand, are always making grand new “discoveries” lol.
Anyone who has a decent education can make observations apply the scientific method. I say this coming from a family of actual scientists from molecular biology to particle physics, who will tell you the same, and also give credit to the multitude of citizen scientists who have done just that.
As for myself, I’ll stick to engineering.
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Do you have ADHD? Most neurotypical people seem to experience jittery effects and being extremely alert while for people with ADHD it can actually make them sleepy. Of course everyone's brain is different, it is just a correlation with many exceptions. So yeah, caffeine works differently on different people. Personally, as someone with ADHD, I have a crazy caffeine tolerance. It helps me somewhat with focus but I don…
I have ADHD and caffeine very easily makes me jittery. Ordering my cappuccino 'half-caff' has terrifically improved my life. Stimulant medication, the kind prescribed by the doc, easily makes me jittery, too. The narrative that 'stimulants calm down people with ADHD but make neurotypicals wired' never sat well with me. But I totally believe that it makes you and many other people calmer without any friction. There mu…
How do you treat your ADHD then?
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It’s almost as if this post is attempting to gaslight the world into thinking that L-Theanine doesn’t work. It’s the exact equivalent of saying “Look at the data, LSD does not make you hallucinate, it’s just conjecture. Look at my data and numbers.” This entire post makes me think there is either an ulterior motive for writing it to try and discredit the obvious impact L-Theanine has on people, or, the write up is si…
What makes you think it is trying to gaslight anyone? The post makes it clear that it just not working on the author is a possibility, but also fairly points out that there are other studies with more participants that weren't really promising either. It then suggests that those who do really believe it works on them also replicate a blinded self-experiment, which seems pretty fair to me - because then surely they'd…
This is my hypothesis. I'm very confident it worked for me, but I'm guessing that there's a certain combination of symptoms and traits that it's effective. If it was a placebo for me, it would be literally a miracle: likely the cheapest thing I've tried and had the biggest effect without requiring me to make a habit out of taking it.
I was surprised that the author’s conclusion didn’t mention another model that looked consistent with the data: that theanine works slowly — over the course of a few days, not hours. (I have no idea whether it would work like this. A placebo effect only is also consistent with the data.)
This was my experience. I'm not sure if that's "typical", although I've never really tried to take it like that.
For anyone looking for a sleep supplement, before you go down the rabbit hole of Theanine, Mg, etc. Try an OTC Azelastine or Fluticasone nasal spray for a month. Turns out my chronic poor quality, restless sleep was a dust mite allergy that I should have figured out and treated a decade ago. Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth but didn't have too many issues during the day. I was allergic to my bed. B…
For anyone looking for a sleep supplement, before you go down the rabbit hole of Theanine, Mg, etc. Try an OTC Azelastine or Fluticasone nasal spray for a month. Turns out my chronic poor quality, restless sleep was a dust mite allergy that I should have figured out and treated a decade ago. Would wake up with a stuffy nose and very dry mouth but didn't have too many issues during the day. I was allergic to my bed. B…
nice! I recently got dust mites out of my home completely, and it was a miraculous upgrade to my health, including several symptoms that are outside the definitions of allergic asthma/eczema/rhinitis. One important thing people are missing about dust mite allergy is the many ways in which they directly damage your immune system and body, outside of the usual frame of "allergies" which is based on type 2 hypersensitiv…
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And that is exactly the point made in the target post by the author. He explicitly raised that criticism himself. Double kudos for self-criticism. You will not find many conventional science publications pointing out: “Shucks, we could have done this a better”.
The ancestor post is neither a "Complete injustice" nor "derision" nor an "insult", and it doesn't warrant a hostile mocking reply. Its tone could have been gentler, but it wasn't that bad. And the study doesn't really deserve "accolades", it deserves to be recognized for whatever it does well. Such polarization of tone and vocabulary doesn't accomplish much, and I'll even propose that it actually prevents good thing…
Re-reading such a negative critique of a solid home-brew experiment is unwarranted. There are several word here worth red flags.
>This is an N=1 trial. Dressing your N=1 trial up with lots of pseudo controls and pseudo blinding and data collection does not make it better. In fact: putting this much effort into any medication trial makes it much more likely that you’re going to be incentivized to find effects that don’t exist. I think it’s nice that the author admits that they found nothing, but statistically, worthless drugs show effects in much better-designed trials than this one: it’s basically a coin toss.