A statistically-significant number of people I know have had significant effects from piracetam. The vast majority of this group were very familiar with other mind-altering substances and could therefore probably be trusted to distinguish actual effects from pure placebo.
I don’t think that’s a good argument against itsunder9000: I’ve seen plenty of supposedly sophisticated people who you would expect to be able to distinguish from placebo advocate things which did not do jack for me in my own blinded or randomized experiments.
For example, the people who praise LSD microdosing have generally taken more psychedelics than I’ve even heard of; and what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? No effects (1 trend toward benefit, 1 trend towards harm). Seth Roberts had been self-experimenting for decades longer than I have, and believed that treadmill usage benefited his spaced repetition performance; what happened when I did a randomized self-experiment while skeptical? Statistically-significant harm to my spaced repetition performance, the opposite of what this sophisticate’s introspection told him. Seth Roberts thought vitamin D at night hurt his going to sleep and taken in the morning, improved his awakening the next morning; what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? I found that he was right about the first thing, and wrong about the second (no benefit). And so on.
I didn’t believe that much in the placebo effect before I started blind self-experiments. But I sure as heck do now.
(That said, I don’t necessarily agree with itsunder9000. Big clinical medical trials are in unhealthy old adults, yes, but the psychology trials are usually done with that white lab rat of psychology—college students. And there are a few nootropics with enough studies to have some confidence in the claims.)
It’s definitely not a knockdown argument, it’s true. It’s mostly a large pile of circumstantial evidence that makes me slow to doubt it’s effectiveness.
Piracetam has a reputation for being subtle. That doesn’t mean it’s not working (aspirin’s effects are subtle too), but it does mean that in the absence of at least semi-rigorous experiments, it’s hard to distinguish from placebo even for people who’re skeptical and experienced with psychoactives.
One friend of mine (neuropsych major, experienced with a wide variety of psychoactives) got similar but slightly stronger results with what I think was over a slightly longer period than gwern; I think he posted his results only on Facebook, though, so I’m not comfortable sharing a link to his writeup.
And anecdotally, a wide sample of people at the college found other placebos not giving the same benefit; every finals week a large table of food and mostly-placebos is available via a student group, and enough people swore by piracetam over the others that when it disappeared in a particular year (it’s sale got somehow regulated), its absence was missed.
Is this talking about me (SL), or is there some other person of our acquaintance who’s written up an experience with piracetam? I can chime in with my experiences if so desired.
Okay. I’m not going to post my writeup since it’s a little outdated — close to two years old now — and contains a lot of info irrelevant to this discussion, but the gist:
I tried out piracetam very actively (using it frequently, varying a lot of things, and closely noting the effects) for about two months in summer 2012, and have been using it periodically since then. I didn’t notice any long-term effects, though I don’t think I’ve actually ever tried to test the effects of a fixed long-term regimen.
What I did find was very dramatic acute effects, starting within an hour or two after taking it and lasting for a couple hours. These effects included music enhancement, visual enhancement (colors look brighter, textures look sharper), relief from anxiety/depression accompanied by a sense of clarity, and often mild euphoria.
While I haven’t done any blind tests and therefore can’t be entirely sure the effects aren’t placebo, they’re often quite strong (e.g. piracetam has helped me go from being very anxious to feeling very clear and self-possessed in situations where I wouldn’t expect that to happen otherwise) and some of them feel quite unlike any state I experience when not using piracetam.
It does seem to be difficult to get piracetam to work right, though — there seems to be idiosyncrasy in the dose people respond to, you have to figure out how much choline to take with it, tolerance builds, you might need to take a high initial dose (‘attack dose’) to get effects immediately, etc. I can see how this unreliability might seem characteristic of a placebo, but I can also see how it might cause people to falsely conclude that something was a placebo because they didn’t get effects from it easily.
A statistically-significant number of people I know have had significant effects from piracetam. The vast majority of this group were very familiar with other mind-altering substances and could therefore probably be trusted to distinguish actual effects from pure placebo.
I don’t think that’s a good argument against itsunder9000: I’ve seen plenty of supposedly sophisticated people who you would expect to be able to distinguish from placebo advocate things which did not do jack for me in my own blinded or randomized experiments.
For example, the people who praise LSD microdosing have generally taken more psychedelics than I’ve even heard of; and what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? No effects (1 trend toward benefit, 1 trend towards harm). Seth Roberts had been self-experimenting for decades longer than I have, and believed that treadmill usage benefited his spaced repetition performance; what happened when I did a randomized self-experiment while skeptical? Statistically-significant harm to my spaced repetition performance, the opposite of what this sophisticate’s introspection told him. Seth Roberts thought vitamin D at night hurt his going to sleep and taken in the morning, improved his awakening the next morning; what happened when I did a blind randomized self-experiment? I found that he was right about the first thing, and wrong about the second (no benefit). And so on.
I didn’t believe that much in the placebo effect before I started blind self-experiments. But I sure as heck do now.
(That said, I don’t necessarily agree with itsunder9000. Big clinical medical trials are in unhealthy old adults, yes, but the psychology trials are usually done with that white lab rat of psychology—college students. And there are a few nootropics with enough studies to have some confidence in the claims.)
It’s definitely not a knockdown argument, it’s true. It’s mostly a large pile of circumstantial evidence that makes me slow to doubt it’s effectiveness.
Piracetam has a reputation for being subtle. That doesn’t mean it’s not working (aspirin’s effects are subtle too), but it does mean that in the absence of at least semi-rigorous experiments, it’s hard to distinguish from placebo even for people who’re skeptical and experienced with psychoactives.
Gwern’s experience suggests a small effect.
One friend of mine (neuropsych major, experienced with a wide variety of psychoactives) got similar but slightly stronger results with what I think was over a slightly longer period than gwern; I think he posted his results only on Facebook, though, so I’m not comfortable sharing a link to his writeup.
And anecdotally, a wide sample of people at the college found other placebos not giving the same benefit; every finals week a large table of food and mostly-placebos is available via a student group, and enough people swore by piracetam over the others that when it disappeared in a particular year (it’s sale got somehow regulated), its absence was missed.
Is this talking about me (SL), or is there some other person of our acquaintance who’s written up an experience with piracetam? I can chime in with my experiences if so desired.
Indeed, it is you! Please provide first-hand details. (I’m pretty sure no one else of our mutual acquaintance has written up anything.)
Okay. I’m not going to post my writeup since it’s a little outdated — close to two years old now — and contains a lot of info irrelevant to this discussion, but the gist:
I tried out piracetam very actively (using it frequently, varying a lot of things, and closely noting the effects) for about two months in summer 2012, and have been using it periodically since then. I didn’t notice any long-term effects, though I don’t think I’ve actually ever tried to test the effects of a fixed long-term regimen.
What I did find was very dramatic acute effects, starting within an hour or two after taking it and lasting for a couple hours. These effects included music enhancement, visual enhancement (colors look brighter, textures look sharper), relief from anxiety/depression accompanied by a sense of clarity, and often mild euphoria.
While I haven’t done any blind tests and therefore can’t be entirely sure the effects aren’t placebo, they’re often quite strong (e.g. piracetam has helped me go from being very anxious to feeling very clear and self-possessed in situations where I wouldn’t expect that to happen otherwise) and some of them feel quite unlike any state I experience when not using piracetam.
It does seem to be difficult to get piracetam to work right, though — there seems to be idiosyncrasy in the dose people respond to, you have to figure out how much choline to take with it, tolerance builds, you might need to take a high initial dose (‘attack dose’) to get effects immediately, etc. I can see how this unreliability might seem characteristic of a placebo, but I can also see how it might cause people to falsely conclude that something was a placebo because they didn’t get effects from it easily.