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 I’m not going to post my writeup since it’s a little outdated — close to two years old now — and contains a lot of info irrelevant to this discussion, but the gist: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.
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.