Nootropics for Dummies

7 min readMay 14, 2019

In this multi-part, opinionated, skeptic’s guide to the world of nootropics and supplements at large, I attempt to offer some context and perspective on a broad, controversial topic. This is Part 1.
Necessarily, in the interest of expedience, some of it will be a gloss. Hence the ‘dummies’ bit in the title. I don’t think you’re a dummy — it’s a figure of speech. Please, do read on, regardless of your self-assessed intelligence.

An Editorial Preface:

If you’re here looking for advice on bleeding-edge, novel, or otherwise experimental ‘smart drugs’ with radical, improbable effects — things described as ‘hacks’ or ‘cheat codes’ or ‘god modes’ or ‘limitless pills’, look no further! None of that is in here.

But, on that topic, if you want my advice, it’s: don’t.

If you want to know how to make your own informed decisions, on nootropics or other supplements, please, do continue.

Across the parts of this guide, we’ll cover such topics as:

What is a nootropic?
What evidence is available that nootropics work?
How good is the evidence? How can I decide for myself?
Where do I get this evidence?
What’s the difference between a supplement and a drug?
Marketing, regulation, and how research gets done
How to read a supplement label
‘Natural’ vs synthetic ingredients
Extracts vs whole herbs, and ‘branded’ extracts
How to judge the quality of a product (formulation, testing, sourcing, and QC)
The bleeding edge, risk, and the personal element

But First, A Personal Preface

Since I first heard about nootropics, I’d been curious, but at an arm’s length. I’m a skeptical person — not chemtrails- or flat-earth-skeptical — more like, ‘needs more evidence’ skeptical.

My combined superpower and Achilles’ heel is a tendency towards obsessive research, and because I know I’ll fall in deep, I don’t point my research-neurosis at something unless I’m ready to go down the rabbit-hole.

About three years ago, despite eating right and exercising regularly (habits that have a huge positive impact on mental performance), I was still frustrated with how inconsistent my focus was.

Sometimes I could stay in the zone for hours on end, and I could feel it coming when that kind of productivity was available to me. Other times, though, I could tell, almost upon waking, that no amount of meditation, priming, or preparation was going to get me all the way to a place where I could accomplish anything like what I could on my best days.

What I’d read about nootropics (definition coming, bear with me) often included the suffix ‘-hacking’, as in ‘neuro-hacking’ or ‘body-hacking’, and, being a programmer among other things myself, I can say that the mess that’s made when one begins hacking is scary and either the analogy is bad or people are buck-wild with their brain chemistry.

No disrespect intended for the adventurous, but I can’t understand wanting to be a guinea pig with something as important as your brain. From a risk/reward standpoint, how good would the result have to be to make the potential downside worth it? Perhaps these hackers are underestimating the potential for things to go wrong?

There are as many approaches to supplementation as there are people — it’s personal, and I knew from the outset that the experimental approach was too crazy for me.

Even at the time I began looking into it, I was already skeptical of the value of multivitamins (see this Atlantic piece for a summary of the debate on that), and supplements at large (no citation necessary), but I knew from personal experience that there was more beyond diet, exercise, and meditation that could have an effect on my mental state, stamina, and the consistency of my ability to perform at a high level.

For example, I was using the Pomodoro technique to cycle attention. Like many, I was trying to be strategic about my (intimate) relationship with caffeine. I had long been a vocal proponent of circadian lighting and good (dark, cold, low-CO2) sleeping conditions.

Each of these interventions had a strong and noticeable effect on my ability to think clearly and solve hard problems for long periods of time, and it was on the strength of these improvements that I became convinced that there is more beyond one’s ‘normal’ mental performance, and that the realm of things available to us to influence our mental state includes more than deep breathing, cold water, and occasionally slapping yourself in the face. Those things have their place, but the results wear off quickly.

I’m not talking Limitless either (I didn’t see the movie), the Lawnmower Man (you better believe I saw that), or super villain origin-story stuff — more that our minds, like our bodies, given the opportunity, are capable of much more than what we consider an untrained baseline, and at a minimum, there are ways to maintain what you consider your ‘best’ more often, and for longer.

I was approaching this in the way many people approach athletic supplementation — I wasn’t looking to find something to ‘take me to the next level’ (a shortcut, the mental equivalent of steroids) — I was looking for something to help me be my best more of the time, for longer periods of time — something like a protein shake, to torture the metaphor.

With that in mind, I began to research the category of nootropics with the thinking that there might be something in the realm of diet — a supplement, in this case — that could be beneficial to focus and stamina in the way that cutting sugar, exercise, light control, or favorable acoustic conditions are.

If you want to know how I went about this research — where I found studies to read and how I interpreted their results, read on for Part 2: EVIDENCE — Having It.

So what is a nootropic?

I’m burying the lede here, but I’m assuming that if you’ve made it this far, you know or have already guessed. ‘Nootropics’, from the Greek noos, for ‘mind’, and tropē, for ‘to turn’, or ‘turning’, are, broadly-speaking, substances meant to increase or enhance cognition.

The term was coined in 1972 by Dr. Corneliu E. Giurgea. He wrote in French so I’m relying on Wikipedia for a paraphrase but his definition of nootropic is still the one widely accepted as the narrow definition today.

According to Giurgea, a nootropic must:
• Enhance learning and memory
• Enhance resistance of learned behaviors to conditions with the tendency to disrupt them
• Protect the brain against physical or chemical injuries
• Increase the efficacy of the tonic cortical / subcortical control mechanisms (neuronal firing control)
• Not be sedating, possess few or no side effects, if any, and be essentially non-toxic.

For my purposes, to this list, I added a few requirements of my own. I wanted to stay away from:
• Anything that was habit-forming, developed a tolerance, or required to be cycled — from my trysts with caffeine I knew what this meant.
• Anything that seemed to elicit very different results in different people — more on this later (that’s what we call a teaser).
• Anything stimulating—I love coffee and know where to get it.

Chemically speaking, while there are categories of nootropics that have synergistic or similar effects, there is no one mechanism of action that all nootropics have in common, and, as we’ll discuss in more detail at a later point in the series, as with many supplements and drugs, we don’t entirely understand how they all work.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to quantify their effects, prove they’re well-tolerated, and understand their most effective dosing. That’s where the research comes in! Read on, will you?

The Outro

This concludes part 1 of Nootropics for Dummies, because I’m gonna keep these bite-sized. Not because you’re a dummy — I just know you’re busy.

Read on for Part 2: EVIDENCE—Having It, where we’ll look at how to find and evaluate the available research for any supplement you may be interested in, and follow me to be notified when I post more in this series.

Give me an example / Just tell me what to take / The Shortcut

I get it. With the bullet points and the Greek and so on and you were here because you’re overwhelmed already. I felt the same way at one point, and I’m flattered you already want my opinion.

I suppose it won’t be a spoiler to say that I figured out something that works for me, and that, nearly 3 years later, it’s now available for anybody, whether or not they want to read the rest of this article. It’s called Plato, it’s exactly what I’ve been taking for 2.5 years†, and you can hit that link to get it.

† I’m not Rain Man now but more on that soon.††

†† More like The Lawnmower Man, a recurring joke I think you’ll continue to enjoy throughout this series.