Nootropics, what are they?

Published in

Hapi Wellness

8 min readDec 9, 2016

“If boosting a brain makes for a better functioning human being, who in turn provides a tangible benefit with no detriment to those around… then nootropics can facilitate the progression of man-kind.” — Lucas Aoun

The word “Nootropic” literally means “mind-bender”, etymologically it is two Ancient Greek words joined together. Coined in 1972 by psychologist/chemist Corneliu Giurgea, the term is used broadly to classify substances that have positive effects on cognitive functioning, but it gets more specific than that.

According to Giurgea, a nootropic substance must:

Enhance learning and memory (e.g. working, short term or long term)

More recently, consumers of nootropics have started replacing this criteria with enhancements of other cognitive measures such as concentration, focus, executive functioning, creativity, stress reduction and motivation. This means that the term “Nootropics” has become more broadly defined since Giurgea’s publications. It may be appropriate at this point in time to now consider the first criteria of a Nootropic to be:

1. Enhance one or more measure of cognitive performance:

But enhancement of cognitive performance isn’t the whole game for this class of compounds. Giurgea’s other criteria have remained valid up to this day. Nootropics must also:

2. Improve the brain’s capacity to self-regulate:

E.g. age-related Excitotoxicity and Age-related Cognitive Decline.

3. Enhance resistance to conditions that disrupt normal behaviours:

E.g. stress-related cognitive decline (long work hours, emotional fatigue, poor sleep, physical exhaustion, oxygen starvation, etc).

4. Protect the brain from physical or chemical injuries:

E.g. trauma from accidents or sports, poisons or neurotoxic drugs (both pharmaceutical/recreational).

5. Provide atypical or normalizing psychotropy:

E.g. no classical motor stimulation, no classical sedation

6. Have few/no side effects:

E.g. cleaner energy (Jitter-free), less likely to experience a crash

7. Have low/no toxicity:

E.g. high therapeutic index, long term consumption deemed safe

The Original Nootropic

Giurgea was first inspired by Piracetam after hearing reports of it’s ability to improve memory in people with cognitive deficits. Studies were performed on rats to see if it could enhance memory above baseline, and for a while evidence piled up suggesting it would do so, but today it is quite clear that while it has medicinal use for recovering the nervous system, it probably doesn’t improve memory in healthy humans. From the perspective of the modern consumer, this means Piracetam is no longer classified as a nootropic… In fact, because of it’s medical potential, many countries are starting to schedule Piracetam, along with the whole family of related compounds.

Whenever you hear the term “nootropic” you should immediately imagine a substance that works on the nervous system to optimise cognitive function with minimal side-effects. By definition it is safe and appropriate for long-term use. Nootropics are part of a holistic journey towards a healthy lifestyle. While nootropics are not magic pills, they are (statistically) likely to make cognitive improvements beyond baseline in healthy persons.

What People Want

What people want is a magic pill. Inspired by movies like Limitless, people want an NZT-48, which gives the ability to fully utilize one’s brain and vastly improve one’s lifestyle.

“Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain” — Corneliu Giurgea

It seems every new supplement has it’s moment in the spotlight and is perceived as a magic cure-all. This quickly dissipates as people buy the product, feel a placebo effect, the placebo effect wears off, skepticism sets in, the critical reviews accumulate, and then the hype dies down. The two exceptions to this trend are :

1. A hyped supplement actually works but turns out to be unsafe, someone dies and it gets banned.

2. A supplement actually works and is safe enough, it gains attention from the medical industry, is studied, regulated, and effectively barred from the general public through scheduling laws.

Anyone who’s been in the supplement industry for a while (who’s not philosophically ignorant, or incentivised to bullshit for profit) will agree with me when I say there are no magic pills. There are, however, some time-aged staples which have held up to scientific scrutiny: they tend to have small effects, are deemed very safe, and eventually they become cheap as every company makes their own label or mix and market competition drives the price down. What happens then? I guess people get bored of them and they become harder to sell (you can’t hype them as easily), so the industry continues looking for the next potential magic pill.

What People Expect

What people expect is something that works. Some people expect magic pills, and they tend to be the early adopters. It takes two to dance the magic pill-searching tango: companies often use their customer base to help identify the next big hit.

Sometimes people expect nootropics to be like Adderall, taking them to the next level, but usually these same people are unaware of the side effects compounds like amphetamines have. Tolerance, addiction, poor sleep, perhaps the buildup of toxic compounds or even receptor or cellular death when these compounds are abused. Compounds like these are simply not sustainable, and while they’re instrumentally useful for healthy people in the short term, more often than not people regret the long term consequences.

The everyday person just wants something that works, usually for the cost equal to or less than the price of a coffee. How do people know things are working? They look for a change in their subjective perceptions. Do they feel like something’s happening? Unfortunately it’s actually really hard to tell whether something is happening or not, and this is why science uses methods like double-blinding, and placebo-control in their studies.

Up until now, innovators and early adopters have expected nootropics to push their physiology beyond the natural limit. Self-aware individuals expect to tap into their fullest potential by harnessing nootropics, without pushing and exhausting their physiology.

What People Receive

What people receive is a mix of things that work and things that don’t work. Many companies sell junk. Sometimes they sell research chemicals, other times a product designer has an old favourite and includes an ingredient just because they like it. Companies build products first, andjustify ingredients after the fact. But don’t think this behaviour is limited to the supplement industry, scientific industries are rampant with corruption from collusion between corporations and government…

Don’t let your head spin, because any industry that’s not in Hard Science has these issues, and even then Hard Science has to untangle itself now and then. There are ways around negative incentives, whereby systematic and ethical guidelines go hand in hand. If you can accept that perfect truth is unattainable, you can start to believe in things probabilistically. We can still figure out (using statistics and debiased-intuitions) which industry claims, data sets and conclusions are more likely to represent the truth.

Now where does the supplement industry stand? I’d say on shaky ground. We lack the money, time, and power to accumulate large scale studies like the medical industry. Now, the medical industry will hide unpublished data that isn’t in their favour… but the supplement industry tends to do it too.

Hapi, however, is determined to find things that actually work. I am pretty excited to be working for Hapi, because we are going to do things by the book. It is good methodology to pre-register studies that are ‘meant’ to get published, that way it’s much harder to hide negative evidence once the study is complete. We’ll be using pre-registration, double-blinding and placebo-control, but more than that. Hapi is building products by looking at the evidence first, and then designing after the facts. For any ingredient used, we write a literature review justifying safety, and efficacy, we come up with a hypothesis, and then we put it to test.

The Future of Nootropics

A pill as powerful as the Limitless Pill does not exist, and may not exist for a while, but substances that enhance cognition and fulfil Giurgea’s criteria do!

Sometimes the future of nootropics requires looking at new compounds, but often we can look into the past. Systems of traditional medicine have strived to alleviate age related cognitive decline, and treat mental diseases of all kinds. Ayurvedic medicine began in india 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, and while traditional medicines have not always stood up to the test of time, modern science has been uncovering which of the herbs and substances stand up to the test of double-blind, placebo-controlled study! Future articles will be delving into the evidence underlying different herbs and substances, and you’ll be able to read our literature reviews on various ingredients used widely in the supplement industry.

Until then, we’ve designed a nootropic stack called Flow, an evidence-based collection of natural ingredients based on our latest analysis of the literature available (Dec, 2016).

At a mechanistic level, it should improve brain health by fine tuning neural growth, neurotransmitter and neuroreceptor regulation. We think it’ll fulfill all of Giurgea’s criteria for nootropism (neurostabilizing, neuroprotective, safe, etc) and likely boost cognitive abilities such as attention, concentration, switching/flexibility, logical memory, auditory-verbal memory, and paired association memory. As a bonus, we predict it will reduce stress, reduce fatigue, and improve mood. Preliminary reviews say it does all those things, and that it’s comparable to coffee in terms of productivity, but feels very different (not classically stimulatory) and lasts longer.

As new nootropics hit the market, we’ll be looking for the most safe and effective compounds to include in our products. Maybe one day there’ll be a magic pill, but until then, we’ve got the next best thing: Flow.