35 replies to this topic

[stablemind]

Focus, motivation, mood, etc can all be enhanced with noots and meds but why is memory so hard to improve? Every other function have polar opposites such as mania and depression, hyper focus and distracted, but memory usually remains consistent. Is the only way to improve memory consistently and significantly by taking bdnf?

[dz93]

Memory has am opposite. That's when you have no memory. You can either remember or not. There's the opposites. Its difficult for scientist to fully understand the mechanism of action behind memory so that's why.

[unbeatableking]

Define 'memory'.

Short-term memory? Long-term memory? Working memory? Spatial memory? Visual memory? Auditory memory?

An eidetic memory perhaps?

There is a reason why the presence of an eidetic memory is relatively absent amongst populations with no pathological issues. Human beings are primed for understanding and abstract thought - higher level mental processes that is.

Rote, verbatim memorization is seen as a low level mental process. Autistic savants are literal data banks - yet they suffer from semantic memory issues in addition to abstract thought processing issues, primarily because they lack the neural structures, the very absence of which, that are responsible for their memories.

Take someone like Kim Peek for example. He has the memory of a computer yet the IQ of a five year old child.

A lot of the nootropics on this forum have helped people with issues pertaining to memory.

Edited by unbeatableking, 14 September 2012 - 06:21 PM.

[stablemind]

My memory in general is pretty bad. I'm looking for something like ccerebrolysin. Aren't there similar bdnf that can help memory?

[unbeatableking]

Are you sure you don't suffer from a metabolic deficiency? A cholinergic deficiency perhaps?

[dz93]

Here's a big list of substances that increase BDNF.
http://www.longecity...-increase-bdnf/

Or eat eggs every morning. It's a good source of choline. As the guy above me mentioned you may be deficient in that area and an easy way to find out is if eggs help your memory.

Edited by dz93, 14 September 2012 - 09:06 PM.

[khemix]

Memory can be improved. At least if you mean ability to encode or recall. Take cholinergics, galantamine, or glutamic acid.

Working memory, or the ability to manipulate information in your head, is not so easily enhanced.

[blazewind]

Evolution has designed the brain to recognize patterns that can be useful in similar but not exact situations that occur multiple times. Permanent photographic memory is harmful to survival (before human civilization) as the pattern recognition is attenuated because the pattern matching is too exact and will not compare to similar situations because they are too different to activate the photographic pattern recognition.

In case of a life or death situation, the brain does have mechanisms to induce photographic memory but only when stress is sky high because that is when photographic memory is most useful. As drugs get more and more pinpointed to exact mechanisms, there will eventually be drugs that can trigger photographic memory without the system wide side effects that fight or flight chemicals create.

Since there are currently people in the world with photographic memory with normal intelligence, it should eventually be possible to mimic this with drugs.

[dz93]

Why do people have photographic memory and such a low IQ whereas someone with a high IQ could have poor photographic memory.

http://en.wikipedia....ed_intelligence

[stablemind]

Memory can be improved. At least if you mean ability to encode or recall. Take cholinergics, galantamine, or glutamic acid.

Working memory, or the ability to manipulate information in your head, is not so easily enhanced.

What I mean is remembering people's names, faces, facts, etc. Can those drugs make that much of a difference? I'm also talking about spatial memory which I feel is harder to improve. Ex Remembering directions and how to navigate around areas

[Kahnetic]

Why do people have photographic memory and such a low IQ whereas someone with a high IQ could have poor photographic memory.

http://en.wikipedia....ed_intelligence

Because a photographic memory doesn't necessarily help with the kind of problem solving and reasoning skills that are involved with an IQ test.

[dz93]

Memory can be improved. At least if you mean ability to encode or recall. Take cholinergics, galantamine, or glutamic acid.

Working memory, or the ability to manipulate information in your head, is not so easily enhanced.

What I mean is remembering people's names, faces, facts, etc. Can those drugs make that much of a difference? I'm also talking about spatial memory which I feel is harder to improve. Ex Remembering directions and how to navigate around areas

The effects of the racetam family and other drugs that improve cognition are usually cumulative. Which means that you'll experience or feel greater improvements 3months in compared to 1month in. So something that inhances memory could very well improve name, faces, facts, etc recall and formation.

May I ask specifically what you're looking for? Are you trying to enhance your memory because you've noticed that you have trouble remembering faces, names, and facts or what? To me it sounds like you're trying to make history class easier lol. Faces, names, and facts all deal with history or social study classes which is why I ask.

[stablemind]

I'm not trying to take anything of the racetam class. Especially since I'm bipolar. In general I have trouble with memory retrieval , I would always remember a name then forget it then remember it again, and it always takes me multiple trys to remember something as simple as a persons name. Uridine has brought me very close to par but I guess I still need more help. Maybe I need to look into a substance that selectively activates nmda and ampa receptors but not so much that it causes mania which pracetam tends to cause.

[dz93]

What type of bipolar do you have? I have a friend with bipolar disorder who has found that taking a multi-complex vitamin such as Beyond Tangy Tangerine has helped him with his bipolar disorder. He's struggled with it since we've becomes friends as a kid. It appears that the best thing you can do for yourself right now is provide your body with all the 90 vitamins, minerals, and nutrients it needs to stay in balance and produce a healthy strong immune system and to keep your body's chemicals in balance.

You should also take all the essential fatty acids too.

Now back to your memory question. I've been taking Noopept, Piracetam, and Aniracetam, along with other substances (Vitamins, Metabolites, and Antioxidants), for about a month now and have noticed that I was once very bad a facial recall. Just facial recall. I could never remember faces but names were fine. Facts were hard to remember unless I could relate to them.

After about a month of taking them I've noticed that my facial recall has improved greatly and I don't notice anymore improvements in that field because It's already at a normal level.

That combination may not work for you and it may work for others. Lets first start with your health before we improve brain functioning. If you're in bad health then what's the point of improving brain functioning when you may or may not die in 30 years or aren't even dedicated to your body but brain health. It all works together.

Get your diet on track or make sure you're receiving your daily vitamins, nutrients, minerals, and EFA's because without them your brain will suffer no matter what.

Next is to research and experiment. Have you tried any racetams for improving memory? My friend with bipolar has taken himself off of Seroquel just by taking Beyond Tangy Tangerine.

Now I'm not going to profit off your buying Beyond Tangy Tangerine but I am a firm believer that this is by far the best thing you can provide your body with in terms of getting all Vitamins, Nutrients, and Minerals your body and brain needs to be healthy. I believe he still takes lithium as a mood stablilizer but he wants to get away from Pharmaceuticals because of them micro-chipping their drugs in the future.

Any questions please feel free to ask. I can even ask my friend with bipolar (who is very good at facial recall, better than I am sometimes) about certain questions you have. Hope this helps.


EDIT:
I haven't heard anything of bipolar people taking Racetam's and experience negative effects. Although I do not have Bipolar so there would be no point in me searching it. I've also read that people with bipolar have less gray matter. Maybe you might want to look into substances that increase gray matter. Such as Lion's Mane and many others.

Edited by dz93, 17 September 2012 - 12:26 AM.

[stablemind]

Racetams have way too many side effects. I've seen countless threads where piracetam users stopped using the drug and their brain turned to mush. It's not worth it IMO. The two substances I've came across are uridine and cerebrolysin, and I'm trying to find similar substances. I already take a multi and my case is more severe so its not that simple, but I have it managed so far.

[khemix]

Memory can be improved. At least if you mean ability to encode or recall. Take cholinergics, galantamine, or glutamic acid.

Working memory, or the ability to manipulate information in your head, is not so easily enhanced.

What I mean is remembering people's names, faces, facts, etc. Can those drugs make that much of a difference? I'm also talking about spatial memory which I feel is harder to improve. Ex Remembering directions and how to navigate around areas

I find glutamic acid helps me remember more, yes. I take 500mg and I find things just stick better. It helps with encoding and is maybe the only thing that does. Also magnesium threonate (or other forms that cross BBB) help protect NDMA receptors also improving learning function. Cholinergics / galantamine I find make retrieval easier... as my mind is generally more agile. Spatial memory is best improved with something like modafinil.

Training also helps. Training your memory is well known to improve it. Get q-cards or something and blindly memorize vocabulary.

[The Immortalist]

I think the OP meant to say is that why can negative conditions of the brain keep slipping into a perpetual no limit(until death at least) decline like memory loss or depression when positives(like obtaining a better memory) be so hard to obtain and also have limits imposed on the level you can achieve?

Edited by The Immortalist, 17 September 2012 - 03:42 AM.

[stablemind]

I think the OP meant to say is that why can negative conditions of the brain keep slipping into a perpetual no limit(until death at least) decline like memory loss or depression when positives(like obtaining a better memory) be so hard to obtain and also have limits imposed on the level you can achieve?

Not quite, I'm saying that areas of functioning such as focus, mood, motivation and energy can be easily improved with drugs but there isn't such a drug that improves memory to a similar extent.

[CIMN]

if your having memory problems, you could give vasopressin a try, though i dont know if its a long term solution,cholinergics seem better for recall.

Edited by CIMN, 17 September 2012 - 06:27 AM.

[Raptor87]

How do you know that memory is hard to enhance?

I think that long term memory is associated a lot with techniques. Some get it, others don't! Of course it can be learned. Also sleep is a keyfactor.

Ye old coffee and eggs might be a good one also.

[Major Legend]

This is a simple question to answer, because stuff like focus, energy and so on are usually up and down switches like sympathetic responses or parasympathetic responses its much easier to find a mechanism which has two sides of the spectrum, and then find out how to achieve the opposite effect, for example heart rate is too fast, use something that induces a parasympathetic response to slow down heart rate.

On the other hand memory is complex, kind of like confidence. I mean how do you find a chemical that improves an abiliity that really is in fact is constituted by many sub disciplines, for example how do you improve someones ability to play sport, certainly some people are more prone to better at sport, there are loads of things at play here, the psyche, the physical coordination, reflex, focus, physical learning ability. It's the same for memory, its a complex ability that has many divisions in how it actually works, thus it is much much harder to find something that would improve memory.

Improving memory would probably take a wholistic approach, like ginkgo for concentration/focus cerebral dilation, rhodiola for speed incrased catecholamines, a certain amount of relaxation, ampa stimulation to improve, cholinergic. Still much like there is no medicine for physical performance in sport, there isn't medicine for enhancing memory by a huge margin.

This can be pinned down to the fact that at the moment our medicine is very primitive in the fact that we cannot target specifically, and also can't target area wise in our brain and body. I think (in my dumb brain) in the future when we can be specific, and we can target chemicals that would be another step in being able to make drastic improvements/repairs to our memory.

Edit: Also there isn't really anything that can significantly restructure the connections in our brain more than what we have already programmed in our DNA, so its likely that someone who is prone to have bad memory will not be able to mitigate those by a lot at the moment.

Edited by Major Legend, 17 September 2012 - 05:21 PM.

[The Immortalist]

Still much like there is no medicine for physical performance in sport,

Wrong- steroids. All pro athletes who take steroids have a significant advantage over those who don't unless the person is a genetic freak which is rare.

[Major Legend]

I mean sports mentally, some people obviously have a better mental ability in playing sports.

Edit: thats why I said sports not athletics.

Edited by Major Legend, 18 September 2012 - 03:40 PM.

[unbeatableking]

I mean sports mentally, some people obviously have a better mental ability in playing sports.

Edit: thats why I said sports not athletics.

Steroids also improve neural functioning, leading to an increase in mental reaction time and overall reflex scores.

Why do you think steroids are so heavily associated with baseball? A sport that requires little to no 'bulk', so to speak, in comparison to that of other sports like football which require size?

[Major Legend]

Really? Thats fascinating...what would be a good example?

(I guess to better explain myself, some people just have a knack of say picking up certain games, whilst some other people are inherently clumsy and slow at picking up a sport, for example if you play tennis between a group of untrained people it becomes obvious some people pick up the strategy to win mentally much quicker, not so much the physical performance but how to think a few steps ahead and win)

Edited by Major Legend, 18 September 2012 - 03:50 PM.

[Major Legend]

I mean sports mentally, some people obviously have a better mental ability in playing sports.

Edit: thats why I said sports not athletics.

Steroids also improve neural functioning, leading to an increase in mental reaction time and overall reflex scores.

Why do you think steroids are so heavily associated with baseball? A sport that requires little to no 'bulk', so to speak, in comparison to that of other sports like football which require size?

Seems like I should refrain from posting...maybe one day i'll be smarter.

[unbeatableking]

Why do people have photographic memory and such a low IQ whereas someone with a high IQ could have poor photographic memory.

http://en.wikipedia....ed_intelligence

Because a photographic memory doesn't necessarily help with the kind of problem solving and reasoning skills that are involved with an IQ test.

Case in point: Richard Feynman.

Despite doing rather brilliantly at Mathematics and Physics, Feynman did somewhat poorly with regards to both English and History.

Edited by unbeatableking, 18 September 2012 - 05:09 PM.

[Raptor87]

Still much like there is no medicine for physical performance in sport,

Wrong- steroids. All pro athletes who take steroids have a significant advantage over those who don't unless the person is a genetic freak which is rare.

All pro's are genetic freaks. That's why we normals like to watch them. Even BB who use roids are genetic freaks, it's impossible for a person like me to get to that size even if I was on roids.

[TheBatman]

Bump

 

 

[TheBatman]

Anything else out there??

 

I'm looking for some solutions. I have trouble with a very bad auditory verbal working memory - especially at work. I have a new job where I am expected to cook over 30 different sandwiches and remember what goes on every single one. I am having trouble repeatedly with the same sandwiches that I just can't remember no matter how many times I have done them. I mean I do good with other aspects such as visual memory and short term memory, but anything auditory I'm just screwed....

Edited by TheBatman, 19 September 2014 - 03:46 AM.