I haven't seen anyone else post this yet, but there's an article in The New Yorker about nootropics that mentions ImmInst.
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New Yorker article on nootropics mentions ImmInst
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nootrope
, Apr 21 2009 02:59 AM
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#2
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Posted 21 April 2009 - 04:46 AM
Cool! Didn't know this was published.
She actually posted in here when she was researching this article.
http://www.imminst.o...o...1&hl=talbot
An excellent, comprhensive, fair article.
The sections where ImmInst is mentioned:
And on Internet forums such as ImmInst, whose members share a nerdy passion for tweaking their cognitive function through drugs and supplements, people trade advice about dosages and “stacks”—improvised combinations—of neuroenhancers. (“Cut a tablet into fourths and took 25 mg every four hours, 4 times today, and had a great and productive day—with no side effects.”) In one recent post, a fifty-two-year-old—who was working full time, studying for an advanced degree at night, and “married, etc.”—wrote that after experimenting with modafinil he had settled on two daily doses of a hundred milligrams each. He believed that he was “performing a little better,” adding, “I also feel slightly more animated when in discussion.”
If Alex, the Harvard student, and Paul Phillips, the poker player, consider their use of neuroenhancers a private act, Nicholas Seltzer sees his habit as a pursuit that aligns him with a larger movement for improving humanity. Seltzer has a B.A. from U.C. Davis and a master’s degree in security policy from George Washington University. But the job that he obtained with these credentials—as a researcher at a defense-oriented think tank, in northern Virginia—has not left him feeling as intellectually alive as he would like. To compensate, he writes papers in his spare time on subjects like “human biological evolution and warfare.” He also primes his brain with artificial challenges; even when he goes to the rest room at the office, he takes the opportunity to play memory or logic games on his cell phone. Seltzer, who is thirty, told me that he worried that he “didn’t have the mental energy, the endurance, the—I don’t know what to properly call this—the sponginess that I seem to recall having when I was younger.”
Suffice it to say that this is not something you notice when you talk to Seltzer. And though our memory is probably at its peak in our early twenties, few thirty-year-olds are aware of a deficit. But Seltzer is the Washington-wonk equivalent of those models and actors in L.A. who discern tiny wrinkles long before their agent does. His girlfriend, a technology consultant whom he met in a museum, is nine years younger, and he was already thinking about how his mental fitness would stand up next to hers. He told me, “She’s twenty-one, and I want to stay young and vigorous and don’t want to be a burden on her later in life.” He didn’t worry about visible signs of aging, but he wanted to keep his mind “nimble and healthy for as long as possible.”
Seltzer considers himself a “transhumanist,” in the mold of the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and the futurist writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Transhumanists are interested in robots, cryogenics, and living a really, really long time; they consider biological limitations that the rest of us might accept, or even appreciate, as creaky obstacles to be aggressively surmounted. On the ImmInst forums—“ImmInst” stands for “Immortality Institute”—Seltzer and other members discuss life-extension strategies and the potential benefits of cognitive enhancers. Some of the forum members limit themselves to vitamin and mineral supplements. Others use Adderall or modafinil or, like Seltzer, a drug called piracetam, which was first marketed by a Belgian pharmaceutical company in 1972 and, in recent years, has become available in the U.S. from retailers that sell supplements. Although not approved for any use by the F.D.A., piracetam has been used experimentally on stroke patients—to little effect—and on patients with a rare neurological condition called progressive myoclonus epilepsy, for whom it proved helpful in alleviating muscle spasms. Data on piracetam’s benefits for healthy people are virtually nonexistent, but many users believe that the drug increases blood flow to the brain.
From the time I first talked to Seltzer, it was clear that although he felt cognitive enhancers were of practical use, they also appealed to him on an aesthetic level. Using neuroenhancers, he said, “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.” For some people, he went on, it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important “to increase mental horsepower.” He added, “It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.” Whereas the nineties had been about “the personalization of technology,” this decade was about the personalization of the brain—what some enthusiasts have begun to call “mind hacking.”
Of course, the idea behind mind-hacking isn’t exactly new. Fortifying one’s mental stamina with drugs of various kinds has a long history. Sir Francis Bacon consumed everything from tobacco to saffron in the hope of goosing his brain. Balzac reputedly fuelled sixteen-hour bouts of writing with copious servings of coffee, which, he wrote, “chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.” Sartre dosed himself with speed in order to finish “Critique of Dialectical Reason.” My college friends and I wrote term papers with the sweaty-palmed assistance of NoDoz tablets. And, before smoking bans, entire office cultures chugged along on a collective nicotine buzz—at least, if “Mad Men” is to be believed. Seltzer and his interlocutors on the ImmInst forum are just the latest members of a seasoned cohort, even if they have more complex pharmaceuticals at their disposal.
I eventually met Seltzer in an underground food court not far from the Pentagon. We sat down at a Formica table in the dim light. Seltzer was slim, had a shaved head, and wore metal-frame glasses; matching his fastidious look, he spoke precisely, rarely stumbling over his words. I asked him if he had any ethical worries about smart drugs. After a pause, he said that he might have a concern if somebody popped a neuroenhancer before taking a licensing exam that certified him as, say, a brain surgeon, and then stopped using the drug. Other than that, he couldn’t see a problem. He said that he was a firm believer in the idea that “we should have a fair degree of liberty to do with our bodies and our minds as we see fit, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the basic rights, liberty, and safety of others.” He argued, “Why would you want an upward limit on the intellectual capabilities of a human being? And, if you have a very nationalist viewpoint, why wouldn’t you want our country to have the advantage over other countries, particularly in what some people call a knowledge-based economy?” He went on, “Think about the complexity of the intellectual tasks that people need to accomplish today. Just trying to understand what Congress is doing is not a simple thing! The complexity of understanding the gamut of scientific and technical and social issues is difficult. If we had a tool that enabled more people to understand the world at a greater level of sophistication, how can we prejudice ourselves against the notion, simply because we don’t like athletes to do it? To me, it doesn’t seem like the same question. And it deserves its own debate.”
Seltzer had never had a diagnosis of any kind of learning disorder. But he added, “Though I wouldn’t say I’m dyslexic, sometimes when I type prose, after I look back and read it, I’ve frequently left out words or interposed words, and sometimes I have difficulty concentrating.” In graduate school, he obtained a prescription for Adderall from a doctor who didn’t ask a lot of questions. The drug helped him, especially when his ambitions were relatively low. He recalled, “I had this one paper, on nuclear strategy. The professor didn’t look favorably on any kind of creative thinking.” On Adderall, he pumped out the paper in an evening. “I just bit my tongue, regurgitated, and got a good-enough grade.”
On the other hand, Seltzer recalled that he had taken piracetam to write an essay on “the idea of harmony as a trope in Chinese political discourse”—it was one of the papers he was proudest of. He said, “It was really an intellectual challenge to do. I felt that the piracetam helped me to work within the realm of the abstract, and make the kind of associations that I needed—following this idea of harmony from an ancient religious belief as it was translated throughout the centuries into a very important topic in political discourse.”
After a hiatus of several years, Seltzer had recently resumed taking neuroenhancers. In addition to piracetam, he took a stack of supplements that he thought helped his brain functioning: fish oils, five antioxidants, a product called ChocoMind, and a number of others, all available at the health-food store. He was thinking about adding modafinil, but hadn’t yet. For breakfast every morning, he concocted a slurry of oatmeal, berries, soy milk, pomegranate juice, flaxseed, almond meal, raw eggs, and protein powder. The goal behind the recipe was efficiency: to rely on “one goop you could eat or drink that would have everything you need nutritionally for your brain and body.” He explained, “Taste was the last thing on my mind; I wanted to be able to keep it down—that was it.” (He told me this in the kitchen of his apartment; he lives with a roommate, who walked in while we were talking, listened perplexedly for a moment, then put a frozen pizza in the oven.)
Seltzer’s decision to take piracetam was based on his own online reading, which included medical-journal abstracts. He hadn’t consulted a doctor. Since settling on a daily regimen of supplements, he had sensed an improvement in his intellectual work and his ability to engage in stimulating conversation. He continued, “I feel I’m better able to articulate my thoughts. I’m sure you’ve been in the zone—you’re having a really exciting debate with somebody, your brain feels alive. I feel that more. But I don’t want to say that it’s this profound change.”
I asked him if piracetam made him feel smarter, or just more alert and confident—a little better equipped to marshal the resources he naturally had. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m not sure what being smarter means, entirely. It’s a difficult quality to measure. It’s the gestalt factor, all these qualities coming together—not only your ability to crunch some numbers, or remember some figures or a sequence of numbers, but also your ability to maintain a certain emotional state that is conducive to productive intellectual work. I do feel I’m more intelligent with the drugs, but I can’t give you a number of I.Q. points.”
The effects of piracetam on healthy volunteers have been studied even less than those of Adderall or modafinil. Most peer-reviewed studies focus on its effects on dementia, or on people who have suffered a seizure or a concussion. Many of the studies that look at other neurological effects were performed on rats and mice. Piracetam’s mechanisms of action are not understood, though it may increase levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. In 2008, a committee of the British Academy of Medical Sciences noted that many of the clinical trials of piracetam for dementia were methodologically flawed. Another published review of the available studies of the drug concluded that the evidence “does not support the use of piracetam in the treatment of people with dementia or cognitive impairment,” but suggested that further investigation might be warranted. I asked Seltzer if he thought he should wait for scientific ratification of piracetam. He laughed. “I don’t want to,” he said. “Because it’s working.”
She actually posted in here when she was researching this article.
http://www.imminst.o...o...1&hl=talbot
An excellent, comprhensive, fair article.
The sections where ImmInst is mentioned:
And on Internet forums such as ImmInst, whose members share a nerdy passion for tweaking their cognitive function through drugs and supplements, people trade advice about dosages and “stacks”—improvised combinations—of neuroenhancers. (“Cut a tablet into fourths and took 25 mg every four hours, 4 times today, and had a great and productive day—with no side effects.”) In one recent post, a fifty-two-year-old—who was working full time, studying for an advanced degree at night, and “married, etc.”—wrote that after experimenting with modafinil he had settled on two daily doses of a hundred milligrams each. He believed that he was “performing a little better,” adding, “I also feel slightly more animated when in discussion.”
If Alex, the Harvard student, and Paul Phillips, the poker player, consider their use of neuroenhancers a private act, Nicholas Seltzer sees his habit as a pursuit that aligns him with a larger movement for improving humanity. Seltzer has a B.A. from U.C. Davis and a master’s degree in security policy from George Washington University. But the job that he obtained with these credentials—as a researcher at a defense-oriented think tank, in northern Virginia—has not left him feeling as intellectually alive as he would like. To compensate, he writes papers in his spare time on subjects like “human biological evolution and warfare.” He also primes his brain with artificial challenges; even when he goes to the rest room at the office, he takes the opportunity to play memory or logic games on his cell phone. Seltzer, who is thirty, told me that he worried that he “didn’t have the mental energy, the endurance, the—I don’t know what to properly call this—the sponginess that I seem to recall having when I was younger.”
Suffice it to say that this is not something you notice when you talk to Seltzer. And though our memory is probably at its peak in our early twenties, few thirty-year-olds are aware of a deficit. But Seltzer is the Washington-wonk equivalent of those models and actors in L.A. who discern tiny wrinkles long before their agent does. His girlfriend, a technology consultant whom he met in a museum, is nine years younger, and he was already thinking about how his mental fitness would stand up next to hers. He told me, “She’s twenty-one, and I want to stay young and vigorous and don’t want to be a burden on her later in life.” He didn’t worry about visible signs of aging, but he wanted to keep his mind “nimble and healthy for as long as possible.”
Seltzer considers himself a “transhumanist,” in the mold of the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and the futurist writer and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Transhumanists are interested in robots, cryogenics, and living a really, really long time; they consider biological limitations that the rest of us might accept, or even appreciate, as creaky obstacles to be aggressively surmounted. On the ImmInst forums—“ImmInst” stands for “Immortality Institute”—Seltzer and other members discuss life-extension strategies and the potential benefits of cognitive enhancers. Some of the forum members limit themselves to vitamin and mineral supplements. Others use Adderall or modafinil or, like Seltzer, a drug called piracetam, which was first marketed by a Belgian pharmaceutical company in 1972 and, in recent years, has become available in the U.S. from retailers that sell supplements. Although not approved for any use by the F.D.A., piracetam has been used experimentally on stroke patients—to little effect—and on patients with a rare neurological condition called progressive myoclonus epilepsy, for whom it proved helpful in alleviating muscle spasms. Data on piracetam’s benefits for healthy people are virtually nonexistent, but many users believe that the drug increases blood flow to the brain.
From the time I first talked to Seltzer, it was clear that although he felt cognitive enhancers were of practical use, they also appealed to him on an aesthetic level. Using neuroenhancers, he said, “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.” For some people, he went on, it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important “to increase mental horsepower.” He added, “It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.” Whereas the nineties had been about “the personalization of technology,” this decade was about the personalization of the brain—what some enthusiasts have begun to call “mind hacking.”
Of course, the idea behind mind-hacking isn’t exactly new. Fortifying one’s mental stamina with drugs of various kinds has a long history. Sir Francis Bacon consumed everything from tobacco to saffron in the hope of goosing his brain. Balzac reputedly fuelled sixteen-hour bouts of writing with copious servings of coffee, which, he wrote, “chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.” Sartre dosed himself with speed in order to finish “Critique of Dialectical Reason.” My college friends and I wrote term papers with the sweaty-palmed assistance of NoDoz tablets. And, before smoking bans, entire office cultures chugged along on a collective nicotine buzz—at least, if “Mad Men” is to be believed. Seltzer and his interlocutors on the ImmInst forum are just the latest members of a seasoned cohort, even if they have more complex pharmaceuticals at their disposal.
I eventually met Seltzer in an underground food court not far from the Pentagon. We sat down at a Formica table in the dim light. Seltzer was slim, had a shaved head, and wore metal-frame glasses; matching his fastidious look, he spoke precisely, rarely stumbling over his words. I asked him if he had any ethical worries about smart drugs. After a pause, he said that he might have a concern if somebody popped a neuroenhancer before taking a licensing exam that certified him as, say, a brain surgeon, and then stopped using the drug. Other than that, he couldn’t see a problem. He said that he was a firm believer in the idea that “we should have a fair degree of liberty to do with our bodies and our minds as we see fit, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the basic rights, liberty, and safety of others.” He argued, “Why would you want an upward limit on the intellectual capabilities of a human being? And, if you have a very nationalist viewpoint, why wouldn’t you want our country to have the advantage over other countries, particularly in what some people call a knowledge-based economy?” He went on, “Think about the complexity of the intellectual tasks that people need to accomplish today. Just trying to understand what Congress is doing is not a simple thing! The complexity of understanding the gamut of scientific and technical and social issues is difficult. If we had a tool that enabled more people to understand the world at a greater level of sophistication, how can we prejudice ourselves against the notion, simply because we don’t like athletes to do it? To me, it doesn’t seem like the same question. And it deserves its own debate.”
Seltzer had never had a diagnosis of any kind of learning disorder. But he added, “Though I wouldn’t say I’m dyslexic, sometimes when I type prose, after I look back and read it, I’ve frequently left out words or interposed words, and sometimes I have difficulty concentrating.” In graduate school, he obtained a prescription for Adderall from a doctor who didn’t ask a lot of questions. The drug helped him, especially when his ambitions were relatively low. He recalled, “I had this one paper, on nuclear strategy. The professor didn’t look favorably on any kind of creative thinking.” On Adderall, he pumped out the paper in an evening. “I just bit my tongue, regurgitated, and got a good-enough grade.”
On the other hand, Seltzer recalled that he had taken piracetam to write an essay on “the idea of harmony as a trope in Chinese political discourse”—it was one of the papers he was proudest of. He said, “It was really an intellectual challenge to do. I felt that the piracetam helped me to work within the realm of the abstract, and make the kind of associations that I needed—following this idea of harmony from an ancient religious belief as it was translated throughout the centuries into a very important topic in political discourse.”
After a hiatus of several years, Seltzer had recently resumed taking neuroenhancers. In addition to piracetam, he took a stack of supplements that he thought helped his brain functioning: fish oils, five antioxidants, a product called ChocoMind, and a number of others, all available at the health-food store. He was thinking about adding modafinil, but hadn’t yet. For breakfast every morning, he concocted a slurry of oatmeal, berries, soy milk, pomegranate juice, flaxseed, almond meal, raw eggs, and protein powder. The goal behind the recipe was efficiency: to rely on “one goop you could eat or drink that would have everything you need nutritionally for your brain and body.” He explained, “Taste was the last thing on my mind; I wanted to be able to keep it down—that was it.” (He told me this in the kitchen of his apartment; he lives with a roommate, who walked in while we were talking, listened perplexedly for a moment, then put a frozen pizza in the oven.)
Seltzer’s decision to take piracetam was based on his own online reading, which included medical-journal abstracts. He hadn’t consulted a doctor. Since settling on a daily regimen of supplements, he had sensed an improvement in his intellectual work and his ability to engage in stimulating conversation. He continued, “I feel I’m better able to articulate my thoughts. I’m sure you’ve been in the zone—you’re having a really exciting debate with somebody, your brain feels alive. I feel that more. But I don’t want to say that it’s this profound change.”
I asked him if piracetam made him feel smarter, or just more alert and confident—a little better equipped to marshal the resources he naturally had. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m not sure what being smarter means, entirely. It’s a difficult quality to measure. It’s the gestalt factor, all these qualities coming together—not only your ability to crunch some numbers, or remember some figures or a sequence of numbers, but also your ability to maintain a certain emotional state that is conducive to productive intellectual work. I do feel I’m more intelligent with the drugs, but I can’t give you a number of I.Q. points.”
The effects of piracetam on healthy volunteers have been studied even less than those of Adderall or modafinil. Most peer-reviewed studies focus on its effects on dementia, or on people who have suffered a seizure or a concussion. Many of the studies that look at other neurological effects were performed on rats and mice. Piracetam’s mechanisms of action are not understood, though it may increase levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. In 2008, a committee of the British Academy of Medical Sciences noted that many of the clinical trials of piracetam for dementia were methodologically flawed. Another published review of the available studies of the drug concluded that the evidence “does not support the use of piracetam in the treatment of people with dementia or cognitive impairment,” but suggested that further investigation might be warranted. I asked Seltzer if he thought he should wait for scientific ratification of piracetam. He laughed. “I don’t want to,” he said. “Because it’s working.”
Edited by Rags847, 21 April 2009 - 05:06 AM.
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Posted 22 April 2009 - 03:13 PM
interesting article. too bad it was so heavily focused on the pharmacological solutions to brain enhancement and didn't dig deeper into the other alternatives like exercise, eating foods like fish (epa/dha), blueberries, beets (uridine), eggs (choline)
it's kind of typical for most reporters to focus on the insidious aspects of a story and the obvious direction to go was down the pharmacological use/abuse route.
i dont take modafinil, adderall, or any of these drugs... but i eat 1-2 meals a day with foods that are very geared towards improving cognition and brain enhancement. sometimes i add a bit of fish oil and alpha-gpc. usually i have one of these pro-brain meals right after i exercise for maximum BDNF effects.
guess that makes me a "white hat" mind hacker... lol
it's kind of typical for most reporters to focus on the insidious aspects of a story and the obvious direction to go was down the pharmacological use/abuse route.
i dont take modafinil, adderall, or any of these drugs... but i eat 1-2 meals a day with foods that are very geared towards improving cognition and brain enhancement. sometimes i add a bit of fish oil and alpha-gpc. usually i have one of these pro-brain meals right after i exercise for maximum BDNF effects.
guess that makes me a "white hat" mind hacker... lol
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Posted 23 April 2009 - 03:46 PM
Interesting article on cognitive enhancement in the New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker...?printable=true
http://www.newyorker...?printable=true
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