kassem23: Your post on how well the piracetam's working was excellent reading!
As for dosing, maintaining min. 4g per dose is reasonable. I take a slightly heaped small-size tablespoon, to ensure maximum saturation.
The only cost of beyond-saturation dosing is to your wallet, and maintaining slightly greater-than-saturation levels insures that the optimum effect can continue with the long process of restructuring your neural system at the physical level, without costing much more than a suboptimal dose.
Piracetam is not protein-bound, so its effects increase or decrease depending on the amount in free solvated circulation. A larger dose, and especially one delayed by co-consumption with a slowly-digested meal, will produce an extended and higher dose-time curve.
Maximal restructuring and maintenance without decumulative dips is ensured by maintaining spillover to account for multiple effects which can alter the saturation volume per unit time, including fluid consumption in particular.
The 'clotting' effect seen in powder that you refer to is that it absorbs some water from the moisture in the air, and gradually clumps together into larger quasi-crystal superstructures. This occurs because fluid condensation on the original, small crystals causes partial dissolution at their neighbor contact points. As the fluid propagates deeper past its initial point of penetration, or evaporates due to heat energy transfer, it leaves behind a segment between the neighbor's former faces made up of newly crystallized molecules.
Think of it as a 'chemical weld' between two crystals, which often happens when faces of structurocompatible crystals are co-wetted with solvent and applied together, with allowance for solvent evaporation or penetration. Among the millions of tiny grains - which are actually often single crystals - there are countless faces in contact within that innocent-looking can of piracetam.
Even
some metals will 'cold weld' together. Unlike the current case under examination however, metal-metal cold welding doesn't rely on exogenous solvent to proceed - it works quite well under vacuum too.
Another case is of rusted bolts, which due to the geometrically larger crystals or amorphous masses of metal oxide produced within limited volumes of enclosed space, fill up the space via gas expulsion or reactive incorporation into the substrate(s). Sometimes the oxide or other reacted products form crystals that themselves co-weld, especially when water is also present.
Why not other powders equally so? Solvent welds don't easily happen if the crystals aren't compatible, or the particles aren't crystals but amorphous solids. Even if the crystals are compatible, unless they attract and hold water molecules from the air then the property won't manifest, except in the case of being removed from refrigeration into a warmer, more solvent-saturated atmosphere - which will cause solvent condensation on the surfaces of most materials.
That's where hygroscopicity comes in. Due to the charge distribution at the interface between crystal surface and the atmosphere, and in the particular case of H20, each has a structure with certain tensions. Places where the electron shells aren't distributed in a perfectly equal way. Call them tensions if you will.
So do the crystal's molecules also contain deviations from a lowest-energy charge-spacial arrangement. At the interface, certain patterns of tension align at least in part with co-complementary segments of the H2O molecule's electronic charge pattern. In this case - and in many but not all cases - it isn't a chemical reaction because there isn't enough difference in electron energies, and of course the often-important activation energy isn't to be found in sufficient quantity in the reference environment.
Instead, the water molecules and piracetam molecules just make each other happy with a partial fit that relieves some of each others' molecular strain induced by their respective native charge distributions. It so happens that when water and piracetam get intimate, the water is absorbed because piracetam is water-soluble.
So for clumping there has to be a solvent affinity (hygroscopicity), solubility, intersurface compatibility, intersurface contact, solvent, and time.
I just break them up with a metal spoon every few days. Clumping is the second pipsqueak annoyance besides taste that I can level on the Good Molecule. Crushing the clumps with a spoon won't ruin the molecules in case you might worry. It will just cleave those solvent-facilitated intercrystal welds, which is in a way a quasi-chemical reaction, but one that doesn't involve shell transitions or the restructuring of the molecules themselves. It just alters their position relative to their neighbors.
Clumping (transparticle co-recrystallization) can be minimized by always keeping the container sealed tight and in the driest location possible. Breathing heavily into the container in anticipation of the next horrid spoonful's delightful taste is also disrecommended. Hot breath makes wet powder, always.
At all costs, absolutely avoid storing refrigerated. Opening a refrigerated container causes very fast condensation from the warmer more moisture-saturated atmosphere outside the fridge - unless your house is colder than the inside of your fridge, which would by definition obviate the need for a fridge - thus such a case is not included in this analysis. Like when a glass of cold juice, etc. 'sweats' after it's poured from the cold, refrigerated state.
Another option is to buy dessicant packets [
this eBay Search finds lots for cheap]. Leaving a few in your piracetam jar keeps the atmosphere inside dry, so long as it's tightly sealed. They do have to be replaced every so often, but are cheap. Some are even regenerable. Those ones get baked in an oven. The heat forces the crystals of its even-more deliquescent active ingredient to lose water to the oven atmosphere, and it dries up again.
Some of those deliquescent materials can have so much affinity for water that it can even be thought of as a quasi-chemical reaction. One way to separate the quasi-chemical absorbent from one that merely has a strong attraction to water is that if, when placed in a perfectly dry atmosphere or vacuum at STP, the material doesn't lose solvent, but does when baked at a higher temperature, then it is a quasi-chemical reaction. Also a certain amount of heat is released or absorbed when the material transitions from saturated to dry, if it is a quasi-chemical absorbent.
In contrast, a nonreactive absorbent such as piracetam will completely dry out if exposed to a perfectly dry atmosphere or vacuum for sufficient time.
Edited by Isochroma, 10 December 2009 - 09:24 AM.
