Non-Pharmacological Cognitive Enhancers – Current Perspectives [pdf]
jcdr.net
jcdr.net
Be wary of tCDS - no long term studies. Also 'no such thing as a free lunch' - see gwern : http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics
Not included and should be: very bright light. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gdl/my_simple_hack_for_increased_ale...
I've heard good things about bright lighting too. Unfortunately, my apartment's wiring can't support multiple 100W bulbs. Anyone have any tips on super-bright LED lightbulbs (that don't cost a fortune)?
I work in a home office though, and do have a window.
Its worth noting that GE now makes some fluorescent tube replacements with LED that have a much more complete spectrum. For those with Fluorescent fixtures above your desks, they will help improve the quality of the light you have. I've put them in my woodshop with great success.
The best solution I found for increasing alertness is also the hardest, but it works for me: go to sleep at the same time every day, don't linger in bed after waking up, and exercise in the morning.
There's also the color temperature of the light, which I definitely notice. I use f.lux/redshift as well as red light bulbs at night, and sleep with blackout curtains. On the flip side, I find it hard to wake up in a pitch black room, so I set two clip lamps aimed at me on a timer instead of an alarm.
What would be really nice is to have light bulbs that adjust both brightness and color temperature to mimic the sun. It would be interesting if mimicking a tropical sun cycle would help with seasonal affective disorder.
Be wary of Longecity (and /r/nootropics to a lesser, or at least different, extent). There are some Longecity users in the Brain Health forum who will seem to know what they're talking about if you haven't read through introductory neuroscience and pharmacology textbooks. The same is true in /r/nootropics, but there are a greater concentration of knowledgeable users and bad science tends to get readily downvoted. I know I have said some ridiculous things in the past on both forums, and /r/nootropics has been more willing to call me out for indulging in anecdotal evidence.
The Longecity forum also seems to have a slightly more experimental tone to it, given that Longecity as a whole is not a nootropics community but a life extension community. There's a tradition of doing "group buys" of new substances from overseas. /r/nootropics has gotten more openly experimental in the past couple years, but I don't believe anyone has tried to organize a group buy yet.
But yeah, the sibling comments have exhausted the options that exist today. As far as I'm aware there aren't any expansive surveys that span the whole of nootropics / cognitive enhancement. There are papers that compare specific classes of new substances or techniques, but no comprehensive treatment of the idea of cumulative/permanent pharmacological brain enhancement yet. For now we're stuck with two slightly quirky online forums (which both skirt the line between self-help and wannabe academia) and wading through the literature ourselves. There's also examine.com and wikipedia as starting points.
Definitely. I probably should have emphasized, not the limitations of anecdotal evidence, but the danger of untestable, excessive or irrelevant speculation.
It's super easy to treat metaphor or simple models as truth when the reality is much more complex and, as such, relatively unstudied. The biggest issue with online nootropics communities is not that people share their experiences, it's that readers often take the average of experiences and generalize it into a pseudo-neuroscientific model.
Not only does this reflect terribly on the nootropics and practical transhumanist milieus, it does a disservice (as a third-order effect) to people such as yourself who just want palatable, accurate, expertly distilled information. The rampant generalization diminishes the validity of the entire field from a public perspective, which slows scientific progress in those places with the ability to generously allocate resources, which in turn delays the amount of time it takes for a significant body of literature to arise which might warrant a canonical survey or introductory paper collection.
It's a shame, and I have no clue what to do about it, or if there even is anything that can be done within the context of places like /r/nootropics or Longecity. Here's hoping that systems like Experiment.com do what they aim to.