Nootropics, mushrooms and psilocybin for higher brain function - Oh my!

#124

FWIW, I dont remember this post or this product.

I found though, that about that time I did buy some on Amazon. After trying it I left a review that it had no noticeable effect.

#125

Has anybody here taken one or more racetams?

Any that produced positive results?

I see at least a couple combined with choline supplements on IndiaMART for cheap.

#126

I have tried many of the popular racetams at various doses and periods for up to a year. For me personally, the subjective results were meh. I don’t know what objective results I could have measured. Maybe some long-term mental results.
Piracetam has some benefits, according to the Russians.
I view it as a waste of my money.

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#127

I’ve experimented with piracetam, phenylpiracetam, coluracetam, aniracetam, and omberacetam. I’d say you’re not missing much if you haven’t tried them.

Aniracetam is interesting due to the reports of increased sociability. Any subjective effects I’ve experienced from it were minimal, but I’d still like to experiement with it further. The solubility is awful though, and I’m not really sure the best ROA.

Piracetam seemed to have some very subtle cognitive enhancement and increase in visual acuity, but hard to truly distinguish from placebo.

Omberactam always made me feel slightly off in a bad way. Like a staticky feeling inside my head.

Of all the things I’ve tried from the nootropic market, NSI-189 is the only one I’ve found interesting and effective enough to consistently take long-term.

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#128

I tried piracetam that wasn’t too bad. Not crazy by any means.

How does NSI-189 compare?

#129

A Single Dose, A Voice Returns: Magic Mushrooms and the Ghost in the Late-Alzheimer’s Machine

Doctors in Brazil describe one octogenarian woman with 10 years of Alzheimer’s disease, five of them severe, who was given roughly 5 grams of dried psilocybin-containing mushrooms. After an intense physical reaction and a long deep sleep, she reportedly began speaking in autobiographical sentences again about 19 hours later, and over the following days and weeks regained urinary continence, walking, self-dressing, and social engagement that had been lost for years. The authors are careful to say this is not a cure and not proof of anything. It is a single, uncontrolled observation suggesting that some functional capacity may survive, dormant, in late-stage dementia and might be temporarily coaxed back out. The evidence is anecdotal and the mechanism is speculative.

Advanced Alzheimer’s is usually described as a one-way street. By the late stage, patients lose speech, continence, mobility, and the ability to dress or feed themselves, and clinicians treat the situation as supportive care rather than something reversible. A case report out of a private clinic in Sao Paulo, Brazil, gently pokes at that assumption.

The patient was a Japanese-American woman in her eighties who had lived with Alzheimer’s for a decade. For the previous five years her speech had shrunk to mostly single syllables, and she was incontinent, dependent for movement, emotionally flat, and barely interacting. Her caregivers gave her about 5 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms of the “Enigma” strain, a dose the authors themselves call high relative to modern clinical trials.

The acute reaction was dramatic and physical: a suspected fever, heavy sweating, and a prolonged deep sleep-like state. No temperature was actually measured. Then, roughly 19 hours after the dose, she woke and reportedly spoke in connected, autobiographical sentences for several hours, something that had not happened in years.

What the authors describe over the following days reads less like a drug trial and more like a family’s diary. Day one, more alertness and recognition of relatives. Day two, walking on her own. Days two to three, dressing herself and staying dry, including overnight. Days six to seven, asking where a specific person had gone and recognizing a vehicle, plus sustained eye contact and reciprocal smiling. A month later a second, smaller 3-gram session was given, and she was again more expressive, described pleasant imagery of surfing with her son, and said, “It is pleasant to come here.”

The proposed explanation leans on psilocybin’s known ability to shake up large-scale brain networks through the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, temporarily loosening the brain’s habitual wiring and, in animal studies, encouraging synaptic growth. The idea is that late-stage dementia may leave residual circuitry that is functionally offline rather than fully destroyed, and that a strong neuromodulatory jolt might briefly bring it back online.

The authors are commendably restrained. They repeatedly state this is not disease reversal, that causality cannot be established, that spontaneous fluctuation in dementia cannot be ruled out, and that there were no brain scans, no cognitive scales, and no sleep monitoring to back up the observations. It is a hypothesis-generating anecdote. The big idea is genuinely provocative. The evidence supporting it is as thin as evidence gets.

Actionable Insights

The honest take-home message is a hard one: there is no action you can responsibly take based on this paper.

On effect size, the paper offers nothing to calculate. There are no measurements taken before and after, no scores, no distributions, and no group to compare against. When you cannot measure how big a change is, you cannot express its magnitude, and any effect-size number I gave you here would be invented. That absence is itself the most important practical fact about this report. The “real-world magnitude” is a list of narrative observations from family and clinicians, not quantified outcomes.

For anyone in the longevity or caregiving world, the useful message is about direction of research, not personal use. High-dose psychedelic mushrooms are potent, produced a suspected fever and a prolonged unresponsive state in a frail elderly patient, and carry real cardiovascular and psychiatric risk in this population. Self-experimentation on a vulnerable dementia patient based on a single anecdote would be reckless. The reasonable action is to watch for controlled trials, not to dose a relative.

Context and Source

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