What The Heck Are Nootropics Anyway?
Nootropics. You might have heard of them. The “limitless pill” that keeps Billionaires richer than you. The 
‘smart drugs’ that students are taking to help jack up their hyperfocus (Vice). The cognitive enhancers that give corporate executives an ‘unfair advantage’. (Harvard Business Review). All very exciting. But as always, the media are way behind the curve. Yes, for the past few decades, cognitive enhancers were largely sketchy substances that people used to grasp at a short term edge at the expense of their health and wellbeing. But the days of dropping Adderall and Ritalin to pull an all-nighter are so 2010.
Nootropics Today
These days, nootropics are beginning to take their rightful place as a particularly powerful tool in the Neurohacker’s toolbox. After all, biochemistry is deeply foundational to neural function. Whether you are trying to fix the damage that is done to your nervous system by a stressful and toxic environment or support and enhance your neural functioning, getting the chemistry right is table-stakes. And we are starting to get good at getting it right. What’s changed?
A big part is that we are finally starting to apply complex systems science to psycho-neuro-pharmacology. The neural system is awesomely complex and old-fashioned reductionist science has a really hard time with complexity. Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to separate the effects of just a single molecule from placebo – and nootropics invariably show up as “stacks” of many different ingredients (ours, Qualia, currently has 42 separate synergistic ingredients). That kind of complex, multi pathway input requires a different methodology to understand well.
But, thanks to the efforts of a number of remarkable scientists, researchers and plain-old neurohackers, we are beginning to put together a “whole systems” model of how all the different parts of the human brain work together and how they mesh with the complex regulatory structures of the body. It’s going to take a lot more data and collaboration to dial this model in, but already we are empowered to design stacks that can meaningfully deliver on the promise of nootropics “to enhance the quality of subjective experience and protect the brain from injury while having extremely low toxicity and possessing very few side effects.”
Even the best of today’s noots only just barely scratch the surface. You might say that we are in the “Nokia 1100” phase of nootropics, and as better tools and more data come along, the leading thinkers in the space see a powerful future. For example, they are already beginning to look past biochemistry to the epigenome. Not only is the epigenome the code that runs much of your native biochemistry, we now know that experiences in life can be recorded in your epigenome and then passed onto future generations. There is every reason to believe that you are currently running epigenetic code that you inherited from your great-grandmother’s life experiences. And there is every reason to believe that the epigenome can be hacked – that the nootropics of the future can not only support and enhance our biochemistry, but can permanently change the epigenetic code that drives that biochemistry and that we pass onto our children.
Source: Neurohacker Collective
