Nicotine for cognitive enhancement
I've been reading a lot about nicotine, and its cognitive enhancing effects.
“To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive enhancer that we currently have, bizarrely,” said Jennifer Rusted, professor of experimental psychology at Sussex University in Britain when we spoke. “The cognitive-enhancing effects of nicotine in a normal population are more robust than you get with any other agent. With Provigil, for instance, the evidence for cognitive benefits is nowhere near as strong as it is for nicotine.” -http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-patch-make-you-smarter-excerpt/
Obviously, I'm not going to take up cigarettes for this reason. But I was wondering if anyone has tried a product like this: https://www.bluebrainboost.com/p/nicotine-solution/
Or even nicorette / nicotine patch.
What are your thoughts?
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I'd be interested in seeing some more results on human test subjects.
Luko
I'd be curious if any testing has been done with human subjects in an academic setting. And I say that because a few of my computer engineering classmates smoke. A lot.
(which is just an article by the way, it presents no research or citations)
The studies are... mediocre that I saw. The one I read because it seemed the most evolved just had smokers doing cognitive tests with one group smoking as normal and the other abstaining for "a self-defined period of not less than 2 hours" which doesn't seem pretty rigorous to me.
Go buy some patches and plasters and run your own.
What lead you to test that? To me it sounds like a placebo effect.... I would need to see MRI/EEG/any other established neural examination report and a double blind study in order to be led to believe there is a grain of truth to anything in that article.
Nicotine shouldn't make your brain work harder, it should make it work better.
Assuming it does either.
1)not a smoker(of any kind)
2)does not chew
When I was in college I gave pouches a try and the best way that I could describe the experience, when I was using it, was its effect was extremely similar to drinking. By that I mean the lightheadedness. I did notice a little bit of energy and focus on one subject...a female in the room...generally I would not have done such a.....direct approach as I did with the pouch. FYI it failed.
I would say there was definitely a focus but there was also a wicked downside which was to describe it would be lack of inhibitions or you could say that would be part of the focus doing whatever possible to get the outcome.
3) I no longer use chew
4) I drink
5) caffeine in the early morning or winter only
Hope that info might assist.
My experience with nicotine is weird, because I'm not sure it does much to enhance my cognitive ability. I've been vaping for about a year now as well, and have tried cigarettes and those pouch things. I honestly just feel really lightheaded and somewhat relaxed after ingesting it.
HOWEVER, I have also used virtually every other nicotine-containing product on the market, and I find that the cognitive benefits of other forms, with the exception of patches, are generally outweighed by one factor or another. Chewing tobacco, for example, contains MOAIs and much higher doses of nicotine than are necessary for cognitive improvement, and as such the quasi-intoxicant effect can actually cause impairment. Even the MAOIs contained in cigarettes can cause enough of a "head shift" as to be distracting and possibly counter-productive. Patches, on the other hand, are time released and so subtle as to not provide any perceptible shift in cognitive ability (read: a waste of money).
Alsooo... There is definitely research indicating that nicotine is not beneficial for STM:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24766971
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25721074
Personally, I still like using nicotine gum while studying, doing homework, or writing painfully long posts on the internet.
My experience with patches is the same as upthread; it's so subtle that you don't really notice. I started using a full patch instead of a half to try to get more at a time, and jump-starting with sublingual nicotine solution, but that still wasn't as good as just redosing with the solution every few hours.
I would say I notice minimal cognitive benefits from nicotine, but on the other hand I do like it very much as a stimulant, and it's possible that it just helps my ADHD enough to make me feel "productive" without actually stimulating me.
Before I had the solution, I had some lozenges (like gum, but you keep them in your cheeks and just let them dissolve). They were pretty nice, you could dose-regulate with a pill cutter and the delivery was efficient. The downside was that you would swallow the nicotine solution and it would nauseate the crap out of me. The solution won't do this; I can put two drops in my lower lip or under my tongue and immediately feel the same nicotine effect letting a whole lozenge dissolve would, minus the nausea.
(Sorry if it's bad ettiquette to bump a thread this old, but it seems like this board moves pretty slowly and I thought I'd chime in since I'm one of probably very few people to have the exact thing linked in the OP...)