Opinion

There is nothing more terrifying than the thought of becoming an Alzheimer’s disease patient — to think that the mind could be permanently lost in a sea of empty memory, with only a few brief moments of painful lucidity. Scary to say the least.

I write this now not to be controversial or incensing, but to bring to the attention of the Daily Cal’s readers the potential to both minimize the chance of early — or any — onset of the aforementioned while also improving school performance on a comprehensive scale. I’m talking about cognitive enhancement and neuroprotection.

We live in the age of nootropics. Not many will know this term — I’m sure there are a number of cultural entities that feel “modification” of the human brain merits denouncement, but I’m not preaching to that audience. Nootropics are a class of cognitively active drug compounds that operate in a purely positive manner. The idea is that the use of this specific class of compounds will have minimum side effects in comparison to “old-school” methods of cognitive boosting (amphetamines being one example that also causes neurotoxicity).

What I’d like to discuss today is a particular strain of nootropic, one that acts upon the AMPA receptor in the human brain, known as ampakines. Ampakines are particularly interesting in that they are the contemporary focus in a number of clinical studies that involve extremely aged individuals with late-term cognitive degeneration.

This is all well and good if you’re an 80-year-old, for there is some hope of recovering lost cognitive function. But for the young and those not debilitated, it can be hard to acquire scheduled versions of medical-quality ampakines.

However, a solution exists outside of these more limited channels. The racetam family — my personal favourite being aniracetam for its fat-soluble qualities — affords a significant degree of neuroprotection while allowing for a higher degree of intercranial communication.

In other words, the drug helps your brain talk with itself more frequently.

Personally, I know two individuals on two seperate types of racetam regiments. One takes antiracetam; the other takes the water-soluble oxiracetam (which has a longer half-life). Both have raved about the changes it has made in their study habits. Comparing their prior semesters at Cal — the times they were not using nootropics — to their output now shows distinctively higher test performance, better lifestyle in terms of academics and overall improved mood (which could be a placebo effect, but also could be a result of their better grades). When they try to explain the experience to me, the language they use is heavily laden with linguistic metaphor. The first, who calls it “Ani,” explains it as if the “brain were a pool of thoughts, and what (you’re) thinking of is just the surface of that pool. Ani helps to bring the thoughts needed to the surface.” The second person explains it similarly, but uses language more evocative of a library: “It’s like the information in my brain is catalogued, and (racetam) rushes my thoughts to the right page.”

Now, there will be some who will pander about how there might be negative long-term effects or the fact that there hasn’t been enough research to prove what studies or users say is true. Keep in mind, rarely indeed do we know fully about causal effects in the human body — in nutritional terms, to say the least. But when I ask these same questioning individuals if they drink alcohol in volume, or copious amounts of caffiene during finals week, or perhaps if they smoke cigarettes, often the answer comes back as yes. Compared to the vast amount of research we have on the potential for damage these drugs cause, nootropics seem to be a far safer bet. With such positive potential — both short and long term — it’s hard to make an argument otherwise.

I’m not saying that taking a nootropic will allow you to stump your professor time and time again throughout lecture, but it might help you wrap your head around a particularly gnarly O-chem problem or perhaps ease the pain of writing those 10-pagers during finals week.

As always, think for yourself. Information is power, but power should be used wisely.

Johnny Dilley is a senior at UC Berkeley.

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