Tales of a Nootropic hipster
Back I was in college at the end of the 90’s I was reading books/newsletters by Leading edge research group and in their newsletters they advertised a supplement called “Brain Lightning”.
I took it and tested my progress with the Ps1 game Intelligent Qube- I’m not even joking haha.
In college I had motor learning and motor development classes where I learned how to test for things like reaction time- and when testing we learned how to account for score improvements due to practice and other factors.
I had been playing Intelligent Qube for some months- at the end of the game it gives you your score as an IQ Score- I know its not a real IQ test 😠
A man in a suit with a briefcase tested me alone on a Saturday at our closed elementary school when I was 6-7 years old for that.
So my Intelligent Qube scored had topped out after playing for some months so I decided to do an informal test with “Brain Lightning”. I took the Brain Lighting and played Intelligent Qube like I normally would and my scores saw a %20-30 increase 😮
So I was sold on Brain Lightning. I continued to take it.
It started to get really expensive and I was already taking a lot of other supplements so I then just bought the separate ingredients and took those.
I was taking that stuff daily for 10-15 years.
I stopped for awhile after traveling a ton and not having it with me.
Recently a friend asked me about “Nootropics” and I remembered the whole brain lightning thing I used to do- I bought all the separate ingredients again. Here they are-
I then realized I was a “nootropic” hipster because I was using nootropic’s before they were even a thing maaaaaaan.
If you need a mental “pick me up”, more alertness, better memory etc try this stuff. BUT BE CAREFUL WITH THE DMAE! It can make you feel kinda crazy 😳 By “crazy” I mean like OVERLY INTENSE. So if you try this and its too intense then drop the Dmae.
I got a lot of work done with help from this stuff- is that how I storyboard, animated and completed thousands and thousands of shots on my feature films back when it was on hard mode without a game engine? It sure didn’t hurt.
Whoa. Another thing in common that's blown me away, except for the intelligence part. Intelligent Qube, to this day, is one of my favorite games. I was never good at it, or any game, but I loved it. It was one of those games I was lucky to get from a friend, same way with ICO. Had I not been given the games; I wouldn't have ever experienced them on my own. I never had good experiences with vitamins or even some herbs. GABA made my chest feel really awful and numb and awful. I'm so sensitive, maaaaan. For a long while now, after finally getting on an anti-depressant (I know) and knowing peace, stability, happiness, creativity, etc. it's continously been wiped from my system from things as simple as Melatonin to the point it can take weeks or months after until I'm readjusted to the anti-depressant. I've been in this vicious cycle. It all started when I took Hydroxizyne which did help for what I needed it for, but eventually it turned on me in a horrible way. It took 9 weeks of feeling like the alternate reality version of myself, feeling like a stranger in my own body, feeling all kinds of shit. It was that I had taken several in the period of a month, then as it always happened, its effects remained for days after, then came the residual side effects but also withdrawal feelings, then even worse, long-lasting effects of being in some limbo while I waited for my anti-depressant to grasp and grip my mind fully. Fucked up thing is, 9 weeks to the day I started to feel better, that night, and what happens that night, my father passes away. First few weeks, thankfully, I was good with my anti-depressant but since then it's been how my life was before. Never stable, always something off/wrong, no ground, no stability, etc. And come to find out, my worst experience has been from taking a higher dose of Gabapentin for nerve pain for Diabetes. I fucking took what my dad had left which is only 100mg more than what I take, for three nights, that fucked me up for two weeks. It's like alcohol withdrawals and you can't fucking sleep and if you do youre not really sleeping, so you never rest. And I'm back there again because i've been feeling the same way for days now and I think it's because I fucking took a double dose. So, yeah. Ain't no different than being some drug addict tweaking out on the streets.