okay, it's a lot to swallow. i take everything in the morning with a cup of 
yogurt or applesauce mixed with trader joe's green or red powder, to taste.
i've gotten the pill-swallowing time down to 2 minutes at a comfortable pace. 


fortunately my friends are mostly transhumanists and neuroscientists (or 
were at some point in their lives) so they only get concerned when there 
is a real cause for concern (such as when i was experimenting with l-dopa)

i had planned to test each supplement one at a time and tease out the 
subjective effects of each in isolation, but i became impatient and just 
started taking everything i thought i needed. it's been a spectacular 
success so far, but i don't know what does exactly what, so now i'm 
co-opting random friends into experiments with single substances.

5HTP is a precursor to serotonin synthesis. this is why it is used to 
treat "major depression" whereas i had "chronic depression" which is a 
different beast entirely. i think my serotonin levels were fine but 
dopamine was low. there is some evidence that 5HTP can deplete dopamine 
even further, which would be bad. so i take tryptophan which is a 
precursor for both, because i like both :)

here's a graph of my subjective well-being over the last 6 months:

above 5 means i'm willing to get out of bed in the morning. you can see the 
results are favorable, but i feel dramatically better than one point 
improvement. oh well, that's science. there's a downward spike near the end 
corresponding to when i caught a flu, then slept for 16 hours and felt better.

tryptophan is also a precursor to melatonin. (through serotonin)
i've been taking melatonin because my sleep cycle's so fucked but it 
hasn't had the long-term return-to-normal-human effect i was looking for.
i haven't seen any major changes in long term sleep trends yet.

I don't drink caffeine at all. it always makes me stay up at least another 
12 hours. 23andme verifies that i have a slow caffeine metabolism.

i had taken gingko a few years ago and never noticed anything at all from 
it. i only take it because it's absurdly cheap and it may actually have some 
effect.

coq10 - if it helped my skin heal better i'd take it just for that reason alone. 
it's pretty cheap. cheaper than getting an infection and having your arm 
fall off. my great grandpa died from a splinter he got in the outhouse.
CoQ10 also scavenges free radicals from mitochondrial action, so chronic 
exercise such as marathon running is no longer as harmful to life 
expectancy.

b-complex - recently learned fact: tryptophan is converted to B-6 (?) at a 
horrible ratio like 60-1 so if you don't have enough B-6 you lose dopamine and 
serotonin synthesis. they're all pretty awesome though, in low doses, in high 
doses. b vitamins give you energy and make your mitochondria work better.

fish oil - makes you smarter, contains omega fatty acids which are needed for 
cell membranes. neurons have a lot of surface area and thus membrane materials.

vinpocetine - vasodilator derived from periwinkle plant. enhances focus, 
seems to improve long range vision, seems to cause your eyes to fixate 
more steadily on what you're looking at, less saccades.

piracetam - increases communication between two halves of brain; the 
effects of this vary by person depending on which half of their brain is 
in control. for me it makes interpersonal relations become more clear, 
easier to cooperate and understand the motivations and intentions of 
others. also uses up choline at a faster rate, which is why i also take

alpha-gpc - a high bioavailability form of choline precursor, which is in 
the form that cells usually generate when they're self-scavenging in 
choline-depletion state. it doesn't go into rebuilding the cell walls, but 
is used for synthesis of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in 
memory and muscle control.

choline-bitartrate - choline is transformed into phosphatidyl choline in 
order to (re)build cell membranes. this is low oral availability (doesn't 
cross blood/brain barrier easily?) but super cheap and tastes good. i have 
a theory that alzheimers is caused mostly by long-term choline deficiency.

dmae - another choline precursor? aka "deanol" and has been shown to 
increase the life-span of mice by 50%, possibly through the mechanism of 
clearing out lipofuscin deposits. cheap, tastes good.

boswellia - no idea, it's in the cucurmin pills; somewhat aromatic and 
pungent, like tea tree oil or piperazine.

curcumin - this is straight up turmeric extract. antioxidant and various 
other bodily health effects.

cordyceps extract - zombie ant brain fungus. look up images of it online, 
it's sick. it makes you want to climb up to the top leaf in a tree, clamp 
your mandibles, and explode spores everywhere. well, not really. but it 
improves oxygenation, energy, and will kill a viral infection in one day. 
the extract is prepared by rapidly growing a lot of cordyceps mycelia in a 
warm fermenter and spray drying the liquid that comes off. this is highly 
unnatural environment

aloha cordyceps - aloha pharmaceuticals saw the explosion in "farmed" 
cordyceps and decided it wasn't natural enough or something, so they 
recreated the mushroom's natural environment of tibetan steppes. they grow 
it up fast and then let it sit for months in the dark in refrigerators 
with low oxygen. they claim that their process increases the number of 
good chemicals (cordycepin, uracil, based on HPLC analysis) and reduces 
the gross things. i can confirm it tastes/smells much better than swanson 
brand cordyceps extract. i started taking regular cordyceps extract first 
and can confirm it works as advertised, but maybe aloha is better, so i 
take that too. i have a friend taking only aloha cordyceps so we'll see 
what happens.

> Where did you hear about all these?

one day i randomly got this word "vinpocetine" stuck in my head and so i 
looked it up, and found this bbs longecity.org. i had seen it before when 
reading about piracetam in 2006 and read some more and read some more and 
pretty soon i was studying neuroscience seriously. it helps having 
neuroscientists running around everywhere to ask questions of, but they're 
mostly educated to be overly skeptical that any kind of improvement over 
baseline is even possible. (there is this entrenched idea that evolution 
has optimized the brain to perfection and any sort of gains along one axis 
will result in losses on another.) robert anton wilson had planted some 
kind of seed in my mind with "prometheus rising". i started reading david 
pearce's "the good drug guide" and "better living through chemistry"

my hair and nails are growing faster? my hair 
seems to lay flat without even any conditioner and is much less tangly and 
easier to comb. how is this even possible after less than a month? my hair 
is 16 inches long and took two years to grow that long.

i now sleep 4-6 
hours a night instead of 12, and bounce out of bed. this is extremely life 
enhancing when you're non-24 circadian.

i no longer have high dance inertia, i can just start dancing on demand.

i exercised today. kettlebells.

four separate bolts have come loose on my bicycle because i've been riding harder.

i learned to juggle in two hours today, which apparently is highly unusual.

i can type 143wpm vs my maximum of 92wpm a month ago. (i can actually type 
faster, but this is weird OCR-resistant font with lots of punctuation, 
capitalization, and odd phrasing.)

i am looking for more objective performance tests.
see http://code.google.com/p/cognistats/

also, there is something i'm not telling you, unless you ask in person.