Re: SmartDrug Questions

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Feb 01 2000 - 12:21:42 MST


Ramez Naam <ramezn@Exchange.Microsoft.com> writes:

> I haven't seen any published papers that explore this, so I look forward to
> reading yours. That having been said, I'm fascinated by a paper that shows
> something of the opposite. Specifically, Christoffersen seemed to show in
> the Jun 98 issue of _Neuropharmacology_ that learning facilitated by
> Piracetam was harder to extinguish than unaugmented learning, to the point
> that it interfered with reversal learning (learning to make a different
> choice in the previously learned situation).

Interesting. I *think* my model can explain that too, but I must get
the model software to run properly. Thanks for the reference!

> Also, one tangential observation: The dosage levels they use in tests of
> nootropics on laboratory animals are incredibly large. The experiment
> below, for example, would correspond to at least 15g of Piracetam for a
> human, or 6x the maximum recommended dosage.

Overall, I prefer papers about human experiments in healthy volunteers
- those papers are rare, but you can trust them much better than the
ones involving rats or elderly. I got very happy when some of my
friends at the Karolinska Institute did one such study... now if I
could only get my hands on some of their ampakines... :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:09 MDT