Nootropics: the solution for learning your topics?

I was first introduced to the world of Nootropics after stumbling upon a dodgy bag of pills in my friend’s basement. Before the inevitable ‘what would your mother say’ argument and dialling 999, I was reassured that what I’d found was actually part of a new craze, fuelled by glossy Hollywood blockbuster, Limitless.

They were memory enhancing Nootropics, legally purchasable from a number of online outlets and best of all, prescription free!

So what do they actually do? Well I should first point out that the heading Nootropics is fairly expansive and there are a large number of drugs encompassed under this title. They are, however, all crucially classified as ‘smart drugs’, claiming to improve academic performance to varying degrees of success.

For example, Choline, hailed as the ‘mother of all nootropics’ has been shown to improve memory retrieval and recording, as well as cognition and even mood stability. All useful traits when your ploughing through a years-worth of Powerpoint Slides or reading a journal from a time when they thought paracetamol was the shit.

So all seems well and good. Time to start popping these bad boys? Well, whilst paying under a tenner for around 90 capsules might seem like a bargain, there remains a fundamental crack in all of this. All of the nutrients delivered in these edgy new wave pills are already present in the boring well rounded meals your mum used to cook. Similarly, what’s the point of investing in caffeine capsules when you can treat yourself to cup of Aldi’s finest coffee?

That being said, students aren’t exactly known for being health conscious if we consider a faculty quad vod with orange juice is the closest most come to their five a day. With this in mind, it’s probably worth exploring this underground phenomenon further if you’re desperately in need of a boost.

Although, the results are likely to be far more modest than Bradley Cooper’s rise as a bilingual stock market prodigy.

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