Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,alt.psychoactives I'm not sure, so I've added ALT.PSYCHOACTIVES to the list, since they seem to discuss them there. Nootropics, from what I can tell, is pretty much an offshoot of pharmacological memory research, promoting an emphasis on enhancement of cognitive and memory functions rather than prophylaxis or treatment of memory disorders, or illumination of memory mechanisms, as most of the original research was doing years back when Vasopressin and Piracetam were among the only compounds in this category, and there was no such commonly used term as Nootropics. _Some_ popularly labelled 'smart' chemicals are more nutritional in nature, often based on the notion that dietary precursors for some neurotransmitters or neuromodulators can beneficically influence brain chemistry. This has some legitimate theoretical basis, as with Dr. Wurtman's research at MIT, but seems to have little reliable clinical support as anything you could use practicall to improve your performance at complex mental tasks. While dietary variations can influence levels of brain signalling chemicals, the nutritional supplements commonly seen seem to effect mental function at best haphazardly when at all. _Pharmaceutical_ nootopics (as opposed to the dietary supplements) sometimes have definite neurological effects, but conclusions about the significance of those effects in enhancing human mental functions appears very premature. There is a good review of 'Smart Drugs' by Steven Rose in the April 17,1993 issue of _New_Scientist_. He surveys the medical literature, evaluates its quality, and draws some tentative general conclusions about the value of these drugs. His overall conclusion is that someone looking for mental performance enhancement would be better advised to seek it in ancient mnemonic techniques than modern pharmaceuticals. The same issue also has an article on the general subject, including the consumer industry around 'Smart' chemicals. A popular introductory text on drug actions in the brain; Cooper, Bloom, and Roth's _Biochemical_Basis_of_Neuropharmacology_, devotes a section at the end to the question "Are there natural memory drugs ?" The 6th edition (1991) states ... "Back in the third edition, in our last outing onto the sea of memory modulators, we mentioned the growing literature on the ability of natural hormones such as vasopressin and adrenocorticotropin (ACTH), as well as 'endocrinologically inert' fragments derived from them, either to repair learning deficiencies in hypophysectomized rats or to delay or accelerate the extinction of a previously learned performance. "Unfortunately, as pathways containing these peptides were more clearly defined in their projections to targets other than the posterior pituitary, and as the known barriers to diffusion of these peptides from the blood stream into the brain were shown to apply to all of them, this once promising area became a source of contention. However, this body of research remains an important case study for scholars of the neuropharmacology of behavior." They later add, after a discussion of the voluminous research on vasopressin in particular ... "Future research will probably establish the superficiality of such interpretations as the following : (1) vasopressin acts directly on 'memory processes'; (2) vasopressin can be an aversive hormone than when given at non-physiological doses arouses the animal who then learns better. We await eagerly the answers to this mind-drug-behavior puzzle, but they may not be found in the next edition, either."