N.B. This post may be of particular interest to you if you get 24 / 7 / 52 muscle aches despite the first bit being about memory. This is going to be a long one so I'll break it up.
I read one of @Hip's posts a couple of years ago in which he mentioned piracetam and it caught my attention.
I have pretty severe cognitive problems at my worst. Some - like brain fog - come and go but others are permanent, if variable, in their intensity. The one I hate most is impaired memory.
Provided I'm not brain fogged I don't have major short-term memory issues. So I can think and problem solve effectively within my energy limits.
Before ME, I had a first class long-term memory. I usually only had to read something once to absorb it and I rarely bothered to read it again unless I wanted to clarify understanding. So, for example, you'd have been far more likely to catch me rereading sections of a physics chapter than biology. Since ME and especially since I became acutely worse, which coincided with a period of amnesia lasting about 10 days, my capacity to learn has been greatly affected. Part of this is definitely due to difficulty reading but mostly it seems to be with how the brain consolidates information long-term. So if I read something, my recall would be pretty reasonable to start with but then it declines rapidly. Previously I could almost visualise the text weeks after I had read it, now it's as if the text starts to fade in front of my eyes almost as soon as I've stopped reading.
So when I learned about piracetam, which is said to be a memory enhancer, it seemed worth a go.
Unfortunately, it hasn't helped me in the way I hoped it would but it has been a gift in other ways; some are seemingly trivial but actually quite life enhancing.
Visually, it has been wonderful. Colours pop, clarity is better, detail and texture jump out, the world appears to be less flat. It seems strange, but I became much more aware that we live in 3 dimensions. I used to think 3-D films were really exaggerated because I didn't perceive the world to be anything like that. Now I get it.
The first evening I took piracetam, I was reading PR (what else) and I kept becoming so engrossed by some of the avatars that I could barely read. I thought to myself "I have to go to the art gallery this weekend". I have almost no interest in art!
In a similar vein, other senses have been enhanced; taste, and hearing. I still can't understand a thing if two people are talking at the same the same time but I have much better appreciation of music. The different instruments stand out rather than just being a pleasant blend.
The other effect of piracetam is that I no longer struggle so much thinking of the right word, which so often happened, especially when talking. Language is so much more fluid and I feel less under pressure and less worried that that my brain will freeze mid thought. It still happens but not nearly so often. Some people refer to the social lubricant effect that piracetam has and I think part of the reason is that you can become more articulate and therefore more at ease. It's like alcohol except that the confidence comes from increased ability rather than worse ability but with lowered inhibition. So it has the happy effect of not turning you into a blithering idiot.
tbc
I read one of @Hip's posts a couple of years ago in which he mentioned piracetam and it caught my attention.
I have pretty severe cognitive problems at my worst. Some - like brain fog - come and go but others are permanent, if variable, in their intensity. The one I hate most is impaired memory.
Provided I'm not brain fogged I don't have major short-term memory issues. So I can think and problem solve effectively within my energy limits.
Before ME, I had a first class long-term memory. I usually only had to read something once to absorb it and I rarely bothered to read it again unless I wanted to clarify understanding. So, for example, you'd have been far more likely to catch me rereading sections of a physics chapter than biology. Since ME and especially since I became acutely worse, which coincided with a period of amnesia lasting about 10 days, my capacity to learn has been greatly affected. Part of this is definitely due to difficulty reading but mostly it seems to be with how the brain consolidates information long-term. So if I read something, my recall would be pretty reasonable to start with but then it declines rapidly. Previously I could almost visualise the text weeks after I had read it, now it's as if the text starts to fade in front of my eyes almost as soon as I've stopped reading.
So when I learned about piracetam, which is said to be a memory enhancer, it seemed worth a go.
Unfortunately, it hasn't helped me in the way I hoped it would but it has been a gift in other ways; some are seemingly trivial but actually quite life enhancing.
Visually, it has been wonderful. Colours pop, clarity is better, detail and texture jump out, the world appears to be less flat. It seems strange, but I became much more aware that we live in 3 dimensions. I used to think 3-D films were really exaggerated because I didn't perceive the world to be anything like that. Now I get it.
The first evening I took piracetam, I was reading PR (what else) and I kept becoming so engrossed by some of the avatars that I could barely read. I thought to myself "I have to go to the art gallery this weekend". I have almost no interest in art!
In a similar vein, other senses have been enhanced; taste, and hearing. I still can't understand a thing if two people are talking at the same the same time but I have much better appreciation of music. The different instruments stand out rather than just being a pleasant blend.
The other effect of piracetam is that I no longer struggle so much thinking of the right word, which so often happened, especially when talking. Language is so much more fluid and I feel less under pressure and less worried that that my brain will freeze mid thought. It still happens but not nearly so often. Some people refer to the social lubricant effect that piracetam has and I think part of the reason is that you can become more articulate and therefore more at ease. It's like alcohol except that the confidence comes from increased ability rather than worse ability but with lowered inhibition. So it has the happy effect of not turning you into a blithering idiot.
tbc
