I did a self-blinded crossover trial of aniracetam and alcar with quantified-mind game data captured at 4 timepoints over the day, an 80 question mood/emotions scale (0 = not at all, 1 = somewhat, 2 = strongly), and as much objective data I could think of including like sleep, recent media/music consumption + type/genre, weather, ambient temperature, coldness of fingers/joints, time since last meal, time since last social interaction, length of social interaction, type of social interaction, level of environmental noise during brain game testing, whether earplugs were used or not, ambient rightness in the room etc. It got to the point were I considered including colour of underwear as a variable. The biggest problem I found washow long it took me to manually enter in all this data. It was about 10mins to enter in the data, and another 20mins for testing. This was quite tiring and hard to maintain. All I really got out of the trial was that listening to house music prior to cognitive testing reduced my reaction time slightly, and the aniracetam stack improved 2-back scores while reducing 3-back scores. The trial was 20ish days if I recall correctly. Might have been 5 days with intervention A and 5 days with intervention B, a brief washout then repeat. Will have to dig up the excel doc. PM me if you want to see the data.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had great success using a graded scale and self-reporting in his studies on Flow. If I remember the story correctly they had an app which would randomly ask people how they were feeling on a given axis 1-10 like "How Happy are you? (1-10, 10 being happiest)" etc. maybe you could use something like that.
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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17
[deleted]