nicotine improves cognitive performance it is [Music] good morning friends in this video i'm going to tell you why nicotine is a performance enhancing drug that may also protect your health but before i do please subscribe to the channel if you're not already like the video and comment on the video to help the channel's growth now let's get started first of all friends i recently made a video about nasal snuff which is nasal tobacco and sometime around that time i received a question from a subscriber who was i think a student intending to use nicotine to
improve his ability to study or perform exams he asked me how should i supplement nicotine to improve my performance and what i decided to do was make a first video introducing you to the subject of why would you want to add nicotine into your daily regimen in the first place and the second video which will be released this afternoon at 12 pm pst i'll tell you how i go about optimizing nicotine supplementation as well as related factors what i do personally and what i think others should do and the considerations in building their own plants
now let's get started first we have to introduce nicotine to understand more about nicotine i'd highly recommend you check out my series in the playlist section called the cholinergic series if you haven't watched it i'll briefly introduce it to you here these the issue that how to understand how nicotine works in our body mainly you need to understand something called the cholinergic system basically there's a dietary a part of our diet that we consume often in meat or in eggs on various other sources called choline choline is actually a vitamin when you consume choline your
body attaches an acetyl group from something called acetyl-coa to the choline to produce a neurotransmitter that's active in our nervous systems called acetylcholi acetylcholine then signals at two kinds of receptors the cholinergic receptors but the receptors are called they're named separately two groups according actually to whether nicotine also agonizes them interestingly nicotine a molecule found in plants including tobacco binds to and activates a subset of our human nicotinic cholinergic world not a subset of a subset of our cholinergic receptors called the nicotinic cholinergic receptors so what does this really mean this means nicotine acts like
a hormone that's naturally present in your brain and nervous system it acts just like it in some aspects it binds to and activates some of the gene transcription controlling receptors that acetylcholine also binds to and activates so you can think of nicotine sort of akin to how cabergoline for the bodybuilders is related to dopamine or how halotestin a little bit different halo testing or anavar is related to testosterone or dht the nicotine is an analog of acetylcholine that does some of its activities next we have to distinguish between tobacco and nicotine and between smoking and
tobacco also smoking anything is very harmful for your body and puts your body in an inflammatory state tobacco also depending on how it's cured can have some carcinogenic compounds in it so although smokers do have better cognition often they have better cognition despite the smoke it's the nicotine that causes them to have better cognition than nicotine in the tobacco whereas the smoke increases their inflammation so when smokers smoke more they get worse cognition but that's not just what we'll find out later partially because the nicotine but mainly because of the inflammation next let's talk about
how nicotine affects cognition we're not going to be very comprehensive here because there are very many measures of cognitive performance but let me tell you that nicotine improves cognitive performance across mammals across a variety of tests of cognitive performance and it does so consistently in a u-shaped curve such that less nicotine is worse but too much nicotine is also worse so in even in humans that are nicotine naive that don't smoke even people that have never used nicotine before two milligrams of nicotine gum will improve their cognitive performance acutely whereas four milligrams will worsen it
compared to not taking anything and compared to taking two milligrams so there's a u-shaped curve with nicotine's effect on cognitive performance now why might nicotine improve cognitive performance well there's a few reasons we might think it does in fact there's quite a few i'll just focus on three here the first is a change in brain resting states so your brain has connective networks that are visible on fmri scans some of these networks uh you actually probably know about even though you may not have heard of them explicitly for example mindfulness meditation being mindful of your
environment without thinking of something consciously is the attempt to introduce and empower what's called the salience network which recognizes salient aspects of your environment or life empower that and weaken the default mode network when you're in a train and you look at the window and you're just thinking about something without meaning to that's your default mode network the default mode network is thought to play a causal role in the development of depression and various other diseases of the brain nicotine weakens the predominance of the default mode network and strengthens the salience network which switches from
the default mode network to the executive control network that's the focus network that you use on an exam so nicotine does something similar actually to mindfulness meditation in that sense but also nicotine controls catecholamine transmission you see the catecholamine-related neurons in the midbrain of mammals is rich in or they are rich in nicotinic cholinergic receptors and nicotinic cholinergic receptor agonism is related to and modulates the dopamine network nicotine administration across mammals causes acute dopamine transmission for those of you that don't know what is one of the main tools used to improve cognitive performance adderall or
some kind of or methylphenidate ritalin these are drugs that modulate the dopamine system well nicotine does also one of the reasons it may be addictive but also one of the reasons is cognitive enhancing and finally the third reason i wanted to point out is simply its modulation of the nicotine cholinergic receptors the cholinergic system is integral to memory development and formation and it is the main modulator of our memory systems in our brains next you may be surprised to know that nicotine also affects our mood and depression in fact there is a very well developed
actually cholinergic hypothesis of depression and nicotine administration is mood enhancing acutely in fact interestingly light smokers have less depression than non-smokers but also less than heavy smokers so the nicotine is involved in our mood as well and finally regarding our health although most of you think of nicotine as being unhealthy what you're really thinking of is smoking as i said earlier smoking combustion in general consuming things that are combusted but also tobacco has carcinogenic elements to it nonetheless because nicotine is so neuroprotective smokers have massively reduced rates of brain disease of parkinson's disease dementia and
even alzheimer's disease this isn't true for all brain diseases like als for example what stephen hawking's had brain diseases that are very very much modulated by inflammation their incidence may get worse like als but the nicotinic cholinergic stimulation from nicotine preserves brain health in fact the first line drug to treat memory deficits in people who have alzheimer's disease is a drug that inhibits the breakdown of the natural hormone that nicotine mimics acetylcholine so the main drug used to treat alzheimer's disease memory issues is a drug that makes acetylcholine more present in the brain sort of
mimicking the effect of taking nicotine partially that drug by the way is called the napazole and we'll be talking about it again this afternoon so to conclude what did we learn here we learned that nicotine improves cognitive performance it is mood enhancing and it is potently neuroprotective and we learned that nicotine seems to have a u-shaped curve with most of these effects in the next video this afternoon i'll tell you how i go about supplementing with nicotine and other supplements to optimize my cognition acutely thank you so much friends i look forward to seeing you
again this afternoon
