⁠“Bacopa Quasi-Experiment ”⁠, ⁠Gwern⁠2014 (R, Bacopa, QS, psychology, Bayes, sleep; ⁠similar⁠):

A small 2014–2015 non-blinded self-experiment using Ba­copa mon­nieri to in­ves­ti­gate ef­fect on mem­ory/sleep/self-ratings in an ABABA de­sign; no par­tic­u­lar ef­fects were found.

Ba­copa is a sup­ple­ment herb often used for mem­ory or stress adap­ta­tion. Its chronic ef­fects re­port­edly take many weeks to man­i­fest, with no im­por­tant acute ef­fects.

Out of cu­rios­ity, I bought 2 bot­tles of Bac­og­nize Ba­copa pills and ran a non-randomized non-blinded ABABA quasi-self-experiment from June 2014_11ya to Sep­tem­ber 2015, mea­sur­ing ef­fects on my mem­ory per­for­mance, sleep, and daily self-ratings of mood/pro­duc­tiv­ity.

For analy­sis, a multi-level Bayesian model⁠ on two mem­ory per­for­mance vari­ables was used to ex­tract per-day per­for­mance, fac­tor analy­sis⁠ was used to ex­tract a sleep index from 9 Zeo⁠ sleep vari­ables, and the 3 end­points were mod­eled as a mul­ti­vari­ate Bayesian time-series re­gres­sion with splines.

Be­cause of the slow onset of chronic ef­fects, small ef­fec­tive sam­ple size, def­i­nite tem­po­ral trends prob­a­bly un­re­lated to Ba­copa, and noise in the vari­ables, the re­sults were as ex­pected, am­bigu­ous, and do not strongly sup­port any cor­re­la­tion be­tween Ba­copa and mem­ory/sleep/self-rating (+/−/− re­spec­tively).

• Background
• Bacopa Sources
• Quasi-Experiment
  • Intervention
  • Data Prep
  • Analysis
  • Conclusion

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