“Bacopa Quasi-Experiment”, 2014-05-06 ():
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 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).