No, there is no evidence at all. However, the medication I have been taking, is known to improve the ability to focus in people with a certain DNA marker. And I have that DNA marker and I take this medication. The same goes with tDCS, over and over it is proven to improve certain brain functions, I have been using this device for the last 3 years now, the device has built in checks that show me that the current is actually going through my skull, I've seen the studies that show the flow of the electrons and I know where the electrodes are placed. I think we can make some assertions on the effects this has had on my brain?

Regarding the minor issues, I sometimes have small bouts of depression, nothing too bad really, I never contemplate suicide for example, but still, it is nice that after a tDCS session these depressions tend to disappear. It could be coincidence, but there are research papers http://www.tmslab.org/publications/165.pdf that also seem to imply that tDCS helps with depressions.

The mental exercise consisted mainly of no longer using my episodic memory (I have very limited time related memory storage, it's really pathetic in some sense) and reading hundreds of audiobooks on the following topics:

Psychology, Early Roman Civilization, Early Christian Religion, General History, Battle Tactics, Modern Warfare, Late Christian Religions, Philosophy, Story Telling, Programming (well, I just learned that on the computer, not with an audio book).

As a result of doing that for a long time (over 10 years), 5 hours per day, I am now a theoretical subject matter expert on a wide range of topics.

In my experience, trying to assess the effects of a medication or technique on yourself is an exercise in frustration. Although you can do legitimate double-blind experiments on yourself, it's usually impossible to properly control the variables which can affect the outcome (diet, exercise, sleep, work, stress, relationships, etc. all have an impact).

So, I'm a big fan of the "assume it works because the studies say it should" approach that you describe. It's not clean or certain but it's eminently practical, and it has the fringe benefit of giving you a lot of opportunities to benefit from placebo :)

One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance.

From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.

Can you expand on this? What is the medication you have been taking? With Dual N Back, do you think it improves WM on a temporary basis or is the increase permanent?

If you have the gene, when taken during the day, Modafinil allows you to focus for up to 12 hours straight, on the subject of your choosing (but you should choose something, or your attention span is wasted). With that focus, it is much easier to learn new things.

[1] http://youscript.com/healthcare-professionals/why-youscript/...

[2] https://www.23andme.com/

That's amazing. As someone who dabbles in nootropics and casually follows tDCS, that looks fantastic and I wish you the best in the future. We're not far from something utterly fantastical in terms of human augmentation and people like you are on the forefront.

That said: What have you won with this? What have you been able to do as a near-genius that you could not have done otherwise? What about the practical correlates of intelligence, like income or social status?

I think a major flaw in many of these self-experiments is that it uses tests that seem to have decent validity, but don't cross-validate that with real-world results.

I would definitely read whatever you published; I've bookmarked your website and will extract anything I can from it.

In other aspects of life, well, that's a hard one. I consider myself one of the world's first cyborgs, with several implants (I have both magnetic sensory perception and RFID implant to computer authentication to give you some examples).

The plans I'm working on now in my leisure time are full of self indulgence. I'm working on art pieces that I'll be using for my performance art work, where I'm integrating my implants with my clothing and transportation. I have all the parts and materials, it's mainly a matter of giving each aspect of the project the time it needs to complete.

Are the implants your projects? Would you not have been able to do them before you started with nootropes and tDCS?

Do you feel like your art is better or more refined?

I hope these questions aren't invasive; feel free to not answer any of them; I just thought it valuable to ask because there are very few people that seem to have gone as far into this as you have, you claim to have strong results, and I'd honestly really, really like to have additional motivation to continue doing them myself.

Are these current, professionally published, individually administered IQ tests? There are only so many brands of those. "IQ tests" on the Internet are completely bogus and are not validated.

The statement you make, even if observed under the most rigorous conditions with proper tests, may just mean that you are enjoying a training effect after taking so many IQ tests. Most people don't take many IQ tests over the course of a whole lifetime, and are taken by surprise by the item content of any given IQ test. Some kinds of IQ test items have HUGE training effects (also known as practice effects), and you only get one shot at using those to estimate your IQ. (The Wechsler Block Design subtest is an outstanding example of IQ test items with strong practice effects.)

How much carry-over from all this do you get in the rest of your daily life activities outside the testing room? That's always the relevant question for any intervention that is supposed to increase IQ. Does anyone else comment that you are smarter now than you used to be?

Further, academia is corrupt. Very little of the work academics do is interesting. The academic process is intensely political and the probability of something getting published is as much a function of who reviews it as it is of the quality of the work, if not more. I say this as someone exposed to academia currently.

Never limit what you can draw conclusions from! Draw conclusions from anything you can observe; but do moderate the strength of your conclusion, and the degree to which you integrate that conclusion, by the strength of the process used to produce that evidence.

But I certainly wouldn't expect the sort of rigor others are asking for in this thread - obviously this is more hobby than science, and I'd consider personal reports interesting despite being anecdotal.

However, if you are willing to participate, you could be part of the control group, doing only the Dual-N-Back workshop for example.

I know we should be doing blind controls, but that's really too hard to implement at this stage and we have the research papers to fall back on anyway, which have tested and proven that the tDCS device does indeed have all sorts of beneficial effects.

I'm really in it for the gains. I don't even care if half of it is placebo! As long as I can measure an increase in intelligence, preferably through testing, then that's good enough for me. I will always maintain a hefty bit of skepticism towards my own intelligence, just in case I'm fooling myself, but so far it seems like the gains are real.

Say, if I publish my findings and 100 people follow and see increases in their intelligence, then five years later it is published that my methods are rubbish. Will that invalide the intelligence increases these 100 people have experienced?

If that happens, then you've learned something very useful: whatever methods and conclusions led you or those 100 people to the conclusion that their intelligence increased - is rubbish.