twenty minutes, I lie-babbled like a person pretending she wasn’t asleep by picking up the conversation where she left off. The problem was I hadn’t left off anywhere; there was no context. There was only the void of meaning imposed by off-white sheets and off-white tables in an off-white room.
The voice would wake me, and the voice would ask if I had slept and if I had dreamed. Every time the answer to both was yes. But the data would show I hadn’t actually entered REM sleep. Why were they testing me? All the questions I’d been asked from the get-go had an air of aggression to them. Had I done something suspicious? Had I mispronounced the name of a drug? I wanted answers as much as they putatively did, so why would I taint the data?
Anyway, altering the body’s data would be tough no matter how much I worried about accidentally tainting it with worry. The body was the source of my measurement; I had to let the body be. But as I gave myself over to the test, I grew suspicious of my own feelings: When should I trust how I feel, and when should I trust how the measurements say I feel? If they’re not the same, what’s wrong, the measurements or my feelings? The sleep study results dictated a certain set of symptoms, and if I didn’t actually experience those symptoms, then something wasn’t right. Logic dictated it must be the measurements: When shown the test results, I’d find that they didn’t match the previous two studies. Nor did they match my life. But they are correct, the doctor would say, because we followed the protocol exactly. What was I doing wrong? I’d ask. I would blame myself, I would find in the gaps between sleep-study versions the fallibility of measurement, the problem of trying to turn subjective experience objective with numbers. But those gaps would shrink with time as I convinced myself I was wrong: The numbers must be right because they’re numbers, because they’re without interpretation and therefore without the uncertainty caused by bias, environment, and self-reflection. I was those numbers, and no more. But without interpretation, could those numbers mean much, if anything at all?
Finally, the last nap, which went like all the other naps: asleep in three or four minutes; stage 1 sleep the whole time but a sleep still full of dreams, dreams of school rooms too small to sit in, of an accidental gun purchase, of parents cloned and turned evil, of playing a 4/4 beat on the drums; sleeves bunched up when I woke, Infinite Jest on the bed next to me; a cleared-throat alarm clock through the intercom that, like me, turned mechanical by the separation of sound and body—her body, her voice; my body, my data.
Then body and voice came together and the woman was in my room a quick knock later. How’d you sleep? she asked.
Just fine, I said.
Good, she said, and began peeling away the rest of my electrodes, easing them out of their glue beds, out of my hair—her fingers broad but delicate. Some women like to wash their hair twice, she said, and I wondered about those women who didn’t, and all the men.
When I got home, I washed my hair twice, and like some women, I put a small dollop of cream in it for smoothing. Yes, I could be relative to other people, not just to myself. Or I could tell myself I might be. Really, I was alone—alone taking my first pill in two weeks, alone waiting for my data to arrive and to tell me whether I’d changed over those in-between-studies years, because for measurements to change, the source must too. Otherwise, how can we ever trust numbers in the first place? And there, alone, I hoped desperately that I’d stayed exactly the same, because even a solid diagnosis can make measurements worthwhile and trustworthy, can make them suggest something within gone wrong. But the lack of a name, or a name that stands in for a lack, would mean I was somehow incapable of producing meaningful measurements. What’s the point of data if they don’t provide certainty, if they don’t stabilize? It wasn’t, in fact, better to rule something out. I wanted the numbers to say “narcolepsy,” because narcolepsy came from somewhere. Narcolepsy was the result of specific data. Narcolepsy was meaning. Idiopathic hypersomnia wasn’t even recognized by my word-processing program. It was a failure of quantification—measurement’s inability to verify or to repeat—and if what ailed me was uncertain and unverifiable, and if what ailed me came from numbers I produced, then I was uncertain and unverifiable too.
Waiting for my hair to dry, I stared at myself in the mirror. My dress’ defined waist and back zipper made me feel like I’d accomplished something. But had I? I stared a little more, let my gaze grow unfocused as the sun setting cut a last triangle of light across my mirror. Had I?
The word nootropic comes from the Greek for “mind” and “turning.” To turn the mind—to move it over itself, like turning over an engine, spinning the parts alive—is to look inward. Or it is at least to believe that the solution comes from within, not from those around us. What solution? The specifics don’t matter; what matters is that there is a solution—something being done—that creates the problem: not being productive or efficient enough. To solve this problem, which is less a personal problem and more a symptom of society, we might try to work with others, all those workers we’re networked to; we might try to change daily demands, not to make them easier, necessarily, but to change value from quantitative to qualitative. Or we might try a nootropic, an individual, personal solution to a collective unease with the way things are.
To take a nootropic (pills called Alpha Brain or Sprint or Ciltep) is to separate oneself from the world in order to stand out in it. To take a nootropic is to demand measurement: We measure ourselves so we can compare who we are now not with other people but with previous and future versions of ourselves. Improvement, then, via nootropics and the like, becomes a necessarily solitary pursuit, with each person using the tools of the internet—apps, trackers, &c.—to keep herself separate from the rest of the internet. To take a nootropic is to insist on the self, alone and lonely, as the source of and solution to the problems of the day.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Feel inadequate. Feel that you’re not getting enough done. Feel that other people have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps when you’re still in your socks.
2. Go online to choose a collection of drugs—a “stack,” in nootropics parlance—that appeals to the dual responsibility to be productive and to be independently so.
3. Wait for the shipment to arrive, tracking it obsessively in between visits to Facebook and pings from an app that asks, “What are you doing right now?”
4. Collect two days’ worth of work and one day to do it.
5. Set your app to quiz you at two-hour intervals, frequent enough to collect sufficient data, infrequent enough for your productivity to thrive.
6. Take a pill. Sit down at your computer.
7. Wait for the pill to kick in, to tickle the brain into action. Feel neurotransmitter activity increasing and decreasing according to the manufacturer’s promises, because if there is no change, then what you’re doing—taking a pill—is a waste of time and effort; it’s inefficient.
8. Start typing. Start annotating the pill with PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. Thank Microsoft, thank the nootropics manufacturer, thank yourself.
9. Don’t talk to other people—they may get in the way of your optimized state. If you must talk, listen to yourself: Hear your words flowing as they do for a nootropics-juiced Joe Rogan.
10. Track your output. Later, you can use these numbers as further justification for the pill. You can remind yourself, in moments of weakness, that it was not other people who got you to that “heightened state”—it was you (and some chemicals).
11. Go online to prove how focused you are.
12.
