ad. 1) I asked him about the best way to learn chemistry and biochemistry.
ad. 2) I asked how he was able to write such vividly and creatively.
ad. 1 Ah, biochemistry. It's weird because I've studied various aspects of it, and already understand the shape of various organic compunds. Things like the Krebs cycle, heavy metals, organic brain drugs, etc. I've got a vast file on drugs, which is my specialty.
My Drugs folder currently has 4,708 files, all organized. It's a treasure trove of the most fascinating brain drugs, poisons, nutrients and sex hormones. The learning was done out of curiosity and as part of the path to becoming healthier myself.
The best way to learn about that stuff is the Internet, Wikipedia, etc. Textbooks should be available at your institution. It's easy to get lost though, in the vast troves of specialized knowledge about various reactions, etc.
What's really important is if you know the important things, like Vitamin D deficiency being the cause of most cancers, or that fish oil can save both your retina from ARMD and your brain from aging.
A lot of what's really important is left out, or hidden in the details. So what's really important is to maintain a wide perspective, and always ask what institutional structure you're being fed info from.
The educational institutions are set up to overwhelm people with detail. Not that they care about whether it will be memorized past the exams, but there's a more important purpose: by filling a person's head with tons of data, it prevents all but the most determined from understanding at a global perspective.
After the deluge of data comes the call to specialize. That's how the schools work at later stages. So the second trap is specialization.
I'm not a specialist except in the areas I decided, but maintained a critical view of everything. The most important thing isn't what they teach you or what's in the textbooks, but to doubt and question it all. To assume they're wrong until they prove themselves right.
If you want to succeed academically, the best way to go about it is to memorize all the stuff they want you to memorize, be just creative enough to show the modicum of independence that's part of their programmatic justification, and if you decide to go further, specialize.
They weed people like me out not because I wasn't smart - had good to excellent grades especially in the sciences - but because they are a threat if they're too independent.
The other trick is they teach that their path is the only one. Fear and guilt. But they're wrong: you can get a better education by hunting it for yourself. There's a price to pay though: no access to expensive labs unless you're rich enough to buy or rent them yourself, no supercomputers, and of course no accreditation.
But academic credit is becoming more worthless by the day, in the real world of employment. Especially relative to the cost of education, which is fearsome. Hell, for the cost of post-public education one could set up one's own business and do quite well. I value self-study more because it encourages the most important attribute of a human being. It lets that attribute flower: conscious will and enterprise, and critical thinking that goes beyond the bounds of the establishment.
As for your chemistry exam, again that's likely mostly formulaic memorization. I hid cheat-sheets inside my calculator for that. The rules of low to mid-level chemistry are based on rate equations and varous simplifications of the dynamics of atomic and molecular equilibria. Energy and entropy transfer.
Lies is how the student is led forward. The equations are simplifications of often massive collections of individual atoms. They work well to describe the simple systems they're applied to, but become horrendously unworkable to describe it all in atomic granularity.
It was once predicted that weather simulation would be commonplace by today, but it still can't predict the weather for more than a day or two ahead. Even then it's a gross oversimplification. Read about Edward Lorenz and the Lorenz attractor. Read Chaos: Making a New Science. That single book will make you cry as it opens your eyes. I read it when I was a kid, before I started programming fractals.
The really important things are the details. The devil lives in the detail, and the deepest detail of them all is a real devil: the emergent properties of matter as it interacts with other matter and receives information outside the predictable realm. The stuff that can't be simulated by any quantized computation system no matter how powerful. Freedom comes from down there. All the possibilities of this universe come from there.
Yet the abstractions taught in textbooks omit everything but the most skeletal elements of reality. They are caricatures, and while useful to say, make a simple chemical reaction, or build a fractional distillation column or gas chromatograph, they have led science dangerously astray.
The most dangerous thing is to reverse causality and become like so many scientists out there, who if confronted with a reality which doesn't match their equations, rule out the reality in favor of their delusions.
Take this case for example. Read the comments section. The device may be a fraud or it may work, but it was demonstrated to work in reality. Yet read how many scientists and aspiring scientists have only the most vicious attacks. Can you find even a single comment attempting to explain why the device works?
Remember, science is about explaining why reality is the way it is. The horse pulls the cart, not the other way around.
Today, science is becoming so lost in its abstractions and so addicted to dirty money from super-rich Big Pharma and Big Government that it hardly resembles its original form. So twisted by huge interests to look in particular directs while ignoring or villifying alternatives which have been proven to work.
I'll give one other case: 'heart disease' aka. arteriosclerosis. Totally preventable, not with fancy drugs but with Vitamin C. Not caused by cholesterol whether bound up in LDL or HDL. Those are the symptoms of something else wrong: preclinical scurvy.
Microtears are always forming in blood vessles, including inside the heart. They are patched with collagen, the protein that makes your skin. Vitamin C (the levo optoisomer) links up to form the enzyme that makes collagen. Dextroascorbate is just as powerful an antioxidant but doesn't fit into the enzyme, so it's useless. Synthetic vitamin C is often racemic: a varying mix of the two isomers.
When enough collagen can't be made, the body uses the next best thing to patch those tears: lipoproteins. It's better than bleeding to death internally, so evolution made that choice. Die now or die years later from blood vessels occluded by lipoprotein.
Dr. Abram Hoffer and Linus Pauling worked on that one. But vitamin C can't be patented: there's no profit in it. They were vilified and thrown out of respected science circles.
A recent cholesterol-lowering drug was pulled from the market. Find out its name. It was so successful at reducing cholesterol that it caused brain damage (the brain needs cholesterol to function), and worse caused internal bleeding. Why? It prevented the secondary patching system from working, leading to hemmorage in the tiny blood vessels of the brain, which are the most vulnerable to that sort of thing. Hemmoragic strokes, they're called.
Answer 2:
I couldn't form sentences properly or write after some dozen DXM trips years ago. It was a horror of self-inflicted brain damage, but in a way it was a good learning experience. Before that I was a very good writer. Now after intensive therapy with piracetam and tons of supporting nutrients, I can function even better than before the problems.
Answer 3:
Severe immunopathology from an early age, worsening with puberty. I've still got the massload of paperwork from the disability application process. It was very rigorous, and in the end I qualified, though I'm to be reviewed in 2012. Since my good doc died (Abram Hoffer), and few others are accepting patients, it may be the end for me. So I figured I'd live the last few years doing what I'd always wanted, which is enjoy life and do my projects
As for your experience, it mirrors mine. Choline from egg yolks got rid of my initial headache, which was very mild and started on day 3. It isn't really necessary to take a choline supplement, and excess choline can itself cause depression, lethargy, and brain fog - from reports on forums I've visited.
Regular consumption of egg or meat is enough for me now.
The thing to remember is the brain recycles most of its choline. So unless you've got the bad luck to be a person with genetics that make your brain a poor recycler (very few do), then only initial supplementation is necessary.
The reason is that the expansion of the cholinergic system when piracetam is started, itself slows down and reaches saturation within a few weeks. Only as new receptors are being built is more necessary, then once the new construction is done, the pool of recycling choline reaches a new equilibrium. During the early days a supplement may be necessary due to the new demand, that's all.
And I'd avoid at all costs the ridiculously overpriced Alpha-GPC. If you needed choline - only due to either headaches or other symptoms that don't go away in 24 hours, then buy some cheap choline citrate from eBay. It will work just as well. Alpha-GPS is something like 24x more expensive than the citrate, but it certainly isn't 24x more potent.
You can try other racetams too
Oxiracetam works well but costs much more. It enhances music and colour more than piracetam - by about 25-50%. And it tastes sweet, but the combination of sweet taste and high price mean it will ruin your budget, because it can be used to sweeten all kinds of foods to make them more delicious
I must go and have my oatmeal breakfast now.
