(I promised @ayamaguire some notes on piracetam - I’m a couple days late, but here they are. @dandelionpie, you may find this useful, though I told you a lot of it already in person.)
I did my first huge writeup on piracetam... seven goddamn years ago, and that’s still probably the best info I have. I also made a one-pager about it for Stim Table. But here’s some additional quick notes, and let me know if you have other questions.
1. Most people who take piracetam seem to take it at relatively low doses regularly (e.g. 800mg daily) in the hope of cognitive benefits like improved memory. I didn’t notice that when I self-experimented, but I haven’t tried it in a long time. I typically take it in substantially larger doses (e.g. 3 grams) for acute effects. N.B.: Piracetam dosing is witchcraft, I don’t think anyone really knows anything about it - but that’s fine, since you can’t hurt yourself by taking too much.
2. The effects I get when I take piracetam and choline without anything else are, roughly: a sense of mental clarity, mood lift / relief from anxiety or neurosis, a sense of “freedom” in that things that normally seem nebulously hard seem easier, delightful music enhancement, sometimes other sensory enhancement (e.g. colors seeming brighter).
3. The effects are typically very different when I take it with caffeine - I get hyperfocused, and it feels a little harder-edged. I haven’t tried it in a long while, though, since that’s rarely what I want.
4. You have to take it with a choline source or it stops being effective and you get side effects (mostly headache and irritability). I use alpha-GPC, at a ratio of about 8:3 piracetam to alpha-GPC. (Again, dosages are witchcraft; I got started on that because that was the doses the pills came in.) Alpha-GPC is fairly expensive, and there are cheaper alternatives like choline bitartrate (which should probably be taken 1:1), but I haven’t found them to work as well. I don’t get side effects if I take adequate choline.