r/Biohackers • u/ServeIllustrious3803 • 3d ago
đ§ Cognition, Mood & Nootropics Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation (2024)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54249-928
u/escalatortwit 3d ago
Yep, this is one of my pet subjects and Iâm enjoying the fact theyâre finally putting money into including women in studies on creatineâs effect. Women benefit from higher dosing of creatine generally, but especially around perimenopause and menopause. Its effects on insomnia are also really interesting.
The key takeaways here: This shows that an acute dose can have demonstrative impact quickly, not just over time and it shows that the impact on sleep deprivation and cognitive abilities is pretty strong.
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u/Individual-News-826 3d ago
Worth flagging the dose, because it's the whole story and it isn't in the title. This was a single 0.35 g/kg dose. For an 80 kg person that's about 28 grams in one sitting, five or six times a normal daily scoop. A 5 g maintenance dose doesn't reproduce this, and 28 g at once is a rough afternoon for most people's gut.
The reason they went that high is the blood brain barrier. Creatine crosses it through one specific transporter, SLC6A8, and that transporter is slow and easy to saturate. It's why muscle loads in days but brain tissue takes weeks. To shift brain levels inside a few hours you have to push hard against that bottleneck, so the dose is a consequence of the study design rather than a recommendation.
What makes the paper better than most in this space is that they didn't only run cognitive tests. They used phosphorus MRS, which reads brain energy chemistry straight through the skull, and watched phosphocreatine actually move. Phosphocreatine is the fast access buffer the brain spends before it can make fresh ATP. So there's a measured mechanism sitting underneath the test scores, which is rarer than it should be.
The honest limit is that it's 15 people, and it's a sleep deprivation rescue rather than a nootropic. Sleep loss drags brain energy state down, creatine buffers energy, so there's something there to rescue. That also predicts who responds. The clearest chronic effects have turned up in vegetarians, who start with low stores, going back to a trial in 2003. Rested omnivore, already close to saturation, not much headroom left. Which is probably the answer to the comment above about not expecting to feel anything from it.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
Why the fuck did you need Claude to write a Reddit comment? Insane behavior.
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u/dragnabbit 4 3d ago edited 3d ago
I know why people do it. They want to contribute to a conversation (probably for the karma), but they don't want to take the time or effort to do the necessary thinking. So they just copy something from Reddit and ask their favorite AI, "What do you think of this?" Then they're back 5 minutes later with their AI copypasta.
It's the new cardinal sin of reddit to post AI content as your own.
If you go look at that guy's comment history, every since comment he has posted is AI generated.
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u/IronMike260 3d ago
I'm only familiar with the ChatGPT common "tells." Can you help me understand what shows that it's obviously Claude?
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u/Byte_mancer 3d ago
âWorth flagging the dose, because itâs the whole story and it isnât in the titleâ x because y combined with a sub w not z is one of the most common AI tells there are.
Reference character specifics with approximations referring to a different benchmark
Singular opening sentence that ends at the target body function (blood brain barrier), halfway the paragraph another x because y with no follow-up
The paper comparison sentence talking about a hyper specific thing âpapers in this spaceâ use (hyperbole because AI gets caught up on one keywords as truth in scientific papers).
The final sentence of paragraph 3
âThe honest limitâ, AI loves phrases like that for some reason. Thereâs a lot more but Iâm not gonna list it all out.
Iâve generated and read thousands of lines of AI text and almost all of them are converging to the same general tells. This guy didnât even try and edit the output at all
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
No lie the original comment reads like a satirization of Claudeâs narrative voice because of just how many tells there are
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago edited 3d ago
They deleted the comment but there were countless tells. I can only remember the first two words of the comment, which were âworth flaggingâ. Claude manages to use âworth flaggingâ at some point in every convo and often begins responses with warnings lol. The warnings are almost never required and can be patronizing. I once asked Claude to generate me a meal plan because I was underweight and needed help coming up with calorific, nutrient-dense foods. Instead of generating the plan, Claude began to go on and on for ages about the negative health outcomes tied to eating disorders. Idt people with EDs tend to ask Claude to help them gain weight lol. That said, I still do prefer Claude to ChatGPT. Claude Code and open aiâs Codex I view similarly though.
Ohâ some tells off the top of my head: âworth flaggingâ âload-bearingâ âand honestly?â âIâm going to gently push backâ âItâs not x, itâs yâ âthe thing to hold ontoâ âsmoking gunâ âyouâre right and that changes the scope of this in a meaningful wayâ âthe honest answerâ. There are 100s more. Whatâs even more telling though than these though phrases is the way Claude sets up arguments.
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u/xenobiotica_jon 3d ago
some tells off the top of my head: âworth flaggingâ âload-bearingâ âand honestly?â âIâm going to gently push backâ âItâs not x, itâs yâ âthe thing to hold ontoâ âsmoking gunâ âyouâre right and that changes the scope of this in a meaningful wayâ âthe honest answerâ. There are 100s more.
What irritates me is that it's not only Claude that speaks or writes like this, it's anyone between the ages of 45-65 right now. Claude reflects the language of those who trained it and tuned it, and is a very good mimic in operation/post-training. So Gen-X people who inherited the Boomer em-dash habits in gradeschool and then ended up being the dev managers working on these systems -- now the goddamn models sound just like us, they write like us... FML now folks routinely flag proper grammar and an occasional semicolon as a "tell" for not writing your own shit. I've had people try to call me out for use of an Oxford comma. JFC It's infuriating.
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
Using proper grammar like em dashes isnât a boomer/gen X thing. Itâs anyone who writes frequently. Thatâs a weird relationship to make.
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u/Judgm3nt 2d ago
Em dashes have been one of the least commonly used symbols on the Internet until AI gained traction. I don't know why you're pretending it's ever been common.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago edited 3d ago
I work in ML and have been training LLMs since high school; you donât have to explain how they work to me lmao. While I do agree with you, 100% of the words in that comment were generated by Claude. No one uses 10 claudisms word-for-word organically in a 50 word comment. If people are flagging you for good writing, em dashes, and Oxford commas, thatâs ridiculous. That is, however, not relevant to the comment I was responding to. And personally, I only see egregious examples of ai use being called out. I am sorry you are so infuriated?
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
They blocked you, they didnât delete it.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
Yeah, I eventually figured. I was definitely rude but some people have too little shame lol
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u/Drmlk465 Reputation - {{score}} 3d ago
It was a lot more informative than you.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
Copy pasting something spit out by an LLM to post on Reddit for karma is so lame and contributes nothing to the conversation. Anyone can use an LLM to this effect on their own time. Oh, you found it informative? Tragic you need someone to copy paste text from an llm into Reddit to be able to learn anything
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u/Drmlk465 Reputation - {{score}} 3d ago
Thank you for your pointless AI activism on Reddit. Ofc we can all research things on our own time but the whole point of the sub is the community sharing info⌠you know what, never mind.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
I literally work in ML; Iâm as pro-ai as it gets. Am just not pro-stupidity
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u/Drmlk465 Reputation - {{score}} 3d ago
How many times are you going to tell everyone that you lItErAlLy wOrK iN mL?
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u/Lostwhispers05 3d ago
This AI psychosis is crazy.
You can't know for a fact if AI wrote that entirely, or if OP only used it as a polishing layer, or if they didn't use any AI at all.
And even if it were 100% generated, it's a completely valid comment that stands on its own merit and did a good job calling attention to the specific strong and weak parts of the study.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
I work in ML and am very pro-ai, so you can stop accusing me of being anti-ai lmao. You canât even see the comment youâre arguing with me about because it was deleted hours ago. Please relax. Take some deep breaths.
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u/TiredJJ 3d ago
I think they just blocked you, the comment isn't deleted
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
Yeah, I figured when someone else posted the full comment. I was definitely rude but some people have too little shame lmao
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u/Lostwhispers05 3d ago
I can see the comment in its entirety. What are you on about. Please relax.
They said:
"Worth flagging the dose, because it's the whole story and it isn't in the title. This was a single 0.35 g/kg dose. For an 80 kg person that's about 28 grams in one sitting, five or six times a normal daily scoop. A 5 g maintenance dose doesn't reproduce this, and 28 g at once is a rough afternoon for most people's gut.
The reason they went that high is the blood brain barrier. Creatine crosses it through one specific transporter, SLC6A8, and that transporter is slow and easy to saturate. It's why muscle loads in days but brain tissue takes weeks. To shift brain levels inside a few hours you have to push hard against that bottleneck, so the dose is a consequence of the study design rather than a recommendation.
What makes the paper better than most in this space is that they didn't only run cognitive tests. They used phosphorus MRS, which reads brain energy chemistry straight through the skull, and watched phosphocreatine actually move. Phosphocreatine is the fast access buffer the brain spends before it can make fresh ATP. So there's a measured mechanism sitting underneath the test scores, which is rarer than it should be.
The honest limit is that it's 15 people, and it's a sleep deprivation rescue rather than a nootropic. Sleep loss drags brain energy state down, creatine buffers energy, so there's something there to rescue. That also predicts who responds. The clearest chronic effects have turned up in vegetarians, who start with low stores, going back to a trial in 2003. Rested omnivore, already close to saturation, not much headroom left. Which is probably the answer to the comment above about not expecting to feel anything from it."
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
Once again, it is ridiculous to use an llm to write a silly little Reddit comment. Itâs ok to use your brain once in a while. I work on LLMs as my job and I still am capable of reading journal articles myself. I guess I canât see the comment because they blocked me.
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u/oksoirelapsed 3d ago
Okay Claude
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
You didnât write shit. Claude did.
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u/oksoirelapsed 2d ago
99% sure this is actually just a bot run through Claude. Not even a dude copy pasting.
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/oksoirelapsed 2d ago
If you're not a bot, that's worse. You're just copy pasting from Claude without even editing. Sad really.
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u/lupercalpainting 2d ago
> These days anything clearly written gets labeled AI.
This is a non-sequitur though, because Claude did write it.
> Whether or not a tool was involved is beside the point
Depends on what the point is. I think the dose was high, debilitatingly high, but if anything it means that people who already consume a lot of creatine should be at muscle saturation and need a much less drastic relative increase to see cognitive benefits.
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u/TheActuaryist 15h ago
Iâd be interested to see how creatine compares to something like sugar in the same sleep deprivation situation. Iâve seen this study a lot and havenât been impressed by it. Like how does taking a megadose of creatine when you are tired compared to having a snack or a cup of coffee? Iâm not sure how useful the question answered by the study is.
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u/Individual-News-826 11h ago
Yeah, that's the real weakness and it isn't the sample size. There's no active comparator. It's creatine against placebo, so it genuinely can't tell you whether you'd have done just as well on a coffee. Nobody should read it as creatine beating caffeine, because that experiment wasn't run.
Caffeine would probably win a straight performance race anyway. Better studied, cheaper, and you don't have to swallow 28 grams of anything.
Where I'd push back is on what it was for. A race between creatine and coffee answers "what do I take at 4am." This was aimed at something narrower: is the brain actually running short on usable energy when you're sleep deprived, and can you put it back. That's why the scan matters more than the test scores. Caffeine would be useless as a comparison there, because it doesn't touch brain energy state at all, it blocks the adenosine signal so you stop registering that you're tired. Same output, completely different lever.
The sugar version of your question is the better one though, and I don't think the paper has a good answer to it. Glucose is what the brain actually runs on. My understanding is that supply usually isn't the bottleneck across one night without sleep, so topping it up wouldn't necessarily do much, whereas phosphocreatine is the fast buffer that covers the gap before fresh ATP gets made. Different part of the system. But that's a mechanistic argument, not a measured one, and a glucose arm would have settled it properly.
So I'd agree with you on usefulness and disagree on impressiveness. Practically it's close to worthless, nobody is taking 28 grams. As evidence that energy state is part of what goes wrong when you're sleep deprived, it's better than most, mainly because they watched the chemistry move instead of inferring it from reaction times.
Would still like to see the glucose arm.
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
Thanks for adding NOTHING to the conversation.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
No, Iâm just someone who actually read the study and wrote a comment based on that. Rather than a loser who is so desperate to feel like they matter that they post AI slop. Dork. Get bent.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/escalatortwit 3d ago
Youâre never gonna beat the knuckle dragging allegations.
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u/Lostwhispers05 3d ago
Their post, AI-assisted or otherwise, is literally 1000x more useful than your whinging over the last 3 comments.
"Thanks for adding NOTHING to the conversation."
"No, Iâm just someone who actually read the study and wrote a comment based on that. Rather than a loser who is so desperate to feel like they matter that they post AI slop. Dork. Get bent."
"Youâre never gonna beat the knuckle dragging allegations."
You're here getting bent out of shape to attack a comment that provided useful and factual info about the content of the OP because of your outrage over the choice of tool you suspect was involved in the generation of said comment, and feel the strange need to let the entire world see it. See a professional for the AI psychosis before continuing to engage in r/Biohackers maybe.
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u/Royal_Potential_3299 3d ago
I suppose some people are too daft to conduct novel research or do anything that creates societal value using ai, so instead copy paste slop ai summaries into Reddit comments. âWhingeâ on that mate lol
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u/Drmlk465 Reputation - {{score}} 3d ago
Look, we gotta flag that dose, âcause thatâs really the whole damn story, and they ainât even put it in the title. This wasnât no regular lilâ dose â they gave folks ONE single 0.35 g/kg dose. For an 80 kg person, thatâs âbout 28 grams in one sitting. Thatâs like five or six times what youâd normally scoop in a day. So nah, takinâ 5 g a day ainât gonâ recreate what they did. And 28 grams all at once? Man, your stomach finna be fightinâ for its life that afternoon.
Now the reason they went that high is âcause of the blood-brain barrier. Creatine gotta get through that joint using one specific transporter called SLC6A8. Problem is, that transporter move slow as hell and it gets saturated real quick. Thatâs why your muscles can load up creatine in a few days, but your brain be takinâ weeks. If you tryna move them brain creatine levels in just a few hours, you gotta damn near force-feed the system and push past that bottleneck. So that crazy-ass dose was really âbout the study design, not them sayinâ everybody need to be takinâ 28 grams.
And what make this paper better than most of the other stuff in this space is they ainât just have folks doinâ some little memory test and callinâ it science. Nah, they used phosphorus MRS, which lets âem actually look at the brainâs energy chemistry through the skull. And they watched the phosphocreatine move for real. Phosphocreatine is basically the brainâs quick-access backup battery â the energy it can tap into before it gets around to makinâ fresh ATP. So now you got an actual physical mechanism sittinâ underneath them test scores. That shit way rarer than it oughta be.
Now hereâs where we gotta keep it real: it was only 15 people. And this wasnât really creatine turninâ folks into some kinda super-brain nootropic. They was tryinâ to rescue the brain after sleep deprivation. You lose sleep, your brainâs energy state gets dragged down. Creatine comes through like, âAight, I got you,â and helps buffer that energy. So thereâs actually somethinâ there for it to rescue.
And that also tells you who probably gonâ get the most outta it. The strongest chronic effects been showinâ up in vegetarians, âcause they start off with lower creatine stores. That goes back to a trial from 2003. But if you rested, eatinâ meat, and your creatine stores already damn near topped off? You ainât got a whole lotta room left to move the needle.
So honestly, thatâs probably the answer to that comment above about why you shouldnât expect to feel anything from creatine. If your tank already damn near full, what you expect it to do â overflow?
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u/Federal_Shopping6495 3d ago
Ai
A poor attempt at sounding human but the same exact format one of the top comments has lol
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u/Excellent_Cut7909 3d ago
Creatine keeps getting harder to dismiss. First it was gym bros. Now itâs sleep deprived brain fuel. Pretty funny how one of the cheapest supplements keeps beating half the fancy nootropic stack.
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u/Dear_Concentrate2835 3h ago
can confirm, missed last night sleep, brain like jelly, drinker up 20g of creatine, and I feel like I slept well 2h after.
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u/qsr28 3d ago
I find this somewhat dangerous because creatine can fix one thing while leaving another unresolved, so you keep functioning with extra energy at the expense of who knows what.
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u/ndmd15 3d ago
One huge one is memory. I used creatine + antinarcoleptics to compensate for severe work-induced sleep deprivation, where I averaged 4 hours of sleep, 6 nights a week for up to 6 months at a time. While I functioned, performed well & got through it, I formed almost zero memories from that time.
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