Astral Codex Ten

Zembrin

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Zembrin

Article

Zembrin is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 28, 2021 and May 17, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Zembrin, a concentrated extract of kanna advertised for low mood and anxiety”; “I wrote up a short page about Zembrin on my professional website”; “Less-well-studed but promising supplements including Zembrin and polygala tenuifolia”. It most often appears alongside kanna, Lorien Psychiatry, SAMe.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 28, 2021
  • Last seen: May 17, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Nootropics Survey 2020 Results
April 28, 2021 · Original source
Zembrin Is Interesting
But I and many other people have had good results with Zembrin, a concentrated extract of kanna advertised for low mood and anxiety. So I asked respondents to specify whether their kanna was Zembrin or something else. Of 37 kanna users, 20 used Zembrin and 17 used something else. The subgroup who used Zembrin reported a mean effectiveness of 6.88, which beats out modafinil to make it highest on the list. After ad hoc Bayesian adjustment, it was 6.72, second only to modafinil as the second most effective nootropic on the list. This really excites me - I've felt like Zembrin was special for a while, and this is the only case of a newer nootropic on the survey beating the mainstays. And it's a really unexpected victory. The top eight substances in the list are all either stimulants, addictive, illegal in the US, or all three. Zembrin is none of those, and it beats them all.
Based on these preliminary results, I wrote up a short page about Zembrin on my professional website, Lorien Psychiatry, and I asked anyone who planned to try it to preregister with me so I could ask them how it worked later. 29 people preregistered, of whom I was able to follow up with and get data from 22 after a few months. Of those 22, 16 (73%) said it seemed to help, 3 (14%) said it didn't help, and another 3 (14%) couldn't tell because they had to stop taking it due to side effects (two headaches, one case of "psychedelic closed-eye visuals"). Only 13 of the 22 people were willing to give it a score from 1-10 (people hate giving 1-10 scores!), and those averaged 5.9 (6.3 if we don't count people who stopped it immediately due to side effects). That's a little lower than on the survey, but this was a different population - for example, many of them in their answers specifically compared it to prescription antidepressants they'd taken, whereas the survey-takers were comparing it to nootropics. Although these findings are not very useful without a placebo control, they confirm that most people who take Zembrin at least subjectively find it helpful.
Inline links: a short page about Zembrin
Peer Review Request: Depression
May 25, 2021 · Original source
The most-studied and best-supported supplements for depression is l-methylfolate. Tryptophan/5-HTP, SAM-e, fish oil and St. John’s Wort may also be helpful. Less-well-studed but promising supplements including Zembrin and polygala tenuifolia. I am currently avoiding discussion of tianeptine, a foreign antidepressant which is sometimes sold as a supplement in the US, until I figure out the legal gray areas around it, but you might consider looking into it on your own. Going through the others one by one:
Zembrin is an extract of kanna, a South African plant. It appears to be an SSRI, but also to have other less-well-understood antidepressant properties that make it work a little faster. It has not been rigorously tested in studies, but has been helpful to me and several people I know. You can read more about it at its Lorien page.
Inline links: its Lorien page
Secretly I suspect Zembrin probably works better than 5-HTP or St. John’s Wort, but there’s not enough evidence for me to recommend it in good conscience.
Link: Troof On Nootropics
May 17, 2022 · Original source
Finally, in my survey, I got impressive results for Zembrin, a certain extract of the kanna plant. This survey fails to replicate that - Zembrin lands exactly where the “how hard is it to get? how fancy is it?” model would predict, which is not very high. I’m not sure why my survey got such strong results. I know I was personally excited about Zembrin, so there’s room for experimenter bias, but I can’t think of how I would have added in the experimenter bias when I was just collecting your ratings. Maybe I bungled the statistics somehow? In any case, it’s a completely average anxiolytic in every way.