Today i took some ketamine. Probably somewhere around 50 milligrams, because i had weighed 60 mg but decided not to take all of it.
The effects where realy euphoric and i definately got into a psychedelic mind state. But at some point i felt i was pretty disconnected from reality.
So i felt like testing my mental abilities a bit, to see how far my perception of myself was off.

For this purpose i played an online computergame that supposedly tests your abilities to think logically and to plan ahead, and i expected to perform realy bad.
After all i was feeling pretty wobbly and disoriented.

But to my surprise, i effortlessly broke my own record. I played another game, and my performance was average, but i felt i didn't realy try hard enough. So i played it again, and...i also broke my own record on this game.

After that i lost my motivation to play any other games, but i was pretty surprised still.

Could ketamine have nootropic effects?

I think so.

I find many psychoactives capable of a boost in cognitive function, not just based on my own experience but also the experience of others. Many smokers of tobacco like J.S Bach and Mark Twain praised nicotine for its ability to produce a sharp concentration, and they produced amazing works of art like this.

I think that maybe with ketamine, it's a little different than with tobacco or stimulants. There probably is a link between it's antidepressant effects and it's nootropic effects.

Maybe the common thread is that small to medium amounts of ketamine, taken on a not too regular basis, can boost brain health.

That may sound weird or paradoxical, since excessive use of ketamine is associated with cognitive decline and maybe brain damage as well. (i believe that's still an issue of debate)

But when you look at all the known side effects of ketamine abuse, you will find that depression is also on that list. While ketamine is known to be a powerfull antidepressant.

This is pure speculation, but maybe that has something to do with tolerance. If ketamine would activate some kind of reset mechanism in the brain, then that would explain both the nootropic and the antidepressant effects. But if that would be the case, and it would be used too often, then tolerance would be a sign of a weakening of that natural reset mechanism. It would then become increasingly harder to trigger that mechanism, leading to a decrease in all kinds of cognitive functions.

A good reason to be very carefull with this substance.

If by nootropic effects you mean weather or not it enhances cognitive abilities such as memory, motivation, learning etc... Most likely not given its antagonism of the NMDA receptor producing both depressant and dissociative effects greatly impairing cognition as a result.

Now having said that, over excitation of its target receptor (NMDA) via endogenous ligands such as glutamate has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's producing cognitive deficits, e.g. dementia, learning, motivational problems, etc... Ketamine given its antagonist action at the NMDA ionotropic receptor reduces this neurotoxic over excitation inducing a neuroprotective effect which I guess may kinda count as a neurotropic effect when looking at the bigger picture.

Nicotine is definitively a nootropic agent but way too addictive to be trifled with talking from experience and its addictive regardless of whether or not its been isolated from tobacco and regardless of ROA (patches to e-cigs). Besides, your brain will very quickly rebound to these effects in a matter of days and you WILL develop dependency.

If I were to recommend a nootropic agent which greatly jolts up brain power in respect to motivation, concentration, memory, learning, etc... it probably be cocaine in its raw form, the coca leaf. This will give the monoamines dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine essential to the nootropic effects listed earlier a furious kick in the right direction.

Well, i've been looking into this a bit more now, and i must say that the mechanism behind ketamine's antidepressant effects seems to be quite complex. As someone with a limited knowledge on neuropharmacology, i must admit that i don't quite understand what exactly is going on. But the consensus seems to be that ketamine increases neuroplasticity.

That could mean, theoretically, that there might be some nootropic effects as well, i think.