TheOtherDave is right. Eliezer borrowed the word but not the entire concept.
What I meant was, "you'll become more stupid/slow-thinking/... but have memories of when you were much smarter, and that is intolerable."
This pretty much describes the first month after my stroke. It's no fun at all... but it isn't intolerable. People are pretty good at recalibrating.
That said, as has been said by others, the other piece of it is perhaps more problematic: your head will be stuffed with memories that you can no longer fully process. This is OK, as long as the corrupted versions of those memories that you end up creating in the course of trying to process them aren't dangerous.
By way of analogy, consider system A with a max string length of N chars trying to read a database f...
Limitless is a movie coming out this Friday which includes nootropics as a major plot device. I think that the way they are portrayed in the movie, and the subsequent media discussion (if any) about nootropics would be of interest here, even if the movie isn't.
From what I can tell, the movie is about a guy who uses a drug to improve his mental capabilities, uses those to radically alter his life, who is then targeted because its just that genre of movie.
Just a heads up, if anyone is interested.