Brain Society: Microdosing from Nicotine to Melatonin
Fabian Foelsch
Fabian Foelsch is the founder and CEO of Europe’s no. 1 performance food brand BRAINEFFECT which supports the mental performance of human beings through innovative ingredients and dosage forms. By 2022, he wants to help 10 million people in Europe to become brain athletes. The BRAINEFFECT products do not only improve concentration and focus, they also increase one’s well-being, energy levels and support healthy sleep and recovery. Fabian builds on his own experience as one of the top biohackers in Europe, former professional athlete and strategic business consultant. He pursues his passion for science as a university lecturer, while spending his free time on the water as a passionate kitesurfer.
Fabian Foelsch explores microdosing legal substances to enhance mental
We are at the edge of a new society where we are not just competing with nature, but also with machines. What differentiates humans from machines is creativity, empathy, and mental performance. This is why mental performance is the key.
Summary
- Mental performance, creativity, and empathy are the key human differentiators in a "neuro society" where artificial intelligence and machines increasingly replace traditional jobs.
- Microdosing is the practice of taking small amounts of a substance to maximize beneficial effects on concentration or sleep while minimizing potential risks, side effects, and addiction.
- To optimize caffeine, consume small doses like green tea or espresso throughout the day to mirror adenosine accumulation and stay in the optimal zone without experiencing a crash.
- Nicotine can enhance memory and motor coordination when microdosed at 1-2mg via gum, but regular breaks are necessary to balance nootropic benefits with the risk of addiction.
- Effective melatonin use requires microdosing between 0.3mg and 1mg to support natural sleep cycles, as high doses often cause early waking and interfere with the body's own hormone production.
Article
Brain Society: Microdosing Caffeine, Nicotine And Melatonin For Peak Performance
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Fabian Foelsch Argued That In An Age Of Artificial Intelligence, The Human Edge Would Depend Less On Muscle And More On The Chemistry Of Attention, Sleep And Self-Control
On a November stage in Helsinki, Fabian Foelsch stood before the crowd at Biohacker Summit 2019 and made a case that felt both timely and faintly unsettling: the future, he suggested, belonged to the brain.
Foelsch, founder and chief executive of BRAINEFFECT, delivered his presentation, *Brain Society: Microdosing from Nicotine to Melatonin*, on 1 November 2019 at the Biohacker Summit in Helsinki, Finland. His thesis was simple enough to fit the mood of the age and provocative enough to linger after the lights came up. As artificial intelligence, automation and machine logic advanced into more corners of daily life, he said, the traits that would distinguish human beings were not brute output but creativity, empathy and mental performance.
“The emerging neuro society,” as he framed it, would reward those who could think clearly, recover deeply and sustain focus without burning themselves out.
The New Contest Between Human Minds And Machines
Foelsch spoke not as a detached academic but as a practiced evangelist of performance culture, drawing from his background as a former professional athlete, consultant, lecturer and self-described biohacker. He told the audience that nutrition and routine had shaped his thinking for 15 years, and that the conversation around optimisation was shifting.
“Nutrition and routines have a vast impact on our mental performance,” he said. “I totally believe that what we eat has an effect on our brain, and everything is moving from the body to the brain.”
It was a line that captured the wider drift of wellness culture at the end of the decade. The old grammar of fitness, sculpted abs, punishing workouts, visible strain, was giving way to a subtler vocabulary of mood, focus, stress and sleep. In Foelsch’s reading, the market had already noticed. Health apps, influencers and investors were increasingly turning away from body transformation and toward cognitive enhancement. The gym mirror had been replaced by the neural dashboard.
His term for this shift was “neuro society”, a world in which mental sharpness became both commodity and shield.
Microdosing As A Philosophy Of Restraint
At the centre of Foelsch’s talk was microdosing, though not in the psychedelic sense that often dominates cultural fascination. He focused instead on legal substances, ordinary compounds hidden in plain sight, caffeine, nicotine and melatonin, each familiar, each widely used, each, he argued, commonly misused.
“Microdosing is the practice of taking a substance to create beneficial effects while reducing risks and side effects,” he said. “It is about a trade-off between benefit and risk to provide the edge we need in this new society.”
There was a distinctly modern logic in this formulation. Not abstinence, not indulgence, but calibration. The body became a system to be tuned. The dose, not the substance alone, determined whether one crossed from enhancement into disruption.
Caffeine, Or How To Avoid The Crash
Foelsch began with the world’s most socially acceptable performance drug. Caffeine, he noted, improved concentration, reaction time and task performance, especially under conditions of fatigue. But the problem was not caffeine itself. The problem was the way people used it: in large, dramatic waves that pushed them briefly into alertness before dropping them into the familiar trough of jitters and exhaustion.
His argument hinged on adenosine, the molecule that builds through the day and contributes to the feeling of sleep pressure. Instead of overwhelming that process with heavy doses, he suggested matching it with smaller and more frequent amounts of caffeine.
“You should microdose caffeine with small amounts to mirror the accumulation effects of adenosine,” Foelsch said. “By using small doses, you hit the optimal beneficial zone and avoid the jitters and the caffeine crash.”
In practical terms, that meant green tea, small espressos, or other modest servings spaced through the day rather than one oversized morning surge followed by repeated rescue attempts. He also warned that caffeine taken too late could quietly degrade sleep quality, with timing affected by whether someone metabolised it quickly or slowly.
The promise here was not intensity but steadiness. Peak performance, in Foelsch’s telling, looked less like overclocking than careful pacing.
Nicotine, The Uncomfortable Nootropic
If caffeine was unsurprising, nicotine was the portion of the talk that sharpened the room’s attention.
Foelsch was explicit that smoking was disastrous and should be avoided. But nicotine, separated from combustion, was presented as something more complicated: a legal stimulant with nootropic potential, capable in low doses of supporting memory, motor coordination and mental task performance through its effects on acetylcholine and dopamine pathways.
He described acetylcholine as the “oil in the engine” of the brain, a phrase crafted to turn dense neurochemistry into something vivid and mechanical. The case he made was not for habitual use but for caution, low dose and strategic breaks.
His recommendation was microdosing at around 1 to 2mg, often via gum rather than cigarettes or high-dose alternatives. Yet even as he endorsed nicotine’s cognitive effects, he did not conceal the danger embedded in the compound. Addiction, he noted, was the obvious and unavoidable risk, and regular pauses were necessary to prevent nootropic ambition from slipping into chemical dependence.
The unease was part of the point. Biohacking often lives in that tense territory where efficacy and hazard share a border.
Melatonin And The Lost Night
If the first half of the talk was about sharpening the day, the second was about repairing the night.
Foelsch turned to melatonin, the sleep hormone that had become a staple of modern supplementation and, in his view, a victim of excess. Most commercial doses, he argued, were far too high. Instead of restoring natural rhythms, they often distorted them, helping users fall asleep only to wake too early, groggy and under-recovered.
“Microdose melatonin to reduce the delta between your current level and the natural level you would have without light and stress,” he said. “Small amounts work best to help you fall asleep without disrupting your body’s natural rhythm.”
His recommended range was 0.3mg to 1.0mg, a fraction of the quantities commonly sold. The aim was not to flood the system but to bridge the gap between the body’s depleted evening state and the hormonal curve it might have reached in a less frantic, less illuminated life.
It was one of the more resonant ideas of the session: that modern living had not merely tired people out but chemically estranged them from sleep itself. Blue light, stress, late exercise, lingering stimulation, all of it pushed against melatonin’s rise. The supplement, then, was not a sedative shortcut so much as a corrective to the conditions of modernity.
Performance, Parenthood And The Ethics Of Self-Care
Late in the session, the atmosphere softened. Foelsch, who had told the audience he had recently become a father, was asked whether microdosing could help someone become a better parent. The answer he gave shifted the discussion away from optimisation as vanity and toward something more intimate.
“Caring about yourself is an act of love,” he said. “You can only spread love if you have love inside yourself. If you care about your personal performance and health, you can be a better parent and give your best to your children.”
In a field often caricatured as self-absorption dressed up as science, it was a notable turn. Sleep masks, earplugs, CBD oil, tiny doses of melatonin, these were framed not as selfish rituals but as ways of protecting one’s capacity to be present for others.
That did not erase the commercial undercurrent of the event or the fact that Foelsch’s company sold products tailored to these very needs. But it did lend the talk a recognisable human gravity. Performance, in this account, was not simply about winning more. It was about fraying less.
A Vision Of Precision In An Exhausted Age
What Fabian Foelsch offered at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki was more than a guide to stimulants and sleep aids. It was a worldview built on dosage, timing and the belief that human beings, pressured by technology and overloaded by modern habits, could still reclaim an advantage through finer self-management.
There was something both seductive and revealing in that vision. The substances were legal, the quantities small, the rhetoric pragmatic. Yet beneath the language of optimisation lay a deeper confession about contemporary life: that many people no longer trusted rest to come naturally, focus to arrive unaided, or resilience to survive without intervention.
In that sense, the talk was not merely about caffeine, nicotine or melatonin. It was about the strange discipline of living in an era that demanded constant alertness while steadily eroding the conditions that make clarity possible.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki