5 ms·

I just hacked my brain (2015)

64 points by apsec112 6y ago

philipswood 6y ago
Cool, but LinkedIn is probably the worst place to document this...
- dang 6y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
tablespoon 6y ago
This is potential Darwin award material: I watched a YouTube video and know about Ohm's law, time to zap my brain! This guy has the right idea: > Dennis Eckmeier > Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience Consulting, and Advocacy > As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3. don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about to hit the switch: don't. :P
- Sanzig 6y ago
  Yeah... reading it in further detail, he applies current across his head between the mastoid processes. I thought it was local stimulation between two surface electrodes under the ear. A quick look at the literature shows that the targeted structures are too deep for an approach like that, so they have to go across the head. Style points for bravery, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't want to pump over a milliamp of direct current right underneath the squishy mass of goo that contains my conscious self. Especially not with an uncontrolled source like a battery - any sort of stimulator really ought to be current limited. A milliamp is an awful lot, IEC 60601 specifies a 0.1 mA patient leakage current and I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting even that small leakage current to be applied to the head. It's still cool, but yeah, nobody try this at home.
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    > Style points for bravery It's only bravery if you know the risks. :)
  - mastre_ 6y ago
    Can someone explain to this non-EE how current alone, as specified in milliamps in the absence of a specified voltage, can be used to specify a lethal condition? In other words, from here and other sources I'm inferring that 100mA can stop the heart, but does it not matter if it's from a (at?) 9V battery vs 1.5V AA battery?
    - OkayPhysicist 6y ago
      Well, the resistance is a fixed variable here, so voltage and current are tied together. Can't increase the amps without increasing the volts.
- AR_14 6y ago
  The guy was standing while his experiment, right? That is for me the potential Darwin award material here. Actually loosing balance due to this could lead to a potentially lethal head injury.
  - MisterTea 6y ago
    What makes you think no precautions were taken?
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Incredible that this guy is building is own electrodes and sending electricity to his body, but what you are noticing is that he might, potentially, get a head injury because he was standing! I'm sure some injuries were to be counted on in this case.
- Yajirobe 6y ago
  It's a 9V battery. Relax.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > It's a 9V battery. Relax. That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-jennifer-strange-water-drinking/story?id=8970712 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-jennifer... > Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, was among 18 people who entered the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition. They tried to drink as much water as they could without urinating in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console.... "It's just water. Relax." > "Can you get water poisoning and, like, die?" asked the female disc jockey. > "Not with water," a male disc jockey replied. "Your body is 98 percent water. Why can't you take in as much water as you want?" > "Maybe we should have researched this before," the female disc jockey added.... > Strange drank nearly two gallons of water in over three hours on Jan. 12, 2007. During the contest, she could be heard complaining about pain to disc jockeys at 107.9 "The End." > "Oh, it hurts," Strange said, while one male disc jockey remarked that she looked pregnant and another, a woman, said "That is so funny."... > Strange left after taking second place, winning a pair of concert tickets. She then called in sick at work and died in her bathroom just hours after the contest.
    - temp0826 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
    - travisjungroth 6y ago
      >> It's a 9V battery. Relax. >That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this It's also the kind of thinking that leads to getting killed by 9V batteries. https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
    - 99_00 6y ago
      Your example doesn't show why a 9v battery used in this way is dangerous.
Sanzig 6y ago
Damn, that's really cool. My concern with doing this with more than a demo setup would be elecrolysis injury due to long-term exposure to direct current. Humans are basically big bags of electrolyte solution, so applying DC for long periods of time results in ions bunching up at the electrodes and all sorts of nasty chemical effects. This is the main danger when children inadvertantly swallow coin cell batteries: it's not actually the heat that causes GI damage (heat generation from a shorted coin cell is minimal), it's the electrolysis-induced chemical burns that result when the battery pumps a few tens of mA through GI tissue. Is it possible to achieve the same effect using an AC waveform? That would likely be safer since it won't result in polarization. EDIT: also, I wouldn't do this to myself, at least not with a 9V battery and a couple of pieces of aluminum foil...
phn 6y ago
Going on a tangent but upon reading about vestibular reflexes I recalled something I used to do as a kid: When in bed, ready to sleep, I could condition myself to believe the bed was tipping over to the side, up to the point where I would have the reflex of grabbing the sheets to keep myself from falling, similar to jolting awake up after falling in a dream. I wonder if something could be done to manipulate these perceptions without actually zapping the brain.
- Jeff_Brown 6y ago
  I'd love to understand the brain's capacity to fool itself. Sometime in my 30s I discovered I could "make my ears retract involuntarily". I'll think about pulling them back without actually trying to do so, and at some time in the near future that I can't anticipate, they'll retract.
psychomugs 6y ago
Allen Pan leveraged GVS to remote control his friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7FO2Qd6Zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7FO2Qd6Zc
torotonnato 6y ago
Slightly OT, but since the focus shifted to safety: is that battery really dangerous? I'm really asking. I remember, as a kid, testing for charged 9V batteries touching the bare electrodes with my tongue. It was a funny feeling, but that was way before the "little chemist" became the dumbed down shadow of itself and everyone was screaming "safety". For science, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now measuring the resistance of ~5mm of my tongue: it's 90kOhms, that should be a lower bound regarding the experiment.
- antonvs 6y ago
  Here's the story of someone else who decided to measure his body's resistance with a 9V battery: https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
  - torotonnato 6y ago
    The poor sailor was a bit more hardcore though. Fascinating story
BossingAround 6y ago
> The effect has been known for almost two centuries now. Ah good. Nothing like a good ol' electroshock brain treatment from the 1800s, also known as the golden age of brain medicine.

64 points by apsec112 6y ago

philipswood 6y ago

Cool, but LinkedIn is probably the worst place to document this...

dang 6y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

tablespoon 6y ago

This is potential Darwin award material: I watched a YouTube video and know about Ohm's law, time to zap my brain! This guy has the right idea: > Dennis Eckmeier > Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience Consulting, and Advocacy > As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3. don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about to hit the switch: don't. :P

Sanzig 6y ago
Yeah... reading it in further detail, he applies current across his head between the mastoid processes. I thought it was local stimulation between two surface electrodes under the ear. A quick look at the literature shows that the targeted structures are too deep for an approach like that, so they have to go across the head. Style points for bravery, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't want to pump over a milliamp of direct current right underneath the squishy mass of goo that contains my conscious self. Especially not with an uncontrolled source like a battery - any sort of stimulator really ought to be current limited. A milliamp is an awful lot, IEC 60601 specifies a 0.1 mA patient leakage current and I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting even that small leakage current to be applied to the head. It's still cool, but yeah, nobody try this at home.
- kayodelycaon 6y ago
  > Style points for bravery It's only bravery if you know the risks. :)
- mastre_ 6y ago
  Can someone explain to this non-EE how current alone, as specified in milliamps in the absence of a specified voltage, can be used to specify a lethal condition? In other words, from here and other sources I'm inferring that 100mA can stop the heart, but does it not matter if it's from a (at?) 9V battery vs 1.5V AA battery?
  - OkayPhysicist 6y ago
    Well, the resistance is a fixed variable here, so voltage and current are tied together. Can't increase the amps without increasing the volts.
AR_14 6y ago
The guy was standing while his experiment, right? That is for me the potential Darwin award material here. Actually loosing balance due to this could lead to a potentially lethal head injury.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  What makes you think no precautions were taken?
- capableweb 6y ago
  Incredible that this guy is building is own electrodes and sending electricity to his body, but what you are noticing is that he might, potentially, get a head injury because he was standing! I'm sure some injuries were to be counted on in this case.
Yajirobe 6y ago
It's a 9V battery. Relax.
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > It's a 9V battery. Relax. That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-jennifer-strange-water-drinking/story?id=8970712 https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-jennifer... > Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, was among 18 people who entered the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition. They tried to drink as much water as they could without urinating in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console.... "It's just water. Relax." > "Can you get water poisoning and, like, die?" asked the female disc jockey. > "Not with water," a male disc jockey replied. "Your body is 98 percent water. Why can't you take in as much water as you want?" > "Maybe we should have researched this before," the female disc jockey added.... > Strange drank nearly two gallons of water in over three hours on Jan. 12, 2007. During the contest, she could be heard complaining about pain to disc jockeys at 107.9 "The End." > "Oh, it hurts," Strange said, while one male disc jockey remarked that she looked pregnant and another, a woman, said "That is so funny."... > Strange left after taking second place, winning a pair of concert tickets. She then called in sick at work and died in her bathroom just hours after the contest.
  - temp0826 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    >> It's a 9V battery. Relax. >That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this It's also the kind of thinking that leads to getting killed by 9V batteries. https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
  - 99_00 6y ago
    Your example doesn't show why a 9v battery used in this way is dangerous.

Sanzig 6y ago

Damn, that's really cool. My concern with doing this with more than a demo setup would be elecrolysis injury due to long-term exposure to direct current. Humans are basically big bags of electrolyte solution, so applying DC for long periods of time results in ions bunching up at the electrodes and all sorts of nasty chemical effects. This is the main danger when children inadvertantly swallow coin cell batteries: it's not actually the heat that causes GI damage (heat generation from a shorted coin cell is minimal), it's the electrolysis-induced chemical burns that result when the battery pumps a few tens of mA through GI tissue. Is it possible to achieve the same effect using an AC waveform? That would likely be safer since it won't result in polarization. EDIT: also, I wouldn't do this to myself, at least not with a 9V battery and a couple of pieces of aluminum foil...

phn 6y ago

Going on a tangent but upon reading about vestibular reflexes I recalled something I used to do as a kid: When in bed, ready to sleep, I could condition myself to believe the bed was tipping over to the side, up to the point where I would have the reflex of grabbing the sheets to keep myself from falling, similar to jolting awake up after falling in a dream. I wonder if something could be done to manipulate these perceptions without actually zapping the brain.

Jeff_Brown 6y ago
I'd love to understand the brain's capacity to fool itself. Sometime in my 30s I discovered I could "make my ears retract involuntarily". I'll think about pulling them back without actually trying to do so, and at some time in the near future that I can't anticipate, they'll retract.

psychomugs 6y ago

Allen Pan leveraged GVS to remote control his friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7FO2Qd6Zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7FO2Qd6Zc

torotonnato 6y ago

Slightly OT, but since the focus shifted to safety: is that battery really dangerous? I'm really asking. I remember, as a kid, testing for charged 9V batteries touching the bare electrodes with my tongue. It was a funny feeling, but that was way before the "little chemist" became the dumbed down shadow of itself and everyone was screaming "safety". For science, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now measuring the resistance of ~5mm of my tongue: it's 90kOhms, that should be a lower bound regarding the experiment.

antonvs 6y ago
Here's the story of someone else who decided to measure his body's resistance with a 9V battery: https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
- torotonnato 6y ago
  The poor sailor was a bit more hardcore though. Fascinating story

BossingAround 6y ago

> The effect has been known for almost two centuries now. Ah good. Nothing like a good ol' electroshock brain treatment from the 1800s, also known as the golden age of brain medicine.