4 ms·

tDCS has a very similar problem. There is so much hype (“it does everything: makes you stronger, faster, happier, smarter, and better at video games and jazz”)

tDCS has a very similar problem. There is so much hype (“it does everything: makes you stronger, faster, happier, smarter, and better at video games and jazz”) and anti-hype (“it does nothing and it’s all placebo or peripheral stimulation”)[0]. I know about as much about it as anyone and I think that it a) has tons of promise and b) should not be anywhere near anyone but an research participant for the foreseeable future.

pedalpete 6y ago
Even the commercial versions shouldn't be used outside the lab? A friend is on the board of a commercial tDCS medical company. They don't make the hardware, they just do the stim on patients. I haven't seen the machines, but he says they look like an old school hair helmet from a salon in the 60s.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  The hardware itself is very simple: it's just a constant current source with some safety features bolted on. Research-oriented devices look wild, but it's mostly because cable management isn't a huge priority: better to be flexible than look nice!. It's certainly possible to make a good-looking one: Neuroelectrics's looks like a swim cap and Halo sells a baseball-style hat with a brim. However, the simplicity of the device makes people think its effects will be equally simple. This isn't true. We don't fully understand what the electric fields do to the brain, and the simple story of "turning the brain up/down" almost certainly doesn't hold up. In most cases, we also don't understand the problem to be solved (e.g., what in the brain is causing your depression--or your bad golf game). Taken together, it's a nightmare: poking at an unknown cause with an unknown effect. My colleagues and I have been looking at this in monkeys, which we can measure everything from behavioral effects down to the activity of single neurons. It's very exciting and has, I think, a lot of potential, but it blows my mind that people are already selling products. The crazy thing is that the field has been through this hype cycle before in the 1960s-1970s....
  - pedalpete 6y ago
    Thanks for clarifying and providing more details. We're working with closed loop auditory stimulation for sleep (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02170-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02170-3) as well as other similar techniques. We've been speaking with neurologists here in Australia who are giving us guidance, but if you have any thoughts, I'd be very keen to hear them. Either here, or via email. My address is in my profile. Thanks
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      Cool! We did some work on DARPA's RAM REPLAY program, and there was a consortium trying that for "tagging" memories: they'd pair something to be memorized with a sound during (awake) study sessions, and then play the sound to a sleeping participant to reactivate that memory during sleep. Stephen Simons was the lead from Teledyne; there were also folks from UCR and Endonovo Therapeutics, I think. It sorta seemed to work (here's the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00028/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0002...) , though I remember they ended up needing to build a fancy system to optimize the cue volume so it was loud but not so loud that it woke the participants up.
      - pedalpete 6y ago
        WOW!!! That's awesome. I've read about that work, and other similar studies. We've had a brief chat with the Australian Navy about some of our tech. It's a fascinating field. We come from CSIRO (Australia's version of DARPA), so have some experience commercializing research. But I think we've been surprised at how bad some of the sleep studies are. :o

pedalpete 6y ago

Even the commercial versions shouldn't be used outside the lab? A friend is on the board of a commercial tDCS medical company. They don't make the hardware, they just do the stim on patients. I haven't seen the machines, but he says they look like an old school hair helmet from a salon in the 60s.

mattkrause 6y ago
The hardware itself is very simple: it's just a constant current source with some safety features bolted on. Research-oriented devices look wild, but it's mostly because cable management isn't a huge priority: better to be flexible than look nice!. It's certainly possible to make a good-looking one: Neuroelectrics's looks like a swim cap and Halo sells a baseball-style hat with a brim. However, the simplicity of the device makes people think its effects will be equally simple. This isn't true. We don't fully understand what the electric fields do to the brain, and the simple story of "turning the brain up/down" almost certainly doesn't hold up. In most cases, we also don't understand the problem to be solved (e.g., what in the brain is causing your depression--or your bad golf game). Taken together, it's a nightmare: poking at an unknown cause with an unknown effect. My colleagues and I have been looking at this in monkeys, which we can measure everything from behavioral effects down to the activity of single neurons. It's very exciting and has, I think, a lot of potential, but it blows my mind that people are already selling products. The crazy thing is that the field has been through this hype cycle before in the 1960s-1970s....
- pedalpete 6y ago
  Thanks for clarifying and providing more details. We're working with closed loop auditory stimulation for sleep (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02170-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02170-3) as well as other similar techniques. We've been speaking with neurologists here in Australia who are giving us guidance, but if you have any thoughts, I'd be very keen to hear them. Either here, or via email. My address is in my profile. Thanks
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    Cool! We did some work on DARPA's RAM REPLAY program, and there was a consortium trying that for "tagging" memories: they'd pair something to be memorized with a sound during (awake) study sessions, and then play the sound to a sleeping participant to reactivate that memory during sleep. Stephen Simons was the lead from Teledyne; there were also folks from UCR and Endonovo Therapeutics, I think. It sorta seemed to work (here's the paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00028/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.0002...) , though I remember they ended up needing to build a fancy system to optimize the cue volume so it was loud but not so loud that it woke the participants up.
    - pedalpete 6y ago
      WOW!!! That's awesome. I've read about that work, and other similar studies. We've had a brief chat with the Australian Navy about some of our tech. It's a fascinating field. We come from CSIRO (Australia's version of DARPA), so have some experience commercializing research. But I think we've been surprised at how bad some of the sleep studies are. :o