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Show HN: Quick Rewire – I made web tool to rewire your brain
Hi HN, I work with a mixed group of developers, data scientists and neuroscientists, and for fun recently built a tool inspired by psychological studies. The idea is to demonstrate how quickly technology can change how your brain works, and potentially the impact that technology actually has over our agency without us even noticing.
- cbreynoldson 4y agoCursor disappeared and I had to find a way to quit Chrome without it. Very frustrating. Re: rewiring the brain - these exercises feel like functional neurology exercises, were they inspired by those? "Neuroplasticity" is just a fancy term for learning, really, and if you dig deep enough there are some niche communities online that (at least claim to) use it to heal themselves from various chronic illnesses. Very anecdotal, but lots of anecdotes. I've always thought people in the "tools for thought" domain should explore this.
- evancoop 4y agoCan someone rewire my brain to be hyper-efficient when clicking through articles on HN and dreadfully-inefficient if my mind wanders to fantasy sports?
- jarrenae 4y agoif (distracted < 15000ms) { electrocute = 300ms; }
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- jarrenae 4y agoI'm glad people seemed to enjoy this.
- muhammadusman 4y agoPretty amazing how quickly my brain just started thinking of the cursor going in the opposite direction. By the 5-7th trial, my hand and brain were pretty in sync. Then going back to the normal movement I was 0.41 seconds slower.
- sumnern 4y agodid this twice -- didn't notice much effect the first time (measurable effect was tiny). When I did it again, I was distracted a bit (mind wandering) and sure enough, when I switched back to the "normal" control, my performance was destroyed. Surprisingly effective.
- 22c 4y ago> Whoa, backwards training actually made your reaction time faster by 0.28 seconds! Interesting result. I think I may have subconsciously primed myself for a better performance as the prompt told me that it was about to go back to "normal". I suspect I'd be a lot worse if it switched me without warning.
- jarrenae 4y agoWe considered removing the prompt, but I've found that it's interesting to intellectually know what to do with a familiar action, but be unable to do it to some small degree. The reaction difference would theoretically be amplified over time, and if you were to take the test for 30+ minutes a few times a week, the impact would (again, theoretically) be greater.
- audreyt 4y agoI also got a significant speedup after the rewire (without looking at the prompt.) OTOH, I was consciously visualizing the mirrored position of the target circle on screen and navigating toward that without looking at the mouse cursor, so mentally it's exactly the same movement as the pre-rewire step.
- 22c 4y agoI think I did something similar, too...
- mdrzn 4y ago"Whoa, backwards training actually made your reaction time faster by 0 seconds!" Amazing results!
- bopowers9 4y agoThanks for giving it a try anyway! I helped make this project. Typically to make an intervention like this effective, you'd need to do hundreds of trials. We made the short version 25 trials in the hopes that more people would get to the end.
- PrivateButts 4y agoHad some issues with my cursor just disappearing during trials, lead me to get a slower score by the end!
- jarrenae 4y agoVery interesting. If you don't mind providing some more info, it'd really help us figure this out so others don't run into that problem. What OS and browser were you using? What version? Did you happen to have any extensions running that disabled JS?
- jayleemurf 4y agoI had the same issue! I just restarted the trial.