4 ms·

Electrical currents to the brain improve memory for older adults

51 points by lxm 4y ago

fithisux 4y ago
superchroma 4y ago
"It’s noninvasive and safe" I've read one detailed account of how someone who had this treatment to relieve depression received brain damage as a result, and had difficulty getting acknowledgement it happened afterwards as people continued to cite this phrase, so I am extremely skeptical. This isn't a thing where you want side effects..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  You don't know if you're comparing the same things beyond the part where both involve electric stimulation to the brain. If I'm right in guessing that you're referring to electroshock therapy then these two treatments are about as similar as drinking one glass of water or drinking four liters.
  - superchroma 4y ago
    It was noted elsewhere that this is like trying to fix a hard drive with a magnet, and I think that analogy works. The size of the magnet isn't really the issue if you don't know what you're doing.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      Not really, the brain is not like a hard drive. It is a tangled mesh of wired up neurons that constantly actively fire and stimulate each other to stay functional. They do not function in a remotely similar way. But if you insist on an analogy to putting a magnet next to a hard drive, then you're basically talking about erasing neuronal connections and destroying cells. Mild electric stimulation does not do this. And again, don't confuse something like transcranial direct-current stimulation for something like electroconvulsive therapy. One uses up to 4 mA, the other 800 mA. Seriously, this whole discussion feels like my in-laws complaining about the "scary WiFi" radiation because they don't see the difference between that and radioactivity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
      - superchroma 4y ago
        I was not referring to electroconvulsive therapy, and my point was that we're interfacing with a very custom, very complex system with an imprecise tool.
      - serf 4y ago
        you're making up your own analogy by taking the magnet thing and running with it. let me rephrase the earlier commenter's magnet analogy. a scalpel can end a human life, it can also be used as the tool of salvation : the difference being the methods used and the skill behind the hands holding that blade. let's apply the analogy practically with regard to what we're talking about. The brain, fundamentally, uses small and precisely metered bursts of electricity as one means to network components together to create a functional whole. By zapping whole sub-sections of neuronal material we're apply a similar concept as to what is already used by the brain in a severely imprecise and brute manner. a harddrive writes with small bursts of precisely confined and aimed magnetism. It can also be err'd and cleared with large amounts of strong magnetism. no one ever claimed that a hard drive is anything similar to a brain; the analogy was towards the methodology behind trying to manipulate very-small and complicated structures with very large and powerful tools incapable of finite and small manipulation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mrbigbob 4y ago
  "this isnt a thing where you want side effects" ok, name me 1 medical procedure or medication that has no chance of side effects in all people. For instance with regards to medical procedure a colonoscopy is a pretty routine procedure. However if you've ever had one then will make you sign a form that you accept the possible risks and one of those is that there is a small chance that something tears and you bleed out. the pros of getting one far outweigh the cons however I find the all or nothing argument quite moronic in just about everything i can think of.
RappingBoomer 4y ago
sounds safe and foolproof and definitely not a medical technique that might be found to be questionable in the future
- mattkrause 4y ago
  It’s safe in the sense that the currents are weak enough not to cause thermal damage to the brain (though it can cause skin redness) or directly evoke seizure-like activity. The whole point is to change brain activity, and obviously one hopes it does so in a “good” way, but ensuring that this reliably happens is a much thornier problem. One of the earlier products, which was supposed to make you better at video games, actually made people slightly worse!
Jensson 4y ago
This would be like attaching electrodes to your hard drive to try to fix bugs in your computer, maybe it helps defrag and free up memory but I wouldn't trust it to be risk free until we got more data.
somenameforme 4y ago
Something I think we often forget about the past is that when they did the things we now look back on as see as being borderline inscrutable, it was invariably driven by the belief that it was also safe and productive. It just turns out they were wrong. This reminded me of the not especially brief trend of lobotomization for health benefits. In current society people might like to imagine the reality was something to do with socioeconomics, race, or other various identities. In reality people did genuinely believe in this. One of the victims of this practice was none other than the sister of JFK, Rosemary Kennedy [1]. She went from being a troubled young adult to being incontinent and having the mental capacity of a 2 year old. She was institutionalized with the entire incident being kept secret for decades. I suppose the nice thing is that a treatment like this (back to the electroshock your brain for health) will implicitly entail a reasonable degree of informed consent, because it sounds like a bad idea on the surface. And so if somebody agree to do it, they've presumably done some due diligence and not just relied on The Verge. Approved medical treatments which "seem" much safer, like taking a pill, can entail just as great of risk, but their apparently benign nature belies the importance of similar due diligence. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  At least this is explicitly for older patients. I had a grandmother who got alzheimers bad before she passed. Even if it has bad long term effects, if you start developing alzheimers then 5-10 more years of good memory in exchange for a completely shot brain afterwards would probably be a deal I'd take. Halfway through she had to be put in elder care because she didn't recognize my grandpa and threatened him with a knife. You might as well be gone anyways at that point.
sowbug 4y ago
Transcranial direct-current stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st...
- JPLeRouzic 4y ago
  Here it is transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), isn't?
adenozine 4y ago
[flagged]
- elcomet 4y ago
  I don't understand these dismissive comments. The days of electroshock therapy are over, now medical research is based on evidence. If researchers are able to prove that it is efficient and safe, why shouldn't we use this ? Or maybe you are a medical researcher / doctor and could share more information about this and why you think it is dumb ?
  - superchroma 4y ago
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/tms-damaged-my-brain/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/tms-damaged-my-brain/ It's not safe. It damaged this person. Even one person is a cause for alarm because you cannot undo this.
    - amelius 4y ago
      That is magnetic stimulation, which is something else.
      - mattkrause 4y ago
        Specifically, it’s a few hundred times stronger: the electric fields created during TMS are often > 100 V/m, vs. < 1 V/m here, and the magnetic stimulation has a much faster dV/dt too. I certainly don’t want to dismiss the account linked above—-it’s obviously tragic—but TMS is generally regarded as pretty safe. I agree with the author that we need to understand depression and possible therapies better, but they’re very tough problems.
    - elcomet 4y ago
      If it is not safe then it will not be used. I'm not saying this specific therapy is safe or not, I have no idea about it. I'm just saying, trust the professional researchers and doctors instead of strangers on the internet.
amelius 4y ago
Somewhat related: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201907/vagus-nerve-stimulation-the-outer-ear-takes-center-stage https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201... > Today, a new study (Bretherton et al., 2019) from the University of Leeds reports that self-administered non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) via the outer ear—performed for 15 minutes daily for two weeks at home—boosted "rest and digest" parasympathetic activity and reduced "fight or flight" sympathetic activity in a cohort of adults 55+ years old.

51 points by lxm 4y ago

"It’s noninvasive and safe" I've read one detailed account of how someone who had this treatment to relieve depression received brain damage as a result, and had difficulty getting acknowledgement it happened afterwards as people continued to cite this phrase, so I am extremely skeptical. This isn't a thing where you want side effects..

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vanderZwan 4y ago
You don't know if you're comparing the same things beyond the part where both involve electric stimulation to the brain. If I'm right in guessing that you're referring to electroshock therapy then these two treatments are about as similar as drinking one glass of water or drinking four liters.
- superchroma 4y ago
  It was noted elsewhere that this is like trying to fix a hard drive with a magnet, and I think that analogy works. The size of the magnet isn't really the issue if you don't know what you're doing.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    Not really, the brain is not like a hard drive. It is a tangled mesh of wired up neurons that constantly actively fire and stimulate each other to stay functional. They do not function in a remotely similar way. But if you insist on an analogy to putting a magnet next to a hard drive, then you're basically talking about erasing neuronal connections and destroying cells. Mild electric stimulation does not do this. And again, don't confuse something like transcranial direct-current stimulation for something like electroconvulsive therapy. One uses up to 4 mA, the other 800 mA. Seriously, this whole discussion feels like my in-laws complaining about the "scary WiFi" radiation because they don't see the difference between that and radioactivity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
    - superchroma 4y ago
      I was not referring to electroconvulsive therapy, and my point was that we're interfacing with a very custom, very complex system with an imprecise tool.
    - serf 4y ago
      you're making up your own analogy by taking the magnet thing and running with it. let me rephrase the earlier commenter's magnet analogy. a scalpel can end a human life, it can also be used as the tool of salvation : the difference being the methods used and the skill behind the hands holding that blade. let's apply the analogy practically with regard to what we're talking about. The brain, fundamentally, uses small and precisely metered bursts of electricity as one means to network components together to create a functional whole. By zapping whole sub-sections of neuronal material we're apply a similar concept as to what is already used by the brain in a severely imprecise and brute manner. a harddrive writes with small bursts of precisely confined and aimed magnetism. It can also be err'd and cleared with large amounts of strong magnetism. no one ever claimed that a hard drive is anything similar to a brain; the analogy was towards the methodology behind trying to manipulate very-small and complicated structures with very large and powerful tools incapable of finite and small manipulation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrbigbob 4y ago
"this isnt a thing where you want side effects" ok, name me 1 medical procedure or medication that has no chance of side effects in all people. For instance with regards to medical procedure a colonoscopy is a pretty routine procedure. However if you've ever had one then will make you sign a form that you accept the possible risks and one of those is that there is a small chance that something tears and you bleed out. the pros of getting one far outweigh the cons however I find the all or nothing argument quite moronic in just about everything i can think of.

RappingBoomer 4y ago

sounds safe and foolproof and definitely not a medical technique that might be found to be questionable in the future

mattkrause 4y ago
It’s safe in the sense that the currents are weak enough not to cause thermal damage to the brain (though it can cause skin redness) or directly evoke seizure-like activity. The whole point is to change brain activity, and obviously one hopes it does so in a “good” way, but ensuring that this reliably happens is a much thornier problem. One of the earlier products, which was supposed to make you better at video games, actually made people slightly worse!

Jensson 4y ago

This would be like attaching electrodes to your hard drive to try to fix bugs in your computer, maybe it helps defrag and free up memory but I wouldn't trust it to be risk free until we got more data.

somenameforme 4y ago

Something I think we often forget about the past is that when they did the things we now look back on as see as being borderline inscrutable, it was invariably driven by the belief that it was also safe and productive. It just turns out they were wrong. This reminded me of the not especially brief trend of lobotomization for health benefits. In current society people might like to imagine the reality was something to do with socioeconomics, race, or other various identities. In reality people did genuinely believe in this. One of the victims of this practice was none other than the sister of JFK, Rosemary Kennedy [1]. She went from being a troubled young adult to being incontinent and having the mental capacity of a 2 year old. She was institutionalized with the entire incident being kept secret for decades. I suppose the nice thing is that a treatment like this (back to the electroshock your brain for health) will implicitly entail a reasonable degree of informed consent, because it sounds like a bad idea on the surface. And so if somebody agree to do it, they've presumably done some due diligence and not just relied on The Verge. Approved medical treatments which "seem" much safer, like taking a pill, can entail just as great of risk, but their apparently benign nature belies the importance of similar due diligence. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

thatguy0900 4y ago
At least this is explicitly for older patients. I had a grandmother who got alzheimers bad before she passed. Even if it has bad long term effects, if you start developing alzheimers then 5-10 more years of good memory in exchange for a completely shot brain afterwards would probably be a deal I'd take. Halfway through she had to be put in elder care because she didn't recognize my grandpa and threatened him with a knife. You might as well be gone anyways at that point.

sowbug 4y ago

Transcranial direct-current stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st...

JPLeRouzic 4y ago
Here it is transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), isn't?

adenozine 4y ago

[flagged]

elcomet 4y ago
I don't understand these dismissive comments. The days of electroshock therapy are over, now medical research is based on evidence. If researchers are able to prove that it is efficient and safe, why shouldn't we use this ? Or maybe you are a medical researcher / doctor and could share more information about this and why you think it is dumb ?
- superchroma 4y ago
  https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/tms-damaged-my-brain/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/tms-damaged-my-brain/ It's not safe. It damaged this person. Even one person is a cause for alarm because you cannot undo this.
  - amelius 4y ago
    That is magnetic stimulation, which is something else.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Specifically, it’s a few hundred times stronger: the electric fields created during TMS are often > 100 V/m, vs. < 1 V/m here, and the magnetic stimulation has a much faster dV/dt too. I certainly don’t want to dismiss the account linked above—-it’s obviously tragic—but TMS is generally regarded as pretty safe. I agree with the author that we need to understand depression and possible therapies better, but they’re very tough problems.
  - elcomet 4y ago
    If it is not safe then it will not be used. I'm not saying this specific therapy is safe or not, I have no idea about it. I'm just saying, trust the professional researchers and doctors instead of strangers on the internet.

amelius 4y ago

Somewhat related: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201907/vagus-nerve-stimulation-the-outer-ear-takes-center-stage https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201... > Today, a new study (Bretherton et al., 2019) from the University of Leeds reports that self-administered non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) via the outer ear—performed for 15 minutes daily for two weeks at home—boosted "rest and digest" parasympathetic activity and reduced "fight or flight" sympathetic activity in a cohort of adults 55+ years old.