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Electrical stimulation can boost brain's willingness to engage in mental effort
- epicureanideal 4y ago"Remember where ze troops are moving or you vil get ze shock" - Not surprising that electrical stimulation would boost mental effort.
- ipsum2 4y agoThat's an inaccurate description of the paper. The "shocks" are continuous, not reward driven. Both control and experimental groups received the electrical current.
- PolyphonyReq 4y agoAs a person with ADHD I'd be super curious how we respond to it.
- zadler 4y agoBRB just going to find a wall socket
- tjpnz 4y agoHow was it? Are you ok?
- LoganDark 4y agoyeah, ADHD is a terrible life-destroying menace and it would be nice to have something that could motivate me to eat food more than once every few days. (I'm referring to the fact that it made us drop out of school and lose 3 jobs. It has, objectively, made our life absolute hell. And we thought we were just lazy or stupid for over a decade until we found out about ADHD. Stimulants don't help us.) -Emily
- Quequau 4y agoOr in my case cook the heathy, cheaper, food that I actually enjoy eating rather than the ultra-processed, pre-made, food like substances that make my stomach ache.
- wincy 4y agoThat’d be nice, I take Adderall every day and still weigh 300 pounds. It wears off and I crave ice cream like none other.
- DanHulton 4y agoHave you looked at other similar medications? I'm on Vyvanse, which is very similar except that it only comes in a time-release form. Adderall has a time-release version, but you may not be on that. If it seems to wear off after 4-6 hours, you're not on the time-release version. I find that i feel the effects of my Vyvanse nearly all day, and it's only for the last few hours of the night that it fades. So though I do have to be a bit careful then to similarly restrict eating, if I can trick myself by like, brushing my teeth early or drinking a lot of water before it wears off, that can help with (though obviously not cure) the binge eating.
- 58x14 4y agoI posted above briefly about my experience with a TES device. While my usage was occasional, I did have a very unique perceived response to a session, and it wasn’t dissimilar to stimulants prescribed for ADHD. However, that response didn’t last much longer than a few minutes after removing the device. I also didn’t feel the mild pseudo-euphoria I commonly experience with ADHD medication, which seems a significant element of resolving ADHD symptoms.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> I also didn’t feel the mild pseudo-euphoria I commonly experience with ADHD medication, which seems a significant element of resolving ADHD symptoms. This is more of a side effect, which disappears over time. Relying on the euphoria of stimulants to get work done is a dead end, so be careful with this assumption.
- hecticjeff 4y agoMaybe this is why Apple still hasn’t properly grounded it’s MacBooks, that light buzz you get is a brain boost!
- callesgg 4y agoThat is not the MacBook itself, it is the power adapter not having a ground pin. The power adapter extension cord has a ground pin, you can use the extension cord if you want to ground the computer.
- themitigating 4y agoBecause the transformer doesn't have a metal case and once the voltage is lowered at the transformer the danger of electrical shock is reduced (as in the effects of it) so there's no reason to ground the laptop chassis.
- callesgg 4y agoThat is probably why it is considered legal to sell the product, yes. The high frequency buzzing you feel in your hands as you place them on the computer when the incoming power is not a proper clean sinus wave is unpleasant. Stoping that buzzing would be a good reason to ground the adapter even if it not legally required.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> The high frequency buzzing you feel in your hands as you place them on the computer when the incoming power is not a proper clean sinus wave is unpleasant. I’ve used countless MacBooks over the years across several countries and even on square wave UPS systems. I’ve never experienced anything like this. This is literally the first time I’m hearing about this phenomenon. The way people are talking about Apple products as having some sort of weird grounding defect in this thread is honestly kind of baffling, given that they obviously have built a product that complies with all international regulations around the world.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoFinally middle management gets to use those cattle prods. Its suprise stimulation time.. while we are at it, lets brand those asses in seats. Yeehaw..
- amelius 4y agoHow long can you keep doing this?
- poulpy123 4y agoelectric and/or magnetic stimulation starts to be used to treat depression in treatment resistant patients
- bilekas 4y agoI would imagine the brain is responding to an abnormality and releases some stimulant to get you to figure out what's going on. Clever idea but I really wonder the long term effects!
- ilostmyshoes 4y agoIt depends on the circuit being stimulated but yes there is usually some sort of adaptation with enough exposures to a stimulus over a period of time. Long enough breaks can prevent it though
- mattkrause 4y agoThe current thinking is that it’s an electrical effect. Brain activity consists of intricate patterns of electrical activity, created as neurons process and transmit information. tACS, the method used here, creates electric fields inside the head, which interacts with neurons’ own electrical activity. The effects are pretty subtle—-it can’t make a neuron spike on its own and thus release neurotransmitter. However, it can shift the timing of spikes caused by its “natural” activity”, and thus change those activity patterns. (My group looks at this in animal and computational models, where we can measure this directly).
- bilekas 4y ago> However, it can shift the timing of spikes caused by its “natural” activity”, and thus change those activity patterns. That's a super cool activity, sounds so simple to manipulate your brain into the 'productive' behavior.
- mattkrause 4y agoIf only! The effects turn out to be pretty complicated because other ongoing brain activity shapes the stimulation effect (and vice versa). Sometimes, the same stimulation can even produce totally opposite effects. Elsewhere in the thread, I linked to an article we wrote about this and other challenges for doing (useful) brain stimulation.
- tropsis 4y agoI suffer from mental and physical effort aversion (avolition), I wonder if this could be helpful for me.
- wincy 4y agoI find amphetamines works pretty well for me.
- tropsis 4y agoI can't take amphetamines, because I suffered three psychotic episodes in the past.
- aliqot 4y ago[flagged]
- tropsis 4y agoOh wow, such an insightful comment! I'm cured! /s
- aliqot 4y ago[flagged]
- tailspin2019 4y agoYou seem to be making a bunch of assumptions about the person you’re replying to.
- pineaux 4y agoYou know, being compassionate usually feels better than feeling right. Being right also gets you less far in life. Just a little life lesson I learned the hard way after 40 years of "being right". I used to make comments like this. Still occasionally do, old habits die hard. Anyway, you also find out that being compassionate is also usually more right than being right. The problem is that, when trying to be right, you stop being inquisitive. Now you might ask, "hey, you know, I always think people are lazy, good-for-nothing whiners, but now you are telling me that there are people that have some kind of neurological problem that makes it a lot harder for them to overcome the initial friction of starting a project/thinking deep?" Or if you dont follow me in this argumentation: Would you tell a cripple to "Stop whining about the most trivial of inconveniences, and just walk. We all learned to walk as kids, you are doing yourself and all the other cripple kids a disservice!"
- ada1981 4y agoCurious if this is similar to the effect of binaural auditory stimulation. I use Brain.fm for focus and its great.
- mattkrause 4y agoIf you’re curious about how this sort of brain stimulation works, I just published a fun little explainer in PLOS Biology. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001973 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- 58x14 4y agoThank you for this! I’m reading now and you strike a nice balance (for me at least) between simple explanations and deeper science. Do you have any suggested introductory reading material for those interested in neuroscience? More detailed and technical than pop science-esq, without requiring subject matter expertise?
- mattkrause 4y agoThanks-that's what we were aiming for! Are you interested in anything specific? Neuroscience is an absolutely massive field. At one end of my department, some folks are poking at the atomic structure of individual ion channels; at the other, people are looking at how social factors affect the brain and vice versa. It's hard to think of any one book that does it all justice. On the other hand, there's been a flood of interesting books lately, so there's almost certainly something for you. Since you're on HN, you might like Grace Lindsay's Models of the Mind. It's about using math and physics to probe the brain, but it's a nice light read that focuses on analogies; no walls of impenetrable equations. If you like this, there are a ton of books that dive more deeply into the math to read next. I've heard good things about Luiz Pessoa's The Entangled Brain, but haven't read it. It's more general neuroscience than focused on applications of math. People love Gyorgy Buzsaki's books Rhythms of the Brain and The Brain from Inside Out. I couldn't really get into them, in part because he was--loudly--wrong about the brain stim stuff in that article--but that's more of a personal beef. If you want something more like a textbook, the standard is Kandel's Principles of Neural Science. It touches on almost everything, though often not in a particularly exciting or up-to-date way. It's not the worst book for a class, but it'd be a slog to power through in bed. Instead, I'd recommend Levitan and Kaczmarek's The Neuron: Cell and Molecular Biology. It covers a bit less (individual cells up through small neural networks), but I like the writing a lot more. Another approach might be some hybrid science-biographies. These include Lessons from the Lobster, which is about Eve Marder and her work. The lobster stomach is a really fascinating circuit: seemingly simple, but capable of really complex behavior. The principles she worked out there have huge implications for more complex brains (like ours). Similarly, Brain and Visual Perception is about how David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel worked out some of the circuits in primary visual cortex--and won the Nobel Prize. I have not read Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight, but people seem to like it. It's about a brain anatomist realizing that she's having a stroke. Oliver Sacks' books are probably the standard bearer in this category. Some of the explanations are a bit dated, especially in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (understandable, as it's from 1985), but the descriptions of the symptoms are fascinating. Some anti-recommendations: I'd avoid Rodger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. It did get me interested in moving from CS to Neuro, but its explanations are, to put it EXTREMELY charitably, not very mainstream. Jeff Hawkin's book is not nearly as far out there, but his ideas also don't have a lot of traction. Stephen Grossberg's stuff is very polarizing: some ideas are very interesting, but also sometimes presented in ways that don't tie in well with the rest of the field, so I wouldn't start there. That's a random walk through my reading list! If you're interested in a particular niche, let me know. There's also cool stuff about drugs, weird animals, sensation, etc...
- mavu 4y agoSo tasing people, makes them do stuff. got it.
- mattkrause 4y agoNah, it's literally thousands of times weaker; just on the threshold of perception.
- 58x14 4y agoI spent ~$600 a few years back to buy a thoroughly tested TES device (https://www.platoscience.com/en-us/pages/product https://www.platoscience.com/en-us/pages/product) and I only ended up using it a handful of times for novelty purposes. My prescribed medication (little orange footballs) regularly helps me overcome executive function inhibition, and I was hoping this tech could work as an alternative or supplement. There’s a lot of friction in setting up a session, because in order to have proper electrical conductivity, these devices typically require you to add some contact pads soaked in salt water. It becomes noticeably unpleasant for me after only a minute or two - a very particular hybrid sensation between heat and… tingling? Pinching? Combined with salt water dripping down my face, the initial appeal faded quickly. I’d like to try it again, but it’s been sitting in a drawer for years, so I wonder if the battery hasn’t degraded. I don’t think I’d like to replace any components on such a device…
- sbayeta 4y agoJust an idea, hope it's not stupid: Maybe you can get/prepare some kind if gel solution similar to what they use when doing an electrocardiogram? Maybe that would make the experience a little better.
- 58x14 4y agoA great suggestion, thank you. The issue with this approach is that I have longer hair and a gel may have more difficulty bridging contact between the device and my scalp, plus it likely requires more effort to clean up. I might look into this.
- mattkrause 4y agoYup! That's what we do in my lab. SignaGel is a conductive gel. It'll mostly stay in place and stays wet a lot longer than the sponges, but it is a little gross. Get it from a medical supplier rather than Amazon, where the individual tubes are massively overpriced. You might also be interested in 10-20 paste, which is a sticky conductive putty. It's a bit more expensive, but it stays put. Instead of the bands, you can also try a neoprene "swimcap" style holder. Some of the tingling is unavoidable--the currents are driving fibers in the skin--but you can do a few things to reduce it. First, make sure there's good contact with the scalp: fully coat/saturate the electrodes and make sure they're pressed tight. The lower the impedance, the better. because the "dose" is specified in terms of current and you want to use as little voltage as possible to deliver that. Second, gradually ramp up the current instead of just switching it on/off. The sensation will diminish a bit over time anyway, so slowly increasing the current will make it more bearable. The difference between on/off and a 30 second ramp is really striking! We've used a topical anesthetic to block sensations, but it's a giant pain--it takes an hour to kick in and you need to tightly cover it too. Finally, be careful because you can burn the skin!
- testemailfordg2 4y agoProbably something Neuralink can assist with in future...Zap the brain with electrical stimulation if brain is not willing to engage in mental effort...
- cypherpunks01 4y agoI recently got an Alpha-Stim CES device for anxiety, it's used by people to treat insomnia and depression as well. The research is still not enough to make a strong determination on effectiveness of these and I figured it would mainly be a placebo device, but actually I have tried it for the past weeks and found it has helped treat anxiety - a similar impact to taking a low dose of Ativan for me. It doesn't directly have long term impacts, but I find reducing anxiety in the moment can build up memory for better mental practices in the future. I use it for a 40 minute session 2-3 times a week, especially if things are feeling really difficult when I might ordinarily need to take an anti anxiety med. The effects do last longer then the treatment duration, many hours afterwards for me. It can help me meditate as well, increasing my focus and reducing mental distractions a bit. If you turn it up too high, it starts to give you a dizzy/vertigo feeling, the recommendation is to run it just below that level. Anyone else have experience with the Alpha-Stim or other CES/tDCS/tACS devices for mental health? I wish the nice research devices like in the study were available to the public, there are a ton of settings and modes they are able to test in studies like this, that you'd have to buy a dozen consumer devices of questionable quality to get any similar flexibility.
- 58x14 4y agoI mentioned my experience in another thread - a few years back when I was researching devices, the PlatoWorks TDCS/TES device seemed to have a higher level of scientific rigor behind it than many of the other consumer devices available online.
- swader999 4y agoWhere do I tape on the wires?
- seydor 4y agoThat is an important addition to our VR headsets
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoTime to develop thinking caps! https://youtu.be/SR5BfQ4rEqQ?t=18 https://youtu.be/SR5BfQ4rEqQ?t=18