6 ms·

Noninvasive theta-burst stimulation enhances skill learning

151 points by dr_dshiv 3y ago

throwaway743 3y ago
Be careful before messing with this and getting a transcranial headset. Bought one in 2013, shit burned, also caused me to see flashes of light. Wore as instructed but only for max 10 seconds. Not worth the risk.
simne 3y ago
Interest idea. I wonder if somebody there working on such thing, or want to collaborate.
qrian 3y ago
Seems pretty cool. I've heard great things about deep brain stimulation and how it is the SOTA for many neurological disorders. It has actual experiments in humans instead of rodents. And the humans are healthy adults too! So it ticks all boxes for me as an amature enthusiast for a potential 'enhance my cognition' method. I wonder, where the catch?
- nomadpenguin 3y ago
  The catch with deep brain stimulation currently is that it's only SOTA for implanted electrodes, meaning it's incredibly expensive, and while DBS implantation is very safe for a brain surgery, it's still a brain surgery. tTIS is very investigational and neuromodulatory focused ultrasound is still quite a bit away from clinical applications. (Ablative focused ultrasound is FDA approved, but that's only for very specific indications.) There's also the Brainsway H series TMS coils that claim to stimulate deep structures, but the activation of large amounts of cortical tissue makes the claim a little hard to verify.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- m3kw9 3y ago
  There’s always a catch even when you exercise there is a catch somewhere
- mattkrause 3y ago
  The catch is that the effects of tTIS are very, very weak--even compared to other forms of non-invasive brain stimulation--and while it does do something to the brain, the proposed mechanism is probably not quite right. Some of the authors' earlier work in rodents painted a really exciting picture of directly driving neuronal activity from outside the brain. However, that data came from an animal with a small, smooth brain and the stimulation was actually delivered onto the skull (rather than the skin). Thus, they could make electric fields of ~400 V/m in their animals, whereas fields of ~1 V/m are about all you can expect from non-invasive (i.e., scalp) electrical stimulation of an awake, healthy human (at least one that you want to keep healthy!). We recently did some experiments with macaques receiving tTIS through the scalp, which are much more similar to humans. It could shift the timing of individual neurons' ongoing activity, but not directly force them to spike. It generally wasn't strong enough to impose new rhythms on the brain, just muck up existing ones. This isn't nothing--"mistimed" neural activity is involved in lots of diseases and ways to fix that might be very valuable--but it's very different fro the dominant story. Here are our results, if you want to read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559340v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559340v1
  - blufuz 3y ago
    Your experiment in macaques is a really important test for such a new method, but do you think that the difference in stimulation protocol could be meaningful? In their paper they used a theta burst stimulation protocol (3 100 hz pulses 200ms apart) which has been very effective with TMS and has been shown to affect neuronal plasticity. Maybe 10 hz tACS-like stimulation is more about spike timing than plasticity?
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Just wondering, if you take a wide beam approach to stimulating the brain with electricity, doesn't that sort of just reamplify whatever is going on in the circuitry and/or activate whatever's already latently there? How's this any better than a line of coke or six cups of coffee?
    - Staple_Diet 3y ago
10g1k 3y ago
The chip in Taskmaster's (MCU version) head.
29athrowaway 3y ago
"I know kung fu"
taraparo 3y ago
Does this relate to tDCS (Transcranial direct current stimulation)? I heard this is also good for enhancing learning.
- jxf 3y ago
  No; this is a different noninvasive technology.
- neuronexmachina 3y ago
  tDCS is (as the name indicates) a constant current, whereas it looks like the temporal interference (TI) technique has two oscillating channels tuned for targeting deeper brain regions: >TI stimulation is a novel brain stimulation strategy that employs two or more independent stimulation channels delivering HF currents (oscillating at f1 and f1 + Δf) within the kHz range, which are assumed to be inert in terms of inducing neuronal activity6,82. The two currents generate a modulated electric field, with the envelope oscillating at the low-frequency Δf (target frequency) where the currents join or cross. The peak of the envelope amplitude can be steered toward target areas located deeper in the brain by tuning the electrode position and current ratio across stimulation channels
  - mattkrause 3y ago
    The gear is pretty similar for tDCS, tACS (which uses alternating current at the "target" frequency"), and TI. Our data suggests that you can hit deep brain structures with all of them (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815958116 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815958116) but TI has the advantage of focality: it avoids stimulating things between the scalp and the target. The other major difference is how it affects the neurons. tDCS, tACS and even TMS create electric fields that electrically polarize the neurons. TI...doesn't. The stimulus itself changes too rapidly and only the envelope fluctuates at the "target frequency." However, that envelope isn't real: something has to extract/demodulate it from the carriers and it's not entirely clear how--or how well--that happens.
randomcarbloke 3y ago
has anyone built any diy projects for this yet?
- amelius 3y ago
  Have you checked how many Volts are needed to send this high frequency current through the brain?
  - mattkrause 3y ago
    It depends on the electrode impedance but somewhere in the neighborhood of 2V.
virtualritz 3y ago
On HN the use of psychedelic microdosing for problem solving/creativity is usually the only context that is being discussed. But there are others. For rapid motor skill improvement I suggest microdosing LSD or shrooms and then doing the resp. excercise/practice. Ideally with a teacher/master present, to correct/help. Also applying the techniques from the famous "The Inner Game of Tennis" book during the trip window helps/boosts the effects for me. The more difficult the motor skill is and the more coordination with other sensory input it requires, the better the gains. I am tango dancer and this is a hobby that takes years to master. Some people would say a decade or more, until you get to an acceptable level. Even more, if you have zero musicality and two left feet, like I did, when I started. It was an uphill battle for years. I only discovered this hack by accident, during the lockdown, about six years into this hobby. I believe I cut years off my tango learning time, ever after. And there is strong evidence based on the feedback of people from the community I dance in, who know me/danced with me for years, before and after. My partner only started tango two years ago. She is also microdosing regularly when she trains and sometimes even for social dancing, when we go to events where the level is very high/you are expected to dance with lots of experienced partners. Most people believe she is dancing since at least four, but sometimes over five years. Certainly, my sample size is two. But it makes sense when you look at what the research on psychedelics suggests about increased neural plasticity during a trip (if that is even what you want to call it when microdosing).
- tcbawo 3y ago
  That sounds fantastic if safe over the long term. If you are learning faster, do the results stick? In your case, it seems that the reward is worth the risk. Are you aware of any studies into the long term effects of microdosing psychedelics?
  - virtualritz 3y ago
    The results do stick. My first experience was random, when I tried a new, legal LSD variant[1], during the end of the pandemic, summer 2021. I tried first ~40µg, while still finishing work (code). Didn't feel anything so I took another 40 and then went dancing two hours later. At 80µg the LSD was just below psychoactive, so that dose was too high, in retrospect. I now use 40µ and that is perfect for me. The only indicator I had, after the night, was external. Three followers came to me, out of the blue, and told me: "you were my best tanda tonight, thank you." (A tanda is a block of three-four songs danced together, before you change partners). That struck me as odd/very surprising, at the level of dancing I was at then. A comment like this was something I would hear once-twice a year, if lucky. But three in one night? After that the praise kept coming from other tango people I danced with for years before, i.e. they felt the change. That's when I started experimenting with it and it has just become another tool to improve since then. People who disregard this I tell to talk to dozens of dancers who know me for years. They didn't know about what caused it. Yet they saw/see and felt/feel the change in my dancing and particularly musicality (which was, until then, my biggest struggle). [1] LSD.shop
Podgajski 3y ago
This is really stupid and dangerous. There is a music to brain waves and this is disturbing the harmony. Can’t we all just be different and be ok with it?
- fakecontent000 3y ago
  [dead]
- simbolit 3y ago
  Doesn't "being different and ok with it" include some people wanting to do something "really stupid and dangerous" and you being ok with it?
Zetobal 3y ago
After my third ECT I am skeptical about anything involving electricity and the brain. It's all guesswork atm.

151 points by dr_dshiv 3y ago

Be careful before messing with this and getting a transcranial headset. Bought one in 2013, shit burned, also caused me to see flashes of light. Wore as instructed but only for max 10 seconds. Not worth the risk.

simne 3y ago

Interest idea. I wonder if somebody there working on such thing, or want to collaborate.

qrian 3y ago

Seems pretty cool. I've heard great things about deep brain stimulation and how it is the SOTA for many neurological disorders. It has actual experiments in humans instead of rodents. And the humans are healthy adults too! So it ticks all boxes for me as an amature enthusiast for a potential 'enhance my cognition' method. I wonder, where the catch?

nomadpenguin 3y ago
The catch with deep brain stimulation currently is that it's only SOTA for implanted electrodes, meaning it's incredibly expensive, and while DBS implantation is very safe for a brain surgery, it's still a brain surgery. tTIS is very investigational and neuromodulatory focused ultrasound is still quite a bit away from clinical applications. (Ablative focused ultrasound is FDA approved, but that's only for very specific indications.) There's also the Brainsway H series TMS coils that claim to stimulate deep structures, but the activation of large amounts of cortical tissue makes the claim a little hard to verify.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
m3kw9 3y ago
There’s always a catch even when you exercise there is a catch somewhere
mattkrause 3y ago
The catch is that the effects of tTIS are very, very weak--even compared to other forms of non-invasive brain stimulation--and while it does do something to the brain, the proposed mechanism is probably not quite right. Some of the authors' earlier work in rodents painted a really exciting picture of directly driving neuronal activity from outside the brain. However, that data came from an animal with a small, smooth brain and the stimulation was actually delivered onto the skull (rather than the skin). Thus, they could make electric fields of ~400 V/m in their animals, whereas fields of ~1 V/m are about all you can expect from non-invasive (i.e., scalp) electrical stimulation of an awake, healthy human (at least one that you want to keep healthy!). We recently did some experiments with macaques receiving tTIS through the scalp, which are much more similar to humans. It could shift the timing of individual neurons' ongoing activity, but not directly force them to spike. It generally wasn't strong enough to impose new rhythms on the brain, just muck up existing ones. This isn't nothing--"mistimed" neural activity is involved in lots of diseases and ways to fix that might be very valuable--but it's very different fro the dominant story. Here are our results, if you want to read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559340v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559340v1
- blufuz 3y ago
  Your experiment in macaques is a really important test for such a new method, but do you think that the difference in stimulation protocol could be meaningful? In their paper they used a theta burst stimulation protocol (3 100 hz pulses 200ms apart) which has been very effective with TMS and has been shown to affect neuronal plasticity. Maybe 10 hz tACS-like stimulation is more about spike timing than plasticity?
- noduerme 3y ago
  Just wondering, if you take a wide beam approach to stimulating the brain with electricity, doesn't that sort of just reamplify whatever is going on in the circuitry and/or activate whatever's already latently there? How's this any better than a line of coke or six cups of coffee?
  - Staple_Diet 3y ago

10g1k 3y ago

The chip in Taskmaster's (MCU version) head.

29athrowaway 3y ago

"I know kung fu"

taraparo 3y ago

Does this relate to tDCS (Transcranial direct current stimulation)? I heard this is also good for enhancing learning.

jxf 3y ago
No; this is a different noninvasive technology.
neuronexmachina 3y ago
tDCS is (as the name indicates) a constant current, whereas it looks like the temporal interference (TI) technique has two oscillating channels tuned for targeting deeper brain regions: >TI stimulation is a novel brain stimulation strategy that employs two or more independent stimulation channels delivering HF currents (oscillating at f1 and f1 + Δf) within the kHz range, which are assumed to be inert in terms of inducing neuronal activity6,82. The two currents generate a modulated electric field, with the envelope oscillating at the low-frequency Δf (target frequency) where the currents join or cross. The peak of the envelope amplitude can be steered toward target areas located deeper in the brain by tuning the electrode position and current ratio across stimulation channels
- mattkrause 3y ago
  The gear is pretty similar for tDCS, tACS (which uses alternating current at the "target" frequency"), and TI. Our data suggests that you can hit deep brain structures with all of them (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815958116 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815958116) but TI has the advantage of focality: it avoids stimulating things between the scalp and the target. The other major difference is how it affects the neurons. tDCS, tACS and even TMS create electric fields that electrically polarize the neurons. TI...doesn't. The stimulus itself changes too rapidly and only the envelope fluctuates at the "target frequency." However, that envelope isn't real: something has to extract/demodulate it from the carriers and it's not entirely clear how--or how well--that happens.

randomcarbloke 3y ago

has anyone built any diy projects for this yet?

amelius 3y ago
Have you checked how many Volts are needed to send this high frequency current through the brain?
- mattkrause 3y ago
  It depends on the electrode impedance but somewhere in the neighborhood of 2V.

virtualritz 3y ago

On HN the use of psychedelic microdosing for problem solving/creativity is usually the only context that is being discussed. But there are others. For rapid motor skill improvement I suggest microdosing LSD or shrooms and then doing the resp. excercise/practice. Ideally with a teacher/master present, to correct/help. Also applying the techniques from the famous "The Inner Game of Tennis" book during the trip window helps/boosts the effects for me. The more difficult the motor skill is and the more coordination with other sensory input it requires, the better the gains. I am tango dancer and this is a hobby that takes years to master. Some people would say a decade or more, until you get to an acceptable level. Even more, if you have zero musicality and two left feet, like I did, when I started. It was an uphill battle for years. I only discovered this hack by accident, during the lockdown, about six years into this hobby. I believe I cut years off my tango learning time, ever after. And there is strong evidence based on the feedback of people from the community I dance in, who know me/danced with me for years, before and after. My partner only started tango two years ago. She is also microdosing regularly when she trains and sometimes even for social dancing, when we go to events where the level is very high/you are expected to dance with lots of experienced partners. Most people believe she is dancing since at least four, but sometimes over five years. Certainly, my sample size is two. But it makes sense when you look at what the research on psychedelics suggests about increased neural plasticity during a trip (if that is even what you want to call it when microdosing).

tcbawo 3y ago
That sounds fantastic if safe over the long term. If you are learning faster, do the results stick? In your case, it seems that the reward is worth the risk. Are you aware of any studies into the long term effects of microdosing psychedelics?
- virtualritz 3y ago
  The results do stick. My first experience was random, when I tried a new, legal LSD variant[1], during the end of the pandemic, summer 2021. I tried first ~40µg, while still finishing work (code). Didn't feel anything so I took another 40 and then went dancing two hours later. At 80µg the LSD was just below psychoactive, so that dose was too high, in retrospect. I now use 40µ and that is perfect for me. The only indicator I had, after the night, was external. Three followers came to me, out of the blue, and told me: "you were my best tanda tonight, thank you." (A tanda is a block of three-four songs danced together, before you change partners). That struck me as odd/very surprising, at the level of dancing I was at then. A comment like this was something I would hear once-twice a year, if lucky. But three in one night? After that the praise kept coming from other tango people I danced with for years before, i.e. they felt the change. That's when I started experimenting with it and it has just become another tool to improve since then. People who disregard this I tell to talk to dozens of dancers who know me for years. They didn't know about what caused it. Yet they saw/see and felt/feel the change in my dancing and particularly musicality (which was, until then, my biggest struggle). [1] LSD.shop

Podgajski 3y ago

This is really stupid and dangerous. There is a music to brain waves and this is disturbing the harmony. Can’t we all just be different and be ok with it?

fakecontent000 3y ago
[dead]
simbolit 3y ago
Doesn't "being different and ok with it" include some people wanting to do something "really stupid and dangerous" and you being ok with it?

Zetobal 3y ago

After my third ECT I am skeptical about anything involving electricity and the brain. It's all guesswork atm.