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Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
- Telomer 13y agoThere is a subreddit for this if you feel like reading more http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/
- wisty 13y agoWith the warning on the subreddit: Caution: you can be killed by a 9V battery
- Ygg2 13y agoYou can be killed by a 9V battery? How? Not from the charge I hope (not sarcastic).
- will_work4tears 13y agoThere's a link to the darwinawards site on the subreddit. Apparently it was a Navy service member that stuck the electrodes into his fingers and the current traveled through the bloodstream across his heart. Sounds like an urban legend, but if you read the back and forth on it, it's rather interesting.
- tekromancr 13y agoIt is theoretically possible to do that. Blood is wonderfully conductive with all the electrolytes.
- RobotCaleb 13y agoI believe you have to provide a path that would go through the heart. Simply piercing the same finger with both electrodes shouldn't do much to the heart.
- will_work4tears 13y agoI believe he pierced each finger with a different electrode.
- tankbot 13y agoI suppose you could potentially choke on it. Darwin was right you know.
- jhaywood 13y agoThe internal electrical resistance of your tissues is a lot lower than the resistance provided by your skin. If you puncture your skin with electrodes a 9V battery can generate enough current to stop your heart.
- guylhem 13y ago"Scientists call for more regulation (ie more grant $) before the devices is sold to the public, film at 11." The only problem is the DIY crowd. A 9V battery is not exactly under regulation. What people do with their body is their problem.
- Fistandantilus 13y agoI'd agree with you, but as you know we have universal health care in Canada which is funded by the government. Therefore, what people do with their body is actually the taxpayers' problem, if anything goes wrong.
- rosser 13y agoWhat people do with their body is their problem. Tell that to the people behind drug laws, and abortion laws, and sodomy laws, and, and, and...
- rmc 13y agoOr trans people, who have to jump through hoops to get hormones or surgery.
- juskrey 13y agoIf something can make your body better without adverse effects, it is already there. You are not smarter than 3.5 billions of life evolution, period.
- ultramundane8 13y agoThis reads like a form of faith. I don't share it. Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection? I know this thinking can be dangerous and contains serious ethical problems, but the factual side of your statement I just can't agree with. Not without more to convince me.
- gwern 13y ago> Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection? Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch. The catch may well be trivial from our modern perspective, in the same way that staying up late or using stimulants and so burning some more calories is a trivial catch from the modern perspective ("'oh no', said the fat American man, 'you mean X might cause me to burn some more calories? how awful'"), but until the catch has been identified, tDCS has not been fully understood.
- tekromancr 13y agoOr, the catch could be such that, with such enhancements, everyone realizes the meaninglessness of existence and kills themselves in a fit of existential rage.
- gwern 13y agoThat would have been noticed already.
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- ChuckMcM 13y agoI am convinced that at some point some smart sod will figure out how to create a 'high' by using something along the lines of this. Put on a headband, flick the switch, and blam! high as a kite. Turn the switch off, and back to being sober. When that happens, the world will change in a very unpredictable way. Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that are part of the drug trade will suddenly have no where to go. All the social aspects of shared inebriation will still be in place but most if not all of the economic aspects will be killed. I expect my kids will get to witness this change.
- msluyter 13y agoI think what you've just described is Larry Niven's "wirehead." In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
- gwern 13y agoWe already have wireheading, but the surgery is too invasive for it to be anything but an obscure curiosity.
- nazgulnarsil 13y agoThere is a lot of ambiguity about whether we are able to activate pleasure or merely activate wanting.
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- ultramundane8 13y agoI may run into a lot of experts (from multiple fields) here on HN with strong opinions to the contrary, but here are my two cents. If I could double my cognitive ability for 5 years, then die from an unknown complication with this type of therapy, I would do it without blinking an eye.
- zem 13y agoit would be deeply ironic if, with your doubled cognitive ability, you realised that that was a bad bargain.
- ultramundane8 13y agoHaha, yes it would. But likely my ability would at least enable me to convince others of this discovery!
- drivers99 13y agoThis is speculative, but it has been suggested that some people's thinking is so advanced that we can't understand what they are trying to do. [1] So it could be the case that what you try to convey once you reach that advanced state isn't comprehensible by normal people. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Genius_Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Genius_Theory
- pstuart 13y agoI think this gets played out with the "normal" population all the time....
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI'm both a tCDS user and a Modafinil user. I'm 30, and don't mind trading life expectancy for higher cognitive function.
- gtani 13y ago
- asifjamil 13y agoI'm actually a PhD student studying this exact technology in Germany. I can say without a doubt that this type of stimulation has proven potential in enhancing cognitive functions (if proper protocol and safety aspects are respected). This is a really exciting field which I think will really explode in the next few years once the montage and paradigms are optimized (which is exactly what I'm working on!)
- tassl 13y agoCan you point to some (respected) publications on the field that can prove cognitive enhancement?
- toomuchtodo 13y agohttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=transcranial+direct+current+stimulation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=transcranial+direct...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAs an IT professional with enough EE knowledge to be dangerous, I've used a home made version to increase the rate at which I learn foreign languages.
- yathern 13y agoCare to shed more information on this? How well did it work? Were the effects long term or temporary?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoSure. Ask away. It worked extremely well. I feel that I typically have a very hard time concentrating on learning new skills due to day-to-day constant context switching (I'm a Sysadmin/Devops by day). I use Modafinil to focus and tCDS to boost my skills acquisition/retention rate. I haven't done any sort of study on myself to measure control vs tCDS time, but I definitely "feel" an increased rate of moving up the skills ladder (in this case, learning French, Spanish, and Russian).
- tehwalrus 13y agoOf course, if you zap the wrong part of your brain you could also decrease your cognitive skills. I'll wait until there's more evidence before I break out the soldering iron.
- caycep 13y agoI don't think he can do too much damage brain wise - the effects of the noninvasive transcranial magnetic/direct current stimulation only last for a few hours anyway. The bigger issue is potentially getting skin burns by not getting the circuitry hooked up correctly. Or maybe frying your electronic gadgets if you have a magnetic stim device. I guess maybe you could theoretically trigger seizures if you have epilepsy, but in that case you'd be seeing a doctor regularly anyway and wouldn't have to DIY these things.
- qdot76367 13y agoSo there's already a tDCS helmet headed toward the consumer market sometime in the next couple of months, aimed at "gamers" because that doesn't really look as suspicious as making health claims. http://foc.us http://foc.us
- DanBC 13y ago> Mr. Siever treats himself for chronic depression, reporting equally striking results. I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Siever is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the tCDS doing anything or not.
- senorprogrammer 13y agoAgreed. It's just as feasible that the beneficial effect is derived from his sense of taking control over his condition rather than being controlled by it (effectively feeling like an active rather than passive participant in his depression). I make no claim that this is actually the reason, only to provide one feasible, untested alternative theory. Further scientific study in this field should be very interesting indeed.
- glenra 13y agoYou don't actually need a controlled double-blind study to notice a medical effect, IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent. Traditional "controlled double-blind studies" are nice to have, but are much too likely to accidentally reject good medicines and medical treatments of the sort that might be discovered and confirmed via this sort of personal experimentation. (Yes, false positives are bad, but false negatives are bad too!) The era of personalized medicine is just beginning and these sort of devices seem unusually well-suited for that sort of approach.
- glenra 13y agoUPDATE: I'm getting downvoted, most likely from people who don't know what I'm referring to. So let me clarify: The platonic ideal of a traditional drug or medical treatment is something that works the same way on EVERYBODY. When you do a controlled double-blind study, you specify one specific treatment regimen - use dose X as a function of unit mass or of condition severity - and test whether that (a) has a statistically significant effect which (b) beats the control. Now imagine a drug which has this effect: half the time it makes people better (often quite a bit better). 30% of the time it has no effect, and 20% of the time it has a NEGATIVE effect - it makes people WORSE along the metric being measured. (one example of a treatment that has this sort of outcome pattern: exercise. If you measure blood pressure or cholesterol levels, it helps many but hurts some (about 12%) and has no effect on others(about 20%)) A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders. In contrast, a "quantified self" personal science study where somebody carefully tracks their statistic and tries out an intervention while doing some A/B comparisons, is likely to discover whether they ARE or ARE NOT a positive responder. If they ARE, further experimentation can help find the best dose regimen for their particular situation. (of course, if we knew and could measure exactly which factors make some people positive responders and others negative responders, then we could test in the traditional way. But until we DO know that, studying at the individual level is often the best or even the only available way to figure out how to help individuals.) As for my "IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent" bit, I'll just note that big controlled studies are sometimes abandoned when an intervention is SO successful it is deemed unethical to deny the treatment to the control group.
- kunai 13y agoThe scientific method has advanced so far in the past century that any new "breakthrough" without proper empirical evidence and due process of science makes me feel like it's just quack science. Forget about the journals, forget about peer review, just have evidence. Anecdota have proven to be very unreliable in critical testing scenarios.
- beagle3 13y agoSo has so called "evidence". Can't google right now, but recently someone tried and failed to reproduce ~60% of celebrated cancer results published in Science & Nature from the last 20 years. Also, ionaddis has shown most published research in medicine and nutrition to be wrong. "Publish or perish" has replaced the gold of gold standard with tungsten, with everyone related aware of it, but no one doing anything about it.
- zxcdw 13y agoI remember the amount of non-reproducible research was as high as 90 %? Google returns some hits from May 7th(and I remember the HN post from around a month ago, we talk about the same thing I think) or so with that title, but perhaps the actual number is somewhere between 60 and 90 %?
- beagle3 13y agoYou're right, I was misremembering. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R12P20120328 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/28/us-science-cancer-... Thanks for correcting - it was much worse than I remembered.
- DannoHung 13y agoI think I'd want some longitudinal studies before I tried this.
- gtani 13y agoI'm no scientist but anecdotal TDCS had me... concerned induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3525744 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3525744
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWhen it occurs, its not as bad as it sounds. This is my own experience though. YMMV.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jurassic 13y agoI applaud these DIYers. If there's one thing my PhD stint taught me, it's that the high stakes nature of dead ends in one's science career has forced most scientists to be extremely conservative in what they write grants for. I fully expect the next large advances in biohacking to emerge from people working in their garages and hackerspaces while collaborating online, not from a lab on NSF funding.
- Qantourisc 13y agoWait what polarity reversed ? Current goes from A to B, so it doesn't quite matter ! So side B from the skull is negative and A is positive, unless you reverse it, then it's reversed ... But regardless one side will always be "reversed"... So the question is rather where you want the current to go exactly, but if "reversing" the polarity is bad, it's safe to say EVERYTHING is bad. (Unless you don't mind destroying a part of the brain to get to another part.)