9 ms·

Can you supercharge your brain?

106 points by mr_tyzic 12y ago

mandeepj 12y ago
Yes with adequate sleep, meditation and thinking positive
- yawgmoth 12y ago
  Spot on. A quick perusal of many cognitive enhancement-centered communities (/r/Nootropics, Longecity, Bluelight, etc) will reveal that sleep and mindfulness are the first things that need to be improved, not last.
  - dominotw 12y ago
    I was always confused about what 'mindfulness' means. Does it mean concentrating on one current thing? Then why not call it concentration. Alternatively, does it mean that my brain has a 'controller' which goads the 'controlled' to be more mindful? To me this duality of our perception feels absurd. It creates internal conflict and somehow this is supposed to be good for you? Do other animals feel this duality? Or this phenomenon unique to human beings?
    - ollerac 12y ago
      I think it is concentration. Although I think concentration has a bit of an active feel to it, as if you're usually doing it in order to accomplish something. When I meditate I just try to be aware of what's going in my mind, my body, and my breath without judging them. The idea of a controller and a controlled entity is just a feeling that comes from an active attitude that you're somehow preserving. If you simple watch yourself it will become apparent that ways of thinking like this don't necessarily represent reality. They comes and go.
    - npsimons 12y ago
      Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be mindful of your satiety. Pause between bites and feel if you are full. Another is for training. Exercise is good, but to train effectively, you have to pay attention to how your body feels, not just to prevent injuries and know when to rest, but also while training, so that you make sure every movement is actually influencing your body the way you want. With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
      - dominotw 12y ago
        Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do. It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.
        Delmania 12y ago
        Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong. However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
    - crusso 12y ago
      Mindfulness is meta-concentration. Concentration is the ability to focus on a task. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of your concentration. Concentration is akin to a programming thread or groups of threads working on tasks. Mindfulness is akin to the thread scheduler and process manager components.
    - zeidrich 12y ago
      You probably notice that sometimes you do things on habit, as a reaction, without thinking about it. Mindfulness is being aware of what you're doing. Even if you are doing something habitual, noticing that you're doing it. If you're angry, knowing why, feeling the anger, making a decision to try and do something about it or not. It's different than concentration because concentration indicates some intensity. Mindfulness doesn't need to be intense. You can be mindful and be doing nothing, or you can be mindful and be doing many things. It just means that you're more aware of what you're doing. I'm sure other animals have this duality, but I would expect that they aren't as introspective as humans, so they probably don't notice it. It's not that your brain has a 'controller'. In fact, that's about as far away from the truth as I can imagine. It's that your brain is made of many parts, and is part of your entire body. You can't really control it as a whole, but you can make an environment where it's easier to work with the cognitive side of things. Mindfulness is being practiced in relaxing the barriers to cognition. Concentration, on the other hand, is more like the ability to override the reward loop, and continue with a task that is getting deprioritized.
- crusso 12y ago
  If we were talking about everyday ways to improve cognitive performance, then I'd agree with you and add "observe and control your diet to see how it affects your mind". That said, I feel that your comment is off-topic and dismissive of the technical subject being discussed. The brain is just a biological machine. There's no reason to believe that we can't improve its performance by manipulating its physical properties directly through technology.
aethertap 12y ago
Here are some highlights that caught my attention from the article (tl;dr): Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region: "The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers’ brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. “Most tDCS studies don’t achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline.” This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven’t involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. “A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I’ve learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn,” he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work “the secret sauce”." Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training: "Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert." Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point: "So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."
- natdempk 12y ago
  A wired article [0] mentions a study that found trade-offs in studying using tDCS, albeit minor ones. It sounds like tDCS increased learning rate, but also increased recall time for the knowledge learned compared to non-tDCS learning. I can't find a link to the study they summarize, but here's a quote from the article: > Those who had the parietal area involved in numerical cognition stimulated learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham stimulation, the researchers report today in the Journal of Neuroscience. But at the end of the weeklong study their reaction times were slower when they had to put their newfound knowledge to use to solve a new task that they hadn’t seen during the training sessions. ”They had trouble accessing what they’d learned,” Cohen Kadosh said. > The volunteers who had the prefrontal area involved in learning and memory stimulated showed the opposite pattern. They were slower than the control group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the new test at the end of the experiment. The bottom line, says Cohen Kadosh, is that stimulating either brain region had both benefits and drawbacks. ”Just like with drugs, there seem to be side effects,” he said. [0] http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive-enhancement/ http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive-enhancement/
peter303 12y ago
George Nash (Beautiful Mind) stopped doing anything significant after they zapped his brain. I wouldnt gamble on this.
- gjm11 12y ago
  1. John Nash, not George. 2. So far as I can tell, Nash was never treated with electroconvulsive therapy. 3. ECT has scarcely anything in common with tDCS. 4. Nash did all his best work before he became schizophrenic. I would be more inclined to blame the major mental illness for any falloff in the quantity or quality of his output, rather than the treatment he received for it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
yawgmoth 12y ago
Fascinating topic - glad to see it mentioned here. tDCS may be effective in improving working memory [4], treatment of depression [1], pain management [2], improved motor control [3]. You can find out how they work, how to build one, or where to get a commercial product via the r/tdcs FAQ [5]. To be fair, it does remind me of Ringworld, where 'wirehead' addicts would starve themselves to remain plugged in. Wild! [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/ [2] http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf [3] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitation_of_implicit_motor_learning_by_weak_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_the_primary_motor_cortex_in_the_human http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitatio... [4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_working_memory_the_effect_of_combining_cognitive_activity_and_anodal_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_to_the_left_dorsolateral_prefrontal_cortex http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_w... [5] http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq
rollthehard6 12y ago
(Subscription needed sadly) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-spark-hack-body-electricity-to-replace-drugs.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-s... Read the dead tree version and it recounts a company who are building implantable devices which can be used to stimulate the vagus nerve to reduce chronic pain. Update - Said corporation : http://www.electrocoremedical.com/ http://www.electrocoremedical.com/ The article from another source : http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark
JackFr 12y ago
I'd like to see more concrete detail on the experimental design, to convince myself that this wasn't much more than placebo effect. Additionally, assuming the effect is real, it would be nice to have a concrete and detailed theory for the mechanism through which the effect works. I find myself extremely skeptical of these results.
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  I am incredibly skeptical. There are a lot of red flags here: * Huge incentive to keep getting positive results because money was/is needed * Higher ups insisting this is great and works before the science is finished - this can cause a lot of pressure to focus on positive results and gloss over negative * Scatter gun approach - they're doing a lot of different experiments, and are allowed to fail on lots of them: "they want to promote research that is very cutting-edge and very risky; a 90 per cent failure rate in their portfolio is okay, because the 10 per cent that works will change the world" - it's pretty likely somewhere in that region of experiments will show results just through sheer chance. Are they controlling for this? * A wide number of not particularly related benefits from a single, simple cause whose mechanism is not understood (I understand that breakthroughs occasionally look like this, but it's also a hallmark of snake oil) * Possible cherry picking: "This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good" and "people do not respond equally to stimulation, and no one yet knows exactly why". Could the reason be that they are sometimes seeing positive results due to chance or placebo? Overall, their claims are extraordinary and their evidence is anything but. I'm not saying there's nothing here, but so far I am not convinced that these researchers aren't fooling themselves.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
It is clear you can damage your brain by having electrical current pass through it, and it has been demonstrated in a bunch of different species (including humans) that electrical charges in the brain are observable when the brain is active. And it has been demonstrated that directly stimulating motor neurons with electricity causes them to 'activate'. So the non-question is whether or not this sort of activity can effect your brain. The question then is can the changes induced by this external stimulus have more positive than negative impact on your brain? That would be easier to answer with a better understanding of how the brain worked (as opposed to what parts of it were active when it was working) but it can certainly be an interesting source of experimentation. What surprises me most about this research is that we have not yet invented 'wire heads' or folks who are addicted to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure cortex of their brain. There is a clear market for such a device, it would not require smuggling any narcotics, and it would seem to be nominally cheap to manufacture. Further, it would seem that finding a way to reliably stimulate the pleasure centers is a much more tractable problem than trying to stimulate memory or intelligence. I keep an eye on this research, I've known too many people with clinical depression for whom existing therapies were unsuccessful in treating that depression, but I expect to see the illicit use appear on the market first, then I'll know we're close to answering the question posed by the article.
- ihnorton 12y ago
  The parts of the brain that one would want to stimulate for direct "pleasure hits" are quite deep in the brain and at this point are only reachable [edit: there are some deep focal stimulation techniques under the development, see the other comment in this thread] with a "minimally invasive" operation (relative to other brain surgeries) that still requires several hours of anesthesia, a ~cm hole in your head, a neurosurgeon with ~13 years of post-collegiate training, and ideally an MRI scanner for guidance. For the technique in the parent article - transcranial stimulation - any stimulation of the pleasure centers is incidental and minor. That tDCS seems to have interesting side-effects is still unexplained. There are some ongoing studies of Deep Brain Stimulation with implanted electrodes as a treatment for depression, but it's not a casual thing to undertake.
- Lambdanaut 12y ago
winfred 12y ago
I'm an individual who has designed [1] and built his own tDCS device, downloaded all the PDFs, read them and then designed his own experiment: anode over LDLPFC and cathode above right eye, 20 minutes at 2 mA, while doing Dual-N-Back Workshop [2]. I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests. I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior. I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that? [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/ [2] http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://winfred.com/ http://winfred.com/
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - winfred 12y ago
    But I'd invite others to follow along, using my instructions and publishing their findings (for example, before and after IQ tests), that would increase the number of participants, but not solve the control group problem. However, if you are willing to participate, you could be part of the control group, doing only the Dual-N-Back workshop for example. I know we should be doing blind controls, but that's really too hard to implement at this stage and we have the research papers to fall back on anyway, which have tested and proven that the tDCS device does indeed have all sorts of beneficial effects.
    - natdempk 12y ago
      You could try to implement a blind test by doing tDCS with currents below those known to be effective as a control. From what I've heard under 0.5 mA should have negligible effects, though its worth looking into more studies for that. You should also implement some sort of double-blind by having another person set control the Amps for you. It wouldn't be too hard to design an experiment around this principle. I would check out some of the stuff on http://gwern.net http://gwern.net for reference on designing quantified-self experiments to establish an effect strength.
ommunist 12y ago
This article is very shallow. I would rather redirect you to this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU <- Practical brain boosting in London today. I visited Andrew's lab in Wembley. Very impressive. He is also very fond of old school nootropics. Also see Hacking the Wetware meet-up - http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/79975272/ http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/79975272/ UPD: Yes, you can supercharge your brain. It is reprogrammable. But there are costs to cover and risks to take.

106 points by mr_tyzic 12y ago

mandeepj 12y ago

Yes with adequate sleep, meditation and thinking positive

yawgmoth 12y ago
Spot on. A quick perusal of many cognitive enhancement-centered communities (/r/Nootropics, Longecity, Bluelight, etc) will reveal that sleep and mindfulness are the first things that need to be improved, not last.
- dominotw 12y ago
  I was always confused about what 'mindfulness' means. Does it mean concentrating on one current thing? Then why not call it concentration. Alternatively, does it mean that my brain has a 'controller' which goads the 'controlled' to be more mindful? To me this duality of our perception feels absurd. It creates internal conflict and somehow this is supposed to be good for you? Do other animals feel this duality? Or this phenomenon unique to human beings?
  - ollerac 12y ago
    I think it is concentration. Although I think concentration has a bit of an active feel to it, as if you're usually doing it in order to accomplish something. When I meditate I just try to be aware of what's going in my mind, my body, and my breath without judging them. The idea of a controller and a controlled entity is just a feeling that comes from an active attitude that you're somehow preserving. If you simple watch yourself it will become apparent that ways of thinking like this don't necessarily represent reality. They comes and go.
  - npsimons 12y ago
    Not that I'm any sort of expert in mindfulness, but I like to relate the concept via a few analogies. The first is that for dieting, one strategy is to be mindful of your satiety. Pause between bites and feel if you are full. Another is for training. Exercise is good, but to train effectively, you have to pay attention to how your body feels, not just to prevent injuries and know when to rest, but also while training, so that you make sure every movement is actually influencing your body the way you want. With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
    - dominotw 12y ago
      Right. I think I get the basic idea of it. What bothers is me is who is this 'other me' telling me what to do. Is the 'other me' the real me, if not why can't I figure out myself when to stop eating why do I need another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do. It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.
      - Delmania 12y ago
        Mindfulness is taking advantage of the fact that humans are conscious of their consciousness, and using that to overcome our instincts. For example, the human brain, if left alone will tend to go towards negative situations. I think (keyword: think) that's because we want to avoid bad feelings, so we replay those events in our mind to figure out what happened and how we can avoid those bad feelings in the future. Feelings, after all, are a response to a situation, so if we have a bad feeling, it means we did something wrong. However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
  - crusso 12y ago
    Mindfulness is meta-concentration. Concentration is the ability to focus on a task. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of your concentration. Concentration is akin to a programming thread or groups of threads working on tasks. Mindfulness is akin to the thread scheduler and process manager components.
  - zeidrich 12y ago
    You probably notice that sometimes you do things on habit, as a reaction, without thinking about it. Mindfulness is being aware of what you're doing. Even if you are doing something habitual, noticing that you're doing it. If you're angry, knowing why, feeling the anger, making a decision to try and do something about it or not. It's different than concentration because concentration indicates some intensity. Mindfulness doesn't need to be intense. You can be mindful and be doing nothing, or you can be mindful and be doing many things. It just means that you're more aware of what you're doing. I'm sure other animals have this duality, but I would expect that they aren't as introspective as humans, so they probably don't notice it. It's not that your brain has a 'controller'. In fact, that's about as far away from the truth as I can imagine. It's that your brain is made of many parts, and is part of your entire body. You can't really control it as a whole, but you can make an environment where it's easier to work with the cognitive side of things. Mindfulness is being practiced in relaxing the barriers to cognition. Concentration, on the other hand, is more like the ability to override the reward loop, and continue with a task that is getting deprioritized.
crusso 12y ago
If we were talking about everyday ways to improve cognitive performance, then I'd agree with you and add "observe and control your diet to see how it affects your mind". That said, I feel that your comment is off-topic and dismissive of the technical subject being discussed. The brain is just a biological machine. There's no reason to believe that we can't improve its performance by manipulating its physical properties directly through technology.

aethertap 12y ago

Here are some highlights that caught my attention from the article (tl;dr): Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region: "The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers’ brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. “Most tDCS studies don’t achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline.” This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven’t involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. “A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I’ve learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn,” he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work “the secret sauce”." Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training: "Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert." Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point: "So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."

natdempk 12y ago
A wired article [0] mentions a study that found trade-offs in studying using tDCS, albeit minor ones. It sounds like tDCS increased learning rate, but also increased recall time for the knowledge learned compared to non-tDCS learning. I can't find a link to the study they summarize, but here's a quote from the article: > Those who had the parietal area involved in numerical cognition stimulated learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham stimulation, the researchers report today in the Journal of Neuroscience. But at the end of the weeklong study their reaction times were slower when they had to put their newfound knowledge to use to solve a new task that they hadn’t seen during the training sessions. ”They had trouble accessing what they’d learned,” Cohen Kadosh said. > The volunteers who had the prefrontal area involved in learning and memory stimulated showed the opposite pattern. They were slower than the control group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the new test at the end of the experiment. The bottom line, says Cohen Kadosh, is that stimulating either brain region had both benefits and drawbacks. ”Just like with drugs, there seem to be side effects,” he said. [0] http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive-enhancement/ http://www.wired.com/2013/03/cognitive-enhancement/

peter303 12y ago

George Nash (Beautiful Mind) stopped doing anything significant after they zapped his brain. I wouldnt gamble on this.

gjm11 12y ago
1. John Nash, not George. 2. So far as I can tell, Nash was never treated with electroconvulsive therapy. 3. ECT has scarcely anything in common with tDCS. 4. Nash did all his best work before he became schizophrenic. I would be more inclined to blame the major mental illness for any falloff in the quantity or quality of his output, rather than the treatment he received for it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

yawgmoth 12y ago

Fascinating topic - glad to see it mentioned here. tDCS may be effective in improving working memory [4], treatment of depression [1], pain management [2], improved motor control [3]. You can find out how they work, how to build one, or where to get a commercial product via the r/tdcs FAQ [5]. To be fair, it does remind me of Ringworld, where 'wirehead' addicts would starve themselves to remain plugged in. Wild! [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/ [2] http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf [3] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitation_of_implicit_motor_learning_by_weak_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_of_the_primary_motor_cortex_in_the_human http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitatio... [4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_working_memory_the_effect_of_combining_cognitive_activity_and_anodal_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation_to_the_left_dorsolateral_prefrontal_cortex http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_w... [5] http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq http://www.reddit.com/r/tdcs/wiki/faq

rollthehard6 12y ago

(Subscription needed sadly) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-spark-hack-body-electricity-to-replace-drugs.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129570.500-healing-s... Read the dead tree version and it recounts a company who are building implantable devices which can be used to stimulate the vagus nerve to reduce chronic pain. Update - Said corporation : http://www.electrocoremedical.com/ http://www.electrocoremedical.com/ The article from another source : http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark

JackFr 12y ago

I'd like to see more concrete detail on the experimental design, to convince myself that this wasn't much more than placebo effect. Additionally, assuming the effect is real, it would be nice to have a concrete and detailed theory for the mechanism through which the effect works. I find myself extremely skeptical of these results.

ZoFreX 12y ago
I am incredibly skeptical. There are a lot of red flags here: * Huge incentive to keep getting positive results because money was/is needed * Higher ups insisting this is great and works before the science is finished - this can cause a lot of pressure to focus on positive results and gloss over negative * Scatter gun approach - they're doing a lot of different experiments, and are allowed to fail on lots of them: "they want to promote research that is very cutting-edge and very risky; a 90 per cent failure rate in their portfolio is okay, because the 10 per cent that works will change the world" - it's pretty likely somewhere in that region of experiments will show results just through sheer chance. Are they controlling for this? * A wide number of not particularly related benefits from a single, simple cause whose mechanism is not understood (I understand that breakthroughs occasionally look like this, but it's also a hallmark of snake oil) * Possible cherry picking: "This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good" and "people do not respond equally to stimulation, and no one yet knows exactly why". Could the reason be that they are sometimes seeing positive results due to chance or placebo? Overall, their claims are extraordinary and their evidence is anything but. I'm not saying there's nothing here, but so far I am not convinced that these researchers aren't fooling themselves.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

It is clear you can damage your brain by having electrical current pass through it, and it has been demonstrated in a bunch of different species (including humans) that electrical charges in the brain are observable when the brain is active. And it has been demonstrated that directly stimulating motor neurons with electricity causes them to 'activate'. So the non-question is whether or not this sort of activity can effect your brain. The question then is can the changes induced by this external stimulus have more positive than negative impact on your brain? That would be easier to answer with a better understanding of how the brain worked (as opposed to what parts of it were active when it was working) but it can certainly be an interesting source of experimentation. What surprises me most about this research is that we have not yet invented 'wire heads' or folks who are addicted to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure cortex of their brain. There is a clear market for such a device, it would not require smuggling any narcotics, and it would seem to be nominally cheap to manufacture. Further, it would seem that finding a way to reliably stimulate the pleasure centers is a much more tractable problem than trying to stimulate memory or intelligence. I keep an eye on this research, I've known too many people with clinical depression for whom existing therapies were unsuccessful in treating that depression, but I expect to see the illicit use appear on the market first, then I'll know we're close to answering the question posed by the article.

ihnorton 12y ago
The parts of the brain that one would want to stimulate for direct "pleasure hits" are quite deep in the brain and at this point are only reachable [edit: there are some deep focal stimulation techniques under the development, see the other comment in this thread] with a "minimally invasive" operation (relative to other brain surgeries) that still requires several hours of anesthesia, a ~cm hole in your head, a neurosurgeon with ~13 years of post-collegiate training, and ideally an MRI scanner for guidance. For the technique in the parent article - transcranial stimulation - any stimulation of the pleasure centers is incidental and minor. That tDCS seems to have interesting side-effects is still unexplained. There are some ongoing studies of Deep Brain Stimulation with implanted electrodes as a treatment for depression, but it's not a casual thing to undertake.
Lambdanaut 12y ago

winfred 12y ago

I'm an individual who has designed [1] and built his own tDCS device, downloaded all the PDFs, read them and then designed his own experiment: anode over LDLPFC and cathode above right eye, 20 minutes at 2 mA, while doing Dual-N-Back Workshop [2]. I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests. I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior. I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that? [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/ http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/ [2] http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://winfred.com/ http://winfred.com/

deleted 12y ago
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- winfred 12y ago
  But I'd invite others to follow along, using my instructions and publishing their findings (for example, before and after IQ tests), that would increase the number of participants, but not solve the control group problem. However, if you are willing to participate, you could be part of the control group, doing only the Dual-N-Back workshop for example. I know we should be doing blind controls, but that's really too hard to implement at this stage and we have the research papers to fall back on anyway, which have tested and proven that the tDCS device does indeed have all sorts of beneficial effects.
  - natdempk 12y ago
    You could try to implement a blind test by doing tDCS with currents below those known to be effective as a control. From what I've heard under 0.5 mA should have negligible effects, though its worth looking into more studies for that. You should also implement some sort of double-blind by having another person set control the Amps for you. It wouldn't be too hard to design an experiment around this principle. I would check out some of the stuff on http://gwern.net http://gwern.net for reference on designing quantified-self experiments to establish an effect strength.

ommunist 12y ago

This article is very shallow. I would rather redirect you to this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1P6v24riU <- Practical brain boosting in London today. I visited Andrew's lab in Wembley. Very impressive. He is also very fond of old school nootropics. Also see Hacking the Wetware meet-up - http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/79975272/ http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/79975272/ UPD: Yes, you can supercharge your brain. It is reprogrammable. But there are costs to cover and risks to take.