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Were there any other side effects observed besides an increase in creativity? Poor quality of the study aside, there are various studies [1] that have shown ass

Were there any other side effects observed besides an increase in creativity? Poor quality of the study aside, there are various studies [1] that have shown assorted links between creativity and mental illness. [1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/03/the-real-link-between-creativity-and-mental-illness/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/...

WhitneyLand 12y ago
Why is it poor quality? It's not the strongest result ever but it seems interesting enough to justify continuing the work. As far as greater creativity being a risk for mental illness, I havent seen anything supporting that kind of concern. I think a bigger concern is its long term safety in general, which hasn't been proven.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 12y ago
  > Why is it poor quality? While the scoring was done in a double-blind fashion, it's still completely subjective. Maybe the person scoring the tests had just eaten a meal before scoring the tests with the alpha-wave frequency stimulation (which has been shown to increase scores that people give in general). Maybe the grader was hungover for the tests with the bad scores. Maybe the grader was being paid $9/hour and just assigned scores at random out of apathy. Maybe the participants just happened to be in better moods on the day they did the alpha-wave frequency test. Having only 20 participants and doing a single trial of each frequency leaves the study vulnerable to small effects like the ones I just mentioned. Do you believe that all of those things, plus all of the factors I haven't even thought of combined couldn't result in just a 7.4% variance in scores? If the study had a control group we might know. Or if they had a much larger sample size we could rule out random variation. So it's not that 7.4% is a small but interesting result, it's that it's not a result.

WhitneyLand 12y ago

Why is it poor quality? It's not the strongest result ever but it seems interesting enough to justify continuing the work. As far as greater creativity being a risk for mental illness, I havent seen anything supporting that kind of concern. I think a bigger concern is its long term safety in general, which hasn't been proven.

88e282102ae2e5b 12y ago
> Why is it poor quality? While the scoring was done in a double-blind fashion, it's still completely subjective. Maybe the person scoring the tests had just eaten a meal before scoring the tests with the alpha-wave frequency stimulation (which has been shown to increase scores that people give in general). Maybe the grader was hungover for the tests with the bad scores. Maybe the grader was being paid $9/hour and just assigned scores at random out of apathy. Maybe the participants just happened to be in better moods on the day they did the alpha-wave frequency test. Having only 20 participants and doing a single trial of each frequency leaves the study vulnerable to small effects like the ones I just mentioned. Do you believe that all of those things, plus all of the factors I haven't even thought of combined couldn't result in just a 7.4% variance in scores? If the study had a control group we might know. Or if they had a much larger sample size we could rule out random variation. So it's not that 7.4% is a small but interesting result, it's that it's not a result.