7 ms·

The Vagus Nerve: A Back Door for Brain Hacking

112 points by musgravepeter 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Getting closer. At some point there will be a non-invasive nerve (or neuron) stimulator system that will replace opioids as the drug of choice. When that happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high" without any of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and money management firms. I expected us to be there by now with much of the deep brain stimulation research, but I also tend to be optimistic in my estimation of time to market for many technologies.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  That will kill the drug industry. Maybe we will have a freemium model? Or a 24k gold version for the rich Chinese?
- dogecoinbase 11y ago
  Larry Niven hypothesized this in 1969 after the brain stimulation experiments of the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29#Known_Space_stories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29#...
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Didn't they recently find out that those experiments had accidentally targeted the wrong part of the rodent brain? That rather than hitting the pleasure center it hit an area related to scavenging?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  > When that happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high" without any of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and money management firms. Why do you think these industries will evaporate? Who will make, distribute, and manage the demand for these devices?
  - chatmasta 11y ago
    Google, Facebook, etc. You think "addicted to Facebook" means something now? Just wait until they literally have a direct line into your brain! In all seriousness though, it's far more likely tech like this will emerge from... You guessed it, the tech sector. Large nontech companies have historically shown an unwillingness to innovate in tech, and if they get out innovated by a tech company, it's impossible to catch up. Example - amazon vs big retailers, amazon vs book sellers, etc. (I would be curious to hear counter examples) It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR.
    - paulojreis 11y ago
      > It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR. In the same way it should be hard for the "agile tech" companies to play in a highly regulated and, I would say, high responsibility market. F*cking up with your users when they are watching cat videos isn't quite the same than doing it when their health is at stake. I don't think we (tech industry) are fast because we're "years ahead in R&D and HR", nor because we're "agile". We are fast because we are reckless and we completely overlook many, many factors (and many of them, scientifically relevant and known). Look at how the Soylent guys claim their meals are nutritionally complete. Were they able to do this because they were "agile" and "years ahead" than other companies that already play in that field? No: they are able to say (not "do") this because they're highly overlooking what nutritionally complete means - mostly, overlooking the fact that we don't know yet what exactly "nutritionally complete" means.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    > Why do you think these industries will evaporate? The primary ingredient in a 'hit' will be energy, and there is already a very well established system for delivering energy to individuals in the economy. The devices themselves will essentially be consumer electronic type devices so that demand will be filled by various factories that produce gadgets. Just as heroin use doesn't really change the spoon or syringe markets as those markets are already so large that carrying along the heroin users doesn't really impact them in any meaningful way. > Who will make, distribute, and manage the demand > for these devices? Those folks will still be around, look at your typical smoke shop for a good corollary. But it is a smaller part of the drug industry than the production and distribution of the product.
- jarboot 11y ago
  Anyone familiar with the tabletop game 'Shadowrun' could compare this to BTL chips!
- digi_owl 11y ago
  http://www.gizmag.com/thync-hands-on-2/37820/ http://www.gizmag.com/thync-hands-on-2/37820/
- newuser88273 11y ago
  If you combine that with the pain stim version into one device and give me the remote, I'll have you barking like a dog whenever I lift my little finger. The good news is that schools don't have to drug unruly boys anymore...
  - ourmandave 11y ago
    There are four lights!
brandonb 11y ago
You don't necessarily need a fancy device to stimulate the vagus nerve. Patients with supraventricular tachycardias are taught to do vagal maneuvers, the simplest of which is gagging: http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-fibrillation/tc/vagal-maneuvers-for-a-fast-heart-rate-topic-overview http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-fibrillation/tc/va... In general, imbalance within the autonomic nervous system (of which the vagus nerve controls half—the parasympathetic portion) has been shown to be related to everything from heart disease to irritable bowel syndrome to having an irritable personality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system
- easymovet 11y ago
  I tried it out with a signal generator (wav file) and an audio amplifier cranked way up, it felt like AC and made some muscles twitch but nothing compared to mechanical vagal maneuvers.
adventured 11y ago
The vagus nerve is fascinating. After a fight with a girlfriend once, I ended up tearing / straining my esophagus (we were yelling at each other). As far as the vagus nerve was concerned, it felt like I was having a heart attack. Over the next year, it continued to plague me. I randomly would feel like I was about to have a heart attack, with all the symptoms including my arm going numb, sharp pain in or across the chest, etc. Doctors were all mixed on what it was (they were all certain it wasn't cardiovascular, but that didn't make me feel any better, because it sure seemed like it was; and my father died in his 50s of a heart attack). During that time I couldn't work out, or even go for a jog without feeling like a heart attack was imminent. I gradually narrowed it down myself, and fixed it myself. It was of course esophageal spasms. Hot liquids, things with caffeine, and physical activity would agitate or stimulate the esophagus and vagus nerve. After some experimentation, I found that the damage wasn't healing, because routine things continued to agitate it; what would otherwise be normal amounts of acid were contributing to the problem. What ended up fixing it? Maximum strength Pepcid AC; took about four months, of reducing the acid levels way down, giving the esophagus time to heal. Since then, everything has been fine.
- zhoujianfu 11y ago
  It sure is fascinating! A few years ago I finally realized I had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response and that was why starting in my mid-twenties I began fainting at the sight of (my own) blood!
  - malexw 11y ago
    Hey, it's good to meet someone else who suffers from this. Funny that it only developed for you in your mid-twenties - I've had it all my life. Not from the sight of my own blood, but from reading medical texts (such as the page you linked) or from having human biology explained to me. One thing that I think people don't understand is that it's completely uncontrollable. I can prevent myself from fainting about a well as a person with a broken leg can just "walk it off". It's very weird to see this effect from a part of the brain that I apparently have no control over. Have you looked into treatment options at all? I have looked around a bit, but I haven't found any studies into treatment of any kind. I've been considering regularly donating blood in the hopes that regular exposure to that environment would reduce effect.
joeyo 11y ago
Their (ElectroCore's) transcutaneous stimulation protocol is very cool. Being able to lower the risk profile (eliminating invasive surgery) may mitigate somewhat the fairly low efficacies that have been demonstrated for previous VN stimulators. But I'd still be quite worried about unintentional activation/blockade of non-target branches of the vagus nerve, affecting the internal organs, and the heart in particular. The article says that it's "just a matter of hitting a sweet spot of signal strength", implying that they are trying to take advantage of the topographic organization of the nerve's fascicles. My understanding, however, is that achieving spatial selectivity has been hard enough with implantable cuff electrodes. I'm not sure how they are going to achieve it with a (handheld?) device. Still, exciting times for electroceuticals!
HillRat 11y ago
A year or so ago I attended a talk by a professor whose research team is doing a lot of fascinating work with vagus nerve stimulation, particularly in the realm of physical rehabilitation after major trauma and ischemic events. Murine models indicated stimulation could trigger bouts of neural plasticity which, when coupled with physical rehabilitation, dramatically improved the rats' recovery from induced ischemic trauma. Pretty amazing stuff, especially when paired with some of the engineering work done on artificial limbs. There are also potential psychiatric and learning applications -- IIRC, he specifically singled out language acquisition as a research target -- but those, I think, are not yet as well-attested.
personjerry 11y ago
These titles are getting kinda clickbait-y
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Clickbait for something that doesn't even have any evidence at all of its effectiveness (see my other comment here).
chatmasta 11y ago
From what I've seen (not much), a large obstacle in the field of brain/computer control seems to be signal interpretation. All our methods for analyzing electrical signals must be non invasive, a requirement which greatly increases noise. For example, to read EEG data from the brain we need to strap a net of ~128 electrodes around the skull and use FFT techniques to analyze 128 wave segments. The electrical signal bounces around in the convex skull, generating noise that pollutes the EEG signal. The fact is, it's hard to read electrical signals without a direct connection -- there is only so much we can do from outside the body. (This is why consumer grade EEG devices can do little more than react in a binary fashion to relaxed/excited emotional state. The signal difference between relaxed/excited is easily detectable in aggregate, but more nuanced signals are hidden amongst the noise of EEG waves bouncing around the skull.) For this reason, any non invasive method of reading (or in this case, apparently even controlling) electrical signals will advance the field of neuroscience exponentially. This obstacle of noisy data leads to a second obstacle: what is the signal? Can we duplicate an arbitrary signal and send it through the nervous system on demand? That's a hard question to answer, especially when we can barely listen to the signal in the first place. My question is, what role can machine learning play in this field? The problem of identifying signal seems more of a computational one than a biological one. How much data loss do EEG machines suffer from noise? Is all the data intact, and we just need to figure a way to avoid the noise? Has there been any research on feeding neural signals into ML algorithms, and labeling them with results, e.g. "Moved finger," "blinked eyes," etc? This field strikes me as one with a lot of untapped potential. With the coming VR revolution, thought-based interaction seems a natural next step.
- amelius 11y ago
  There is already a lot of research done in the area of decomposing signals. For example, to make an ECG of a foetus' heart, where the heart signal of the mother is noise that is to be canceled. The classical approach is to use something that is called a Kalman filter.
cpncrunch 11y ago
As far as I can tell, there haven't been any placebo-controlled trials yet. All of the medical conditions listed have a very high placebo effect, and using a novel device like this will amplify that placebo effect. Right now I don't think we can even say whether or not this thing works at all. Also, on a completely different subject, I find it interesting that the incredibly simple javascript animation uses about 70% of my macbook pro's CPU time (even after zapping the flash adverts at the top). Chrome really needs a method to stop javascript execution in pages, especially now that javascript is replacing flash for animations.
- chestervonwinch 11y ago
  > Chrome really needs a method to stop javascript execution in pages, especially now that javascript is replacing flash for animations. Just turn it off. You wouldn't believe how much quicker pages load. It's such a pain in the butt when you're visiting a primarily text content page, and it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43 analytics engines and social media libraries. Just flip it on when you want it. There's plugins for fast switching and allowing only for certain sites.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    It's becoming less and less an option. No javascript means blank page on a surprisingly large number of websites. Saddening.
  - flavor8 11y ago
    > it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43 analytics engines and social media libraries. Don't browse without ghostery.
hobbidibble874 11y ago
Or you can just use a dildo in your anus. Also reliable and cheap stimulator of vagus.
- visarga 11y ago
  Looked it up, it's true, guys.
DonGateley 11y ago
Sounds like using a club where a needle is appropriate.
amelius 11y ago
Here is one solution for tinnitus that uses such a device: [1] [1] http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118 http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118

112 points by musgravepeter 11y ago

Getting closer. At some point there will be a non-invasive nerve (or neuron) stimulator system that will replace opioids as the drug of choice. When that happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high" without any of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and money management firms. I expected us to be there by now with much of the deep brain stimulation research, but I also tend to be optimistic in my estimation of time to market for many technologies.

meatysnapper 11y ago
That will kill the drug industry. Maybe we will have a freemium model? Or a 24k gold version for the rich Chinese?
dogecoinbase 11y ago
Larry Niven hypothesized this in 1969 after the brain stimulation experiments of the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29#Known_Space_stories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29#...
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Didn't they recently find out that those experiments had accidentally targeted the wrong part of the rodent brain? That rather than hitting the pleasure center it hit an area related to scavenging?
stephengillie 11y ago
> When that happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high" without any of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and money management firms. Why do you think these industries will evaporate? Who will make, distribute, and manage the demand for these devices?
- chatmasta 11y ago
  Google, Facebook, etc. You think "addicted to Facebook" means something now? Just wait until they literally have a direct line into your brain! In all seriousness though, it's far more likely tech like this will emerge from... You guessed it, the tech sector. Large nontech companies have historically shown an unwillingness to innovate in tech, and if they get out innovated by a tech company, it's impossible to catch up. Example - amazon vs big retailers, amazon vs book sellers, etc. (I would be curious to hear counter examples) It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    > It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR. In the same way it should be hard for the "agile tech" companies to play in a highly regulated and, I would say, high responsibility market. F*cking up with your users when they are watching cat videos isn't quite the same than doing it when their health is at stake. I don't think we (tech industry) are fast because we're "years ahead in R&D and HR", nor because we're "agile". We are fast because we are reckless and we completely overlook many, many factors (and many of them, scientifically relevant and known). Look at how the Soylent guys claim their meals are nutritionally complete. Were they able to do this because they were "agile" and "years ahead" than other companies that already play in that field? No: they are able to say (not "do") this because they're highly overlooking what nutritionally complete means - mostly, overlooking the fact that we don't know yet what exactly "nutritionally complete" means.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  > Why do you think these industries will evaporate? The primary ingredient in a 'hit' will be energy, and there is already a very well established system for delivering energy to individuals in the economy. The devices themselves will essentially be consumer electronic type devices so that demand will be filled by various factories that produce gadgets. Just as heroin use doesn't really change the spoon or syringe markets as those markets are already so large that carrying along the heroin users doesn't really impact them in any meaningful way. > Who will make, distribute, and manage the demand > for these devices? Those folks will still be around, look at your typical smoke shop for a good corollary. But it is a smaller part of the drug industry than the production and distribution of the product.
jarboot 11y ago
Anyone familiar with the tabletop game 'Shadowrun' could compare this to BTL chips!
digi_owl 11y ago
http://www.gizmag.com/thync-hands-on-2/37820/ http://www.gizmag.com/thync-hands-on-2/37820/
newuser88273 11y ago
If you combine that with the pain stim version into one device and give me the remote, I'll have you barking like a dog whenever I lift my little finger. The good news is that schools don't have to drug unruly boys anymore...
- ourmandave 11y ago
  There are four lights!

brandonb 11y ago

You don't necessarily need a fancy device to stimulate the vagus nerve. Patients with supraventricular tachycardias are taught to do vagal maneuvers, the simplest of which is gagging: http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-fibrillation/tc/vagal-maneuvers-for-a-fast-heart-rate-topic-overview http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-fibrillation/tc/va... In general, imbalance within the autonomic nervous system (of which the vagus nerve controls half—the parasympathetic portion) has been shown to be related to everything from heart disease to irritable bowel syndrome to having an irritable personality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system

easymovet 11y ago
I tried it out with a signal generator (wav file) and an audio amplifier cranked way up, it felt like AC and made some muscles twitch but nothing compared to mechanical vagal maneuvers.

adventured 11y ago

The vagus nerve is fascinating. After a fight with a girlfriend once, I ended up tearing / straining my esophagus (we were yelling at each other). As far as the vagus nerve was concerned, it felt like I was having a heart attack. Over the next year, it continued to plague me. I randomly would feel like I was about to have a heart attack, with all the symptoms including my arm going numb, sharp pain in or across the chest, etc. Doctors were all mixed on what it was (they were all certain it wasn't cardiovascular, but that didn't make me feel any better, because it sure seemed like it was; and my father died in his 50s of a heart attack). During that time I couldn't work out, or even go for a jog without feeling like a heart attack was imminent. I gradually narrowed it down myself, and fixed it myself. It was of course esophageal spasms. Hot liquids, things with caffeine, and physical activity would agitate or stimulate the esophagus and vagus nerve. After some experimentation, I found that the damage wasn't healing, because routine things continued to agitate it; what would otherwise be normal amounts of acid were contributing to the problem. What ended up fixing it? Maximum strength Pepcid AC; took about four months, of reducing the acid levels way down, giving the esophagus time to heal. Since then, everything has been fine.

zhoujianfu 11y ago
It sure is fascinating! A few years ago I finally realized I had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response and that was why starting in my mid-twenties I began fainting at the sight of (my own) blood!
- malexw 11y ago
  Hey, it's good to meet someone else who suffers from this. Funny that it only developed for you in your mid-twenties - I've had it all my life. Not from the sight of my own blood, but from reading medical texts (such as the page you linked) or from having human biology explained to me. One thing that I think people don't understand is that it's completely uncontrollable. I can prevent myself from fainting about a well as a person with a broken leg can just "walk it off". It's very weird to see this effect from a part of the brain that I apparently have no control over. Have you looked into treatment options at all? I have looked around a bit, but I haven't found any studies into treatment of any kind. I've been considering regularly donating blood in the hopes that regular exposure to that environment would reduce effect.

joeyo 11y ago

Their (ElectroCore's) transcutaneous stimulation protocol is very cool. Being able to lower the risk profile (eliminating invasive surgery) may mitigate somewhat the fairly low efficacies that have been demonstrated for previous VN stimulators. But I'd still be quite worried about unintentional activation/blockade of non-target branches of the vagus nerve, affecting the internal organs, and the heart in particular. The article says that it's "just a matter of hitting a sweet spot of signal strength", implying that they are trying to take advantage of the topographic organization of the nerve's fascicles. My understanding, however, is that achieving spatial selectivity has been hard enough with implantable cuff electrodes. I'm not sure how they are going to achieve it with a (handheld?) device. Still, exciting times for electroceuticals!

HillRat 11y ago

A year or so ago I attended a talk by a professor whose research team is doing a lot of fascinating work with vagus nerve stimulation, particularly in the realm of physical rehabilitation after major trauma and ischemic events. Murine models indicated stimulation could trigger bouts of neural plasticity which, when coupled with physical rehabilitation, dramatically improved the rats' recovery from induced ischemic trauma. Pretty amazing stuff, especially when paired with some of the engineering work done on artificial limbs. There are also potential psychiatric and learning applications -- IIRC, he specifically singled out language acquisition as a research target -- but those, I think, are not yet as well-attested.

personjerry 11y ago

These titles are getting kinda clickbait-y

cpncrunch 11y ago
Clickbait for something that doesn't even have any evidence at all of its effectiveness (see my other comment here).

chatmasta 11y ago

From what I've seen (not much), a large obstacle in the field of brain/computer control seems to be signal interpretation. All our methods for analyzing electrical signals must be non invasive, a requirement which greatly increases noise. For example, to read EEG data from the brain we need to strap a net of ~128 electrodes around the skull and use FFT techniques to analyze 128 wave segments. The electrical signal bounces around in the convex skull, generating noise that pollutes the EEG signal. The fact is, it's hard to read electrical signals without a direct connection -- there is only so much we can do from outside the body. (This is why consumer grade EEG devices can do little more than react in a binary fashion to relaxed/excited emotional state. The signal difference between relaxed/excited is easily detectable in aggregate, but more nuanced signals are hidden amongst the noise of EEG waves bouncing around the skull.) For this reason, any non invasive method of reading (or in this case, apparently even controlling) electrical signals will advance the field of neuroscience exponentially. This obstacle of noisy data leads to a second obstacle: what is the signal? Can we duplicate an arbitrary signal and send it through the nervous system on demand? That's a hard question to answer, especially when we can barely listen to the signal in the first place. My question is, what role can machine learning play in this field? The problem of identifying signal seems more of a computational one than a biological one. How much data loss do EEG machines suffer from noise? Is all the data intact, and we just need to figure a way to avoid the noise? Has there been any research on feeding neural signals into ML algorithms, and labeling them with results, e.g. "Moved finger," "blinked eyes," etc? This field strikes me as one with a lot of untapped potential. With the coming VR revolution, thought-based interaction seems a natural next step.

amelius 11y ago
There is already a lot of research done in the area of decomposing signals. For example, to make an ECG of a foetus' heart, where the heart signal of the mother is noise that is to be canceled. The classical approach is to use something that is called a Kalman filter.

cpncrunch 11y ago

As far as I can tell, there haven't been any placebo-controlled trials yet. All of the medical conditions listed have a very high placebo effect, and using a novel device like this will amplify that placebo effect. Right now I don't think we can even say whether or not this thing works at all. Also, on a completely different subject, I find it interesting that the incredibly simple javascript animation uses about 70% of my macbook pro's CPU time (even after zapping the flash adverts at the top). Chrome really needs a method to stop javascript execution in pages, especially now that javascript is replacing flash for animations.

chestervonwinch 11y ago
> Chrome really needs a method to stop javascript execution in pages, especially now that javascript is replacing flash for animations. Just turn it off. You wouldn't believe how much quicker pages load. It's such a pain in the butt when you're visiting a primarily text content page, and it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43 analytics engines and social media libraries. Just flip it on when you want it. There's plugins for fast switching and allowing only for certain sites.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  It's becoming less and less an option. No javascript means blank page on a surprisingly large number of websites. Saddening.
- flavor8 11y ago
  > it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43 analytics engines and social media libraries. Don't browse without ghostery.

hobbidibble874 11y ago

Or you can just use a dildo in your anus. Also reliable and cheap stimulator of vagus.

visarga 11y ago
Looked it up, it's true, guys.

DonGateley 11y ago

Sounds like using a club where a needle is appropriate.

amelius 11y ago

Here is one solution for tinnitus that uses such a device: [1] [1] http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118 http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118