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Vaniver comments on DIY Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. Who wants to go first? - Less Wrong
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Comments (35)
I've been looking into this, and have commented about it briefly here. I think I may hold off on future experimentation until I get this kit.
The takeaway is that there definitely appears to be an effect. Getting that effect to be positive seems more difficult, however. For example, a problem with this kit is going to be getting the electrodes in the right spots- see all of those dots on that image they have? It may be that missing the correct placement by a centimeter gives you a significantly different effect, and so I'm sort of leery of doing this more without finding a training video for EEGs or something.
(Also, going off the diagram they have, we did have the current going the right direction in our setup.)
What effect could misplacing the electrodes have besides stimulating a different part of the brain? I'm honestly asking, I have no idea about any of this.
That would be it.
One of the other things, that I haven't seen discussed much but seems to be going on, is that TCDS works by altering local ion concentrations. But those ions have to come from somewhere- and so it may be that TCDS lowers action potentials in one part of your brain but raises them elsewhere. (Brains are big, though, and so it seems plausible the effects elsewhere would be tiny. Ions would also be small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, so many they just get pulled out of your bloodstream? It's times like this that I wish I had taken more biology.)
After watching the video, though, I'm much less pessimistic about electrode placement (or size- it looks like ours were reasonable).
Neurons near the cathode a depressed. Read this
Impaired learning, IIRC - one study I read about recently mentioned that when the setup was reversed on the head, learning was not enhanced compared to baseline but damaged.
Nausea and apparent bright flashes of light. ie. What it looks and feels like to stimulate certain different parts of your brain. From what I understand this isn't a particularly big deal, just unpleasant.
I wonder if shaving your head would improve this treatment? I remember when I was getting an EEG. my thick hair made it difficult for the electrodes to read my mind.
Good advice, but my head was already shaved for cosmetic reasons.
Speaking to a guy who has done some research, you just need to use heavily soaked electrodes. Although he did say he had problems with Afros.
Here's a video. Doesn't have quite all the information you might want, but it's a start.
(I'm not qualified to make claims as to the efficacy of tDCS in general or this video in particular. Large grains of salt should be taken with this comment.)
Sorry, this was the video linked in the post. (The link redirection had me confused.)
Upshot of this comment: watch the video in the post.
Thanks for the link- I hadn't noticed it was in the post either.
Sorry about the redirection.
I'm a nerd for data, so I usually run my links through my own redirection scripts so that I can collect statistics.