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tDCS, Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers
"The evidence of harm would be the evidence that you can hurt some cognitive functions with the same stimulation protocols that help another cognitive function. But they're completely correct that we don't have any evidence saying you're definitely hurting yourself. We do have evidence that you're definitely changing your brain."
interview:
http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2016/07/11/caution-brain-hacking
Paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24689/references
I was aware of the variability of responses to stim, but not the paper that leveraging one brain function could impair another. This was also written to give the docs some info to help inform their patients.
edit
I'll also tuck this in here, as i posted it to open thread.
Texting changes brain waves to new, previously unknown, pattern.
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/2623.html
Makes me wonder if they were using spell check, or the new, shortend speak. By using constructed kernels, or images of words and concepts, it looks like machine learning retrieval or construction is already being practiced here ?
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Comments (6)
So, "changes brain waves" and similar things are mostly worthless statements. We don't know enough about what our sensor readings mean to assign a direction to any particular change, and if you don't know if a change is good or bad and you don't expect things to stay the same... what can you say?
As for that you can harm function, well, obviously! For TDCS in particular, the idea is that you can either lower or raise the action potential in a particular region, and you would expect the effect of lowering to be roughly the opposite of the effect of raising. So it's no surprise that, say, changing the polarity could be very relevant. (The article makes the more subtle point that instead of just boosting overall function, one is likely making tradeoffs, but those sorts of tradeoffs represent increased mental flexibility that's overall good, because you can shape your mind to complement whatever task you're currently facing.)
The brain wave change they are describing has not been seen before, as i read it. Good or bad, it shows that doing a physical AND mental components together has produced something new and unstudied. there are some studies done on meditation, visualizations, and breath control too, and i must assume they haven't plotted the same feature there. I know there are also some papers coming out now showing some faults in MRI software and analysis that may undermine some of the results from those studies , but these are EEGs, so prob not as much an issue.
The tCDS paper seems to say you can choose either memory optimization , or flexibility and focus in thinking, but you won't get both....
My apologies for the pedantry, but could you repair the title so it says "tDCS" instead of (as now) "tCDS"? (It's transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, not transcranial Direct-current Stimulation.)
Does anyone know if these tradeoffs occur in organic brain variation between people? It almost seems that the g-factor is so strong as to overwhelm these tradeoffs without tDCS...
where's the open letter from decision theorists to rationality hackers
or from necroscientists to death hackers
A reply to the case that tDCS doesn't have enough current to actually be affective.
Response to the Response: Does tDCS Actually Deliver DC Stimulation?
paywalled http://www.brainstimjrnl.com/article/S1935-861X%2816%2930212-1/fulltext
there is a journal for brain stim now
http://www.brainstimjrnl.com/