Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers | Hacker News Reader

Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

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209 pointssanj144 comments

Neuroscientist here: Just listened to a talk from a reseacher who studied tDCS and tACS in human subjects, and found that IQ scores were actually going down relative to control groups. It's absolutely not clear what the appropriate protocols are, and behavioral outcomes could be incredibly sensitive to factors such as 1) electrode placement, 2) stimulation frequency, 3) amplitude, 4) direct or alternating current, etc.

On top of that, benefits may come at the cost of other unobserved effects (i.e. faster learning and plasticity, accompanied by faster forgetting, to oversimplify).

> IQ scores were actually going down

By how much?

If someone can trade severe anxiety for perhaps 5-10 IQ points, then in most cases they will probably sign up.

Anxiety and high IQ are linked: http://www.livescience.com/36259-anxiety-linked-high-iq.html so it is possible (I am speculating) that by reducing anxiety, you are reducing IQ. Not everyone wants to be smart, but it is not a decision I would take lightly. I wonder if you could perform the opposite operation, jacking up anxiety and IQ...

As someone who has experienced this from the inside let me share with you exactly what is going on...

A large part of anxiety is the result of basically running mental simulations of the world with "negative" assumptions. Thus, people who are better at cognitive simulation (i.e. high IQ) are naturally going to have a greater capacity for worry. That being said, if you train your mind to stop running simulations all the time (mindfulness) or just start running simulations with positive assumptions, that anxiety can be eliminated without any impact on intelligence whatsoever.

Even ignoring the whole "IQ = smart" thing, you can have a lower IQ and still have a high IQ.

This was not a well formulated sentence. I'll go ahead and clarify it some for other people reading and scratching their heads:

>you can have a lower IQ and still have a high IQ

You can lower your IQ and still have a high IQ. I.E going from 130 to 120 is different from going from 100 to 90.

Severe anxiety is painful for sure, but doesn't that seem a bit unnecessary? Given there are proven methods for treating anxiety such as medications, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapies, etc without such a high cost.

Most people who are turning to more extreme and DIY solutions are doing so precisely because they've tried everything else. Outside of a small core of "natural cure" quacks, alternative medicine or "unproven medicine" is the last thing people try after conventional medicine and methods of symptom regulation have failed.

Combined, the anxiety treatment options you mentioned are probably about 80-90% effective, which is good from a societal outcomes perspective, but that still leaves millions of people with no other options.

Furthermore, many of the FDA approved medications for anxiety have side effects that can be more harmful than the original anxiety, and patients have far less experience coping with those second-order effects. A sufferer of extreme anxiety can have developed a toolset of partially effective coping mechanisms built over decades of experience, but be totally unprepared to deal with the disassociative effects and suicidal thoughts that come from something like Xanax.

Anecdotal, but the people I know who have messed with brain hacking did not do it to treat anxiety but because they believe it makes them better at learning stuff. Precisely because of the effect described in this letter - they read a couple of studies that sound very positive and think this is something they could easily do at home.

I doubt we can get any real numbers about the motivation behind DIY tDCS. But I'm glad this was written.

I think you're right and for me the numbers skew about 70-30 for people who want an "edge" and people who want a "cure".

Although, (at the risk of being pedantic and playing parlor games) I would say that many of the people seeking to boost their ability to learn and go to such great lengths to do it are also experiencing psychological problems.

Only anecdotal, but it's never been my most successful friends trying to become even moe successful, but rather people who feel like failures or that they're stuck in a rut, or that they're just not cognitively capable of being in this industry at the highest levels on their own.

That coincides with what I have seen, those studies definitely made me and my friends curious. With better evidence I will definitely be trying tDCS for accelerating learning.

Thanks for this. There is a bottle of contingencies in my bathroom, but, it simply is not an option for what plagues me daily. I quickly become wholly inefficient & anxiety transmutes to doldrums. In the days directly after having to succumb to the use of a benzo I am foggy and detached...hungover. Have not tried some of the newer beta-blockers that are supposed to work without creative lobotomy.

They're each "proven" for a relatively small (sometimes overlapping) subset of the population. If anything, psychopharmacology has taught us about the extreme variance in brain chemistries and how difficult the problem is when it comes to treatment. Adding more options is a great thing, as long as there is strong science behind it.

As long as people recognize the costs. It is painful to watch people try to solve a problem without looking into the costs of side effects. Because of hyperbolic discounting our brains are often prone to take the easier short term relief despite much higher long term costs.

For severe anxiety/panic, the main course of treatment when it comes to medication is to load the patient up with high doses of SSRIs. We're talking hitting the maximum doses for medications, where side effects will almost certainly appear. They aren't fun, they slow you down, give you nausea, change your behavior/personality and might make your dick not work.

Some doctors not in the loop will end up overprescribing Xanax and benzodiazepines to deal with the symptoms, but fail to recognize that they're only indicated to be used for a period of 4-6 weeks because they're highly addictive drugs with a withdrawal that can last 6mo or more, can cause brain damage or kill. They mask the symptoms, add their own (you are essentially drunk and impaired while on them) and tend to make the disorder worse after quitting.

>> Neuroscientist here: Just listened to a talk from a reseacher who studied tDCS and tACS in human subjects, and found that IQ scores were actually going down relative to control groups.

So really, someone experimenting on their own could be considered more ethical than researchers doing it to other people ;-) This is really an area where having all the data is critical and that publication bias we keep reading about at HN can actually be harmful to people relying on published results. One could say "they shouldn't be doing that", but don't researchers want their results to be used for something, or is it just about publication?

On the risk that I may sound to much like from the ivory tower but doing something out of the blue is not more ethical (why should it?). But you may end paralyzed and need help by other people, very clever. And the amount people at home can contribute to science is negleable. How much do all the at home car tuners contribute to new cars?! Is it ethical to built new superfast cars on your own ground so you one day can build a faster ambulance? Right, it is not. Just because this kind of research is somewhat new, it does not mean it is easy or you just have to invest sometime to revolutionize the world.

Somewhat parallel, people also critize WebMD. Obvoiusly, scientists want their finding to be used but in a reasonable matter, not without context and into the blue. And publications are (among scientists) are rendered not that important (and everyone knows that). It is just that you get judged by them, so you do them and as good as you can. As a software engineer you also at some point finish your project, although you could obtimize on it for ever.

No I think that medical research can now be preformed by anyone. I think that there are going to be great advances that come from this amateur research in the next 5 years and I think it is the next evolution of hacking. People in general are capable of the kind of science required to achieve reproducible results. Most of this "research" is driven by a personal motivation (personal or some one close) where traditional medicine is unable to help. Research is driven by what can be sold afterwards and not the reward of knowledge gained from the results. And even then if knowledge was captured it often be inaccessible to those whom could turn that into a practical application of that science. So really this comes off as questioning the Doctors' absolute authority as masters in their field, and someone with out credentials coming up with just as meaningful results being tossed aside as amateurs not having a full understanding of what they are doing. I would say that in my personal experience that medicine is largely more art than science you rarely find Doctors that are interested in solving the unusual.

"No I think that medical research can now be preformed by anyone."

They should have at least some knowledge of how research works. Whats the point in experimenting if you aren't adding a control group for example?

Some people just want to make themselves better. They don't care about a control group. They only care to see if they can produce a positive effect on the one subject that matters to them. Most of them would probably go to a doctor for this if it were readily accessible.

I don't see any ethical problem with people doing experiments on themselves. That said, they should know what they're getting themselves in for, so I applaud these researchers for highlighting the dangers.

> One could say "they shouldn't be doing that", but don't researchers want their results to be used for something, or is it just about publication?

I imagine they would like their results to be used for positive purposes. If people are misapplying the methods and permanently damaging themselves, I doubt the scientists are super happy about that just because their research got applied somewhere.

RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance sharp-shooting ability.

At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of loss when the tCDS system was no longer available to her. She sounded like a drug addict that pines for that feeling of their first high and then risks spending their life in vain trying to recover that feeling.

If your life literally depends on a skill and supervised tCDS can improve it, then the reward may outweigh the unknown risks. But for other tasks/skills, it is difficult to justify.

Edit: typos, clarity

http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana

A quote from the reporter's blog [0]: "When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up."

I'll be honest, that is a pretty compelling testimonial for many folks.

[0]: http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-th...

From that blog post:

And then, finally, the main question: what role does doubt and fear play in our lives if its eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we’re freed from them? If we all wore these caps, would the world be a better place?

That's a really interesting thought. Not so much "would the world be better", as there is a presumption present in that question that more rational decision making is necessarily better, but if tDCS works similar to how it did with her with other people, we might have a way to study rational decision making in groups in interesting ways.

It's a leap to say that suppressing doubt and fear makes people more rational. It could just as well make people more impulsive.

It's also a leap to say the world would be a better place. One person's version of rationality can be quite different to another's. Imagine of someone feels that the only rational thing for them to do is to do something "normally rational" people would find irrational- like kill your neighbour's dog because it's bark is keeping you up at night, but social pressures, anxiety and fear actually keep them in check from the perspective of the whole population.

Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off?

Well, rationality doesn't exist in a vacuum. Those societal pressures are taken into account in a rational choice.

> Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off?

Possibly? If your goal is the ultimate advancement of the self, then sociopathic tendencies might yield the best results. We've evolved to have strong emotions regarding our offspring and those of our tribe, because that's proven a beneficial strategy for the species, but that is, in some respect, to the detriment of the individual. Most of us are fine with this decision, because of our feelings regarding our and our future offspring, but if you have no care for family, friends or the species as a whole, then gaming the system for your own advancement is probably the rational choice.

There are interesting implications to your sentence though. The blogger explained the loss of (generally perceived as) negative emotions, but what if they were not put in a situation to notice, or were unable to because of the condition itself, a loss in what we generally perceive as positive emotions, such as empathy and sympathy? This of course assumes that there was some emotional state change, and it wasn't a placebo effect.

Psychopaths aren't simply a normal person with some morals turned off. They exhibit a number of other differences, including some that you might consider closer to 'brain damage' than 'rational', like an insensitivity to losses or punishment which makes them show worse performance on the Iowa Gambling Task.

I'm not sure it is that much of a leap. That's not to say that a person will be rational by suppressing those emotions, but as long as the emotions are suppressed, but not the information about any situations that led to those emotions, the person may be able to more objectively assess a situation.

That is, there are assumptions involved, but I think a case could be made that emotions are a way to bypass rational thought when it's less efficient, useful (too slow for the situation) or lack of information (or lack of our own capability) causes us to fall into local maxima thinking (e.g. love, distrust of the different, etc).

If tDCS helps test this in some manner, that would also be good. We of course need a lot more information on what tDCS actually does first though. It's entirely possible that the described effects are not what is happening at all, just what it feels like. Measuring the state of the mind is weird.

Just to address the question of elimination of fear and doubt... This is fairly easy to draw out on a line. Alcohol does a pretty good job of eliminating fear and doubt, as well. There are other problems mixed in with alcohol use, but I spent many years drinking, and having fear and doubt removed from pretty much every interaction, every day. You can ask my friends and family what that was like. I agree though that it would be very interesting for studying decision making if tDCS could modify very specific features like fear or doubt from every individual in a group.

That's exactly how many addicts describe their first experience with drugs and/or alcohol.

> for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up

Sounds remarkably similar to what happens as a result of various techniques of meditation - but, of course, I've no way to tell whether it's actually the same thing.

Similar feeling to transcendental meditation. You can change your brain..

They improved her ability to play a shooting video game.

Quite honestly, those games ("simulations") are like Counter Strike on adderal. They are nothing like the real deal. They certainly do not teach precision sharp shooting.

What they do teach is reaction times and hand eye coordination (see bad guy, point gun, pull trigger, repeat).

Let's hope the CSGO community never find out about this and start trying to juice themselves with 9v batteries.

Larry Niven arguably predicted the existence of wireheads, although his wires ran directly to the brain's pleasure center.

Although the most famous wirehead (spoiler alert) got a wire installed when he was walking through the park, feeling depressed, and someone shot him with a "tasp", which is a device that stimulates the pleasure centers without wires.

Suppose you can achieve happiness with a wire to the brain. Is there a good argument against doing this?

That depends. If your end goal is merely happiness then no, as long as you can still find a way to motivate yourself to eat, get enough physical activity to stay alive and provide yourself at least basic shelter and essentials.

If your end goal isn't happiness but fulfillment or meaning or something else that will also trigger happiness then there's an excellent argument against doing that, since it will eventually become all you do or care about.

Are we talking about happiness or pleasure? A days-long orgasm might be an incredible physical experience, but I doubt the feeling would be the same as seeing my daughter walk for the first time, or achieving a long-sought personal goal.

It would short circuit your normal reward-action feedback loop. We don't live to trigger the reward, we are rewarded to live.

So how does addiction work?

Addiction works like that (what I said above). It's bad because it gives you no reason to do the stuff you'd normally have to do to stay alive or reproduce.

Rubbish, most smokers are addicted, and get on with life fine.

Smoking is different from dopamine releasing drugs. Smoking's addiction mechanic isn't dopamine release. Dopamine is the body's natural pleasure signal and short circuiting that would cause the issues I mentioned.

You seem to be changing your argument now. It was addiction that "worked like that" your comment.

The same arguments against doing heroin?

Heroin (and the fact that it's a scarce commodity due to legislation first world countries) has the self-harm potential (needles can be used by addicts so many times they actually snap/collapsed veins/'cotton fever') along with social negatives (shared needles=>increased rates of transmittance of hep C and other maladies, petty crime, prostitution (which is a-okay by me if regulated, but addicts who resort to sex working as a means to sustain their habit often are subjected to violent situations) organized crime/gang warfare due to the market effects of prohibition effectively making powdered heroin high purity being incredibly valuable in a fairly transportable form). Nasal consumption can lead to deviated septums, decreased nasal mucosa production, etc (not limited to heroin, habitual insufflation of cocaine exhibits the same effects). Smoking heroin off foil surely can't be good for ones lungs, though I'm not sure specifically what pulmonary effects it would yield.

As long as electricity and the components/knowledge is commonly available, those sociological byproducts are more or less eliminated (though the self-injurious effects have analogous deleterious effects one could argue). Unlike heroin, where the side-effects are well-known (about two hundred years of opium usage in the west, ranging from laudanum in the 19th century among primarily the affluent women of society to Purdue's OxyContin(tm)). We know how mu-opioids are structured molecularly, the pharmacological behavior occurs as they bind to (primarily) mu-opioid receptors in the brain, etc). tDCS main risk factor is (as stated in the article) the fact that it's a fairly new science. Even if properly administered by trained neuroscientists/neurologists/technicians within the field, we're not aware of the long-term 10 year side-effects. The risks increase dramatically if an average Joe is half-informed and tries to administer (or modify) tDCS themselves.

If heroin was legal, safe, and free, I still wouldn't use it.

The state I would be in as a heroin addict has a large negative value in my current utility function. This negative value is so large that it swamps the positive value of being happy all the time. I suspect this just means I'm not entirely hedonistic.

Heroin doesn't make you happy.

It nukes emotion.

I suffered a pretty horrible Smith's fracture on my dorsal radius two years ago, such that the resident at the ER called his attending, who called the ortho specialist and immediately got 30mg oxycodone's 4x daily just as a stop-gap until they could block in a surgeon skilled enough to work on the Smith's fracture. Even through the egregious pain, I could see a: how those without opiate dependencies can find it euphoric and b: how easily an average person could form a habit without noticing it by escalating consumption.

I've used oxycodone for pain, and have occasionally played with higher dosages. I don't find the effects euphoric. More like numbness, but in a vaguely pleasant way. Or at least, not euphoric in the sense that Psilocybe are. But maybe that's just me. I've never had problems with opiate dependence.

heroin does have self-harm potential, but so do free climbing, flying in wingsuit, etc. Should we outlaw them as well?

Absolutely not my point. In fact, properly administered IV opiates have less long term damages of administered in than alcohol. (Pill-form opiates of the non-paracemetol fashion have no chance of liver cirrhosis, and the withdrawal has no potential to kill you, unlike sucking down two quarts of plastic vodka a day for 2 weeks then stopping cold.)

There were political benefits to scaremongering tons of drugs into illegality, economic benefits of keeping them illegal (should, say, 5mg generic Perocets enter into CVS tomorrow as over-the-counter and/or on-the-shelf drugs, petty theft might go up [much like I'm sure Robotussin is stolen frequently by high-schoolers who can't find someone to buy them booze]) would put tons of people out of work. There goes a significant part of the DEA (from those out in the field to those who push papers) along with the politicians who made their name during the Reagan-just-say-no-years, the extra police who were hired in more-or-less crimeless-suburbia to deal with some 16 year olds half-gram of weed, the attorneys who prosecute them, the defense contractors who make an excess of tanks in order to give those suburban law enforcers tanks[1].

My overall point was that opioids are a magnitude safer than DIY brain-hacking, if only due to the well-explored terrain of the analgesic properties of the narcotic (which, again, was the point of the article). "Even us neuroscientists/neurologists with extensive graduate school/residencies/fellowships and years of experience still don't know what the long-term effects are when we properly administer controlled dosages of current via well-placed electrodes on your skull. Please don't try to 'hack' your brain."

Sidebar, I'm not a medical doctor but every every grandfather, uncle (except one who went into mathematics as I did), and father all have been practicing MD's (including two neurologists), MD/PhDs, or PhDs in specifically drug design for evil-bigpharma). Drug design is basically 'throw a lot of junk at the wall and see what doesn't kill mice, oh god please make it to at least phase 1". Specifically, we're going to effectively look at our understanding of the brain and compare it to the crudity of surgery during the Civil War. The brain is an amazing thing - don't attach electrodes to it and try to modify its behavior until 'brain hacking' has been well-explored terrain.

[1] http://www.njtvonline.org/news/video/nj-police-departments-g... I'll spare you an Eisenhower MIC schpeal

Dependency. Unless you don't value independence.

> ...then the risk may outweigh the reward

I think you mean the reward may outweigh the risk

Thanks. I just corrected that.

Typical wirehead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)

The first 40 minutes of this week's "Invisibilia" touches on the effects transcranial magnetic stimulation had on a woman who lived with undiagnosed aspergers for most of her life.

> ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: Until she was 54 years old, Kim (ph) was totally unaware that there were things in the world that she could not see.

> KIM: Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head, and now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/invisibilia-an-exper...

(The TMS study "Kim" participated in took place at the same hospital that the co-author of this letter works, Beth Israel Deaconess.)

Thank you for mentioning this — my podcast app didn't notify me that Season 2 was underway.

The linked transcript is fairly short and DEFINITELY worth a read.

Very interesting stuff.

There is a much longer and even more fascinating article here on HN about a similar case. You should search for it, if I was in front of a computer I'd find it for you. In it the man seems to have a lasting effect and is "cured" from Aspergers ends up splitting with his wife of I remember correctly.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-aut...

I think the thing that a lot of hackers don't understand is unintended consequences. It's fine when you're hacking a computer game, and the worst case scenario is that the game malfunctions. Things like overclocking a PC, or re-tuning a car, have more tangible consequences, but those consequences ultimately mean that the hacker will damage an easily replaceable commodity.

A person's brain is not replaceable.

>"A person's brain is not replaceable."

In addition to that are the consequences probably not detectable in the short run, but will eventually crystallize years from now. (If there are any)

That's one of the reasons I've stayed away from 'beta blocker' medications even though they're designed to tone down stage fright to a bare minimum. There are, from what I've read, potential side effects that can be rather severe. As in, some real unwelcome motor/cognition changes. That's enough cautionary literature to keep me away. Strangely enough though, I'm not anti-supplement (vitamins, PH stacks, etc) in the least.

Can you point to any papers? I'm curious. A friend (actually not me) was just asking about them. He gets anxiety, and wanted to have them on hand in case of a severe attack. But he's wary of medications generally and is on the fence about taking them.

Beta blockers aren't great for sudden panic attacks. I took them for years, and while they're great for toning down the anxiety baseline, they don't even remotely approach benzos when it comes to mitigating severe panic. Sadly the only medications you can reasonably get out there that will address an incipient or in progress panic attack are benzos.

There are other supplements/medications that are helpful (phenibut is my goto since I no longer wanted to take benzos), but none of them are fast acting or powerful enough to stop something that's already happening.

Ah, interesting. I checked with my friend, and it turns out they had gotten mixed up. They were prescribed benzos, not beta blockers.

What made you stop taking them? My friend has been making good progress without them, but still gets some rough days. And what supplements/medicines do you use, apart from phenibut?

(To be clear, they've already spoken with a doctor, psychologist, consulted drugs.com listing of side effect, etc.)

I stopped taking them for two reasons.

1. I have an absurdly high tolerance to them (and almost all GABAergics, for that matter.) I always have, and also have an absurd alcohol tolerance. So, while clonazepam worked for me, I was taking roughly the maximum dosage designated for severe seizure disorders (I was taking 18mg/day, which if anyone is familiar with clonazepam, they'll know how absurd that is.)

2. I was starting to feel dumb. I'm not 100% sure if that was the clonazepam or the quetiapine or the topamax, but one or all of them was making me forget my friends' and family's names. So, I dropped them like they were hot.

I'll give a small rundown of my stack below. I certainly won't say my stack is bulletproof, and for people with addictive personalities it could certainly be actively harmful. I won't discuss dosages either, because frankly my phenibut dosage is irresponsible, but once again that goes directly towards my GABAergic tolerance.

-----

Tianeptine - for depression. It's a fast acting novel TCA that works via unknown mechanisms. In higher dosages it exhibits opioid activity, and if someone suffers from addictive tendencies it should absolutely be avoided.

Phenibut - for anxiety. It's converted directly into GABA in the brain. It's relatively fast acting. Some people, but definitely not all, can suffer from horrible withdrawals if they take it for a long time and then stop taking it. I've never had problems with it if I've run out though, and I take it daily.

Adrafinil - for fatigue and sleepiness. I suffer from an autoimmune disorder and am chronically fatigued. Adrafinil is a pro-drug for modafinil, and gets rid of your tiredness without being otherwise stimulating.

Caffeine - tiredness. I get mine powdered, but it doesn't really matter.

Vitamin D - this one helped with my depression enormously. I decided to give it a try one day after my dad was diagnosed with SAD, and did a loading dose. Within 3 days the dark circles had disappeared from under my eyes and my depression lifted significantly.

Those are everything I take on a day to day basis. I also have conditional nootropics for days when I'm in the mood for them/need to be extra productive. Noopept, aniracetam, oxiracetam, N-Acetyl Selank Amidate for days I'm feeling extra anxious, N-Acetyl Semax Amidate for a mental boost, and a few others I rarely use.

How much Vitamin D are you taking? I have been supplementing with it, but it did not put much of a dent in my winter depression. And what is considered to be a loading dose?

10,000 IU per day. A loading dose is in the range of 100,000IU to 1,000,000IU, depending on age and body weight. Hypervitaminosis D only occurs when you take a loading dose level for months or years; it's not possible to acutely overdose on vitamin D.

That's a lot. Vitamin D tests are easy to get, so I just took a few over a few months to find a dose that would keep me at ~50ng/ml. Previous to that, I had taken 5000+ IU/day for some time and the test showed my levels were very high.

It looks like this site has a nice chart: https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/further-topics/i-tested-my-v...

I did end up taking a Vitamin D test after I had started supplementing, and on that dosage I'm still a little below normal levels.

Interesting that you're able to take phenibut daily. I only take a low dose once per wee, starting two months ago, and I'm already starting to get issues with tolerance and rebound anxiety.

That is interesting. I've long held a theory that my brain simply doesn't respond to GABA properly. I seem to be able to take any GABAergic in gargantuan amounts and experience very few side effects, and just feel normal. Then, once they wear off, I just go back to my normal anxious self.

On the suggestion of someone here I tried Phenibut for sleep earlier this year. What I've found with it is that it works best taking it 4-5 days a week with 2-3 days off, otherwise my tolerance builds up. The first day I take it after a break is noticibly stronger and I could probably use a lower dose then (but I ended up just using 900mg all the time). I now do the same with Baclofen 20mg, which I prefer (but Phenibut is more effective for anxiety I hear since it is a weak baclofen plus a weak gabapentin). Anyway, if you want to try lower doeses and haven't tried this already and can go without for a couple of days a week that might work (you might need a longer break at first to clear it out).

Phenibut (and almost certainly Baclofen too) have some interactions with other medications; I had issues with diphenhydramine (numbness in mouth for 10 seconds or so after waking up; I didn't intend to take both, it didn't even seem like a good idea) and L-Theanine (mild asthma reaction, which I otherwise rarely get these days other than in the vicinity of certain cats). While not severe for me, they are the kind of things that could be severe and I think it is worth being careful with them. Withdrawal effects should be less severe with once a day usage due to the short half life (about 6 hours IIRC), but take it long enough without breaks, particularly at high dosage, and it can build up enough to cause withdrawal effects (but tapering when stopping will prevent those).

While I don't remember the details, I tried a benzo for sleep briefly after high school and found it effective only for a day or two. Between that and the potential side effects, I haven't tried them again since. I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm and have had success with a combination of uridine monophosphate (150mg sublingual daily with maybe monthly breaks of a couple of days), Baclofen (20mg four or five days a week, at least two in a row off), and a quarter of a 5mg melatonin patch most days (I manage to forget it often enough to not need intentional breaks; at least monthly breaks of a couple of days would be a good idea). With this I've been able to avoid my sleep schedule shifting every day as it does without medication. My alertness and other issues during the day still vary quite a bit and are rarely all that good, but hopefully this will get better eventually.

Uridine monophosphate (or triacetyluridine, which is better absorbed from the digestive system but isn't usable sublingually) is also a higher risk in that it hasn't been as comprehensively studied as other things and it could have negative long term effects. I seem to need to take a high B vitamin supplement when I take it or get B vitamin deficiency symptoms (bright red around lips); even a 100% DV supplement doesn't prevent that. The combination of uridine, DHA, and choline is supposed to help with neural growth. I don't know if it would help with anxiety, but anything that helps with sleep seems like a possibility at least :/. It could potentially interact (negatively or otherwise) with things like autoimmune conditions.

The problem with benzodiazepines is that they're insanely addictive. And withdrawal is excruciating.

Your friend should consult someone who spends a lot of time studying these sorts of things. I take a beta blocker, by prescription, for anxiety, and it does work for me. But I'd never recommend anyone else try it. I'd recommend they ask their doctor about it specifically.

Ask him how he feels about diabetes.

> "That's one of the reasons I've stayed away from 'beta blocker' medications even though they're designed to tone down stage fright to a bare minimum."

Just in case you're interested, bananas are meant to act as natural beta blockers (or more specifically, the potassium in bananas). I have no idea about how effective bananas are in reducing anxiety, but they might be worth a try.

Thank you very much for sharing! I believe I have a mild allergy to them (and avocado as well) but will pursue this experiment in the name of science. A banana rich, plain yogurt smoothie sounds like a good test.

You're welcome 6stringmerc. A banana rich, plain yogurt smoothie sounds like a good way to try it out. You may want to give dark chocolate a go too, it's also meant to be good at reducing anxiety (as long as you only eat small amounts):

http://www.livestrong.com/article/450142-how-does-chocolate-...

""Some people were administering it to their kids," he says. "

WTF , fair enough if you want to risk it on yourself but not your children with still developing brains.

The whole thing just reminds me about the radium water craze years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor https://67.media.tumblr.com/1899ba50f59df9c88dace35c13c2c1a7...

I once lived in a area that had naturally elevated levels of radium in the city water supply. Nice that each water bill had a warning about possible bone cancer risk in drinking the water.

Needless to say we had a delivery service for our drinking water.

I watched a documentary on Netflix a while back that talked about the Radium health craze and carelessness. I think it was about the rise of investigative chemistry with regard to poisonings, etc.

The radium portion was horrifying to think about.

As long as the mindset of "we're done hearing from experts!" is allowed to resurface again and again, we'll have this problem. See: Anti-vaccers, the insanity with radium, maybe even Bob Marley's toe cancer.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poisoners/

The Poisoner's Handbook

The radium portion was especially sad, but fit in quite well with the lead section in american societies willingness to poison people to improve profit.

Yup, same with anti-vaxxers. But they (like anti-vaxxers, or even vaxxers) think they're doing the kids a favour.

Insanity of proponents of pseudoscience has no boundaries.

Too early to say if it pseudoscience. They don't know the effects yet. It is just risky tinkering.

>Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to the scientific method. A field, practice, or body of knowledge can reasonably be called pseudoscientific when it is presented as consistent with the norms of scientific research, but it demonstrably fails to meet these norms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

Science is not "if it works. It's science." You can be correct by change or by having right intuition. Science is systematic way to organize and build knowledge.

Replicable Falsifiable Precise Parsimonious

> They don't know the effects yet.

That's what makes it 'pseudo'.

Not only that but the fact that by the method they are following, they will never know what the effects are. That's really what makes it pseudo-science.

They have an apparatus, but nothing else of the scientific method.

The results of a trial are judged in some purely subjective terms.

So by that definition, any new and untested-en-masse "thing" is "pseudoscience", with all the implied quackery baggage that term applies.

That is not a useful definition.

It's pseudoscience if it's presented as "scientific fact"; science is the process by which such facts are established. Otherwise you're talking about a hypothesis.

http://jjodx.weebly.com/home/seven-papers-about-tdcs

Sounds like scientific fact to me. We know it works, it's just a matter of establishing effects on specific tasks.

Sigh did you read TFA? It's not "just" a matter of establishing effects - article goes into why it's not that straightforward ... as another commenter said TDCS is like using a sledge-hammer to tune a piano. We know that TDCS does "something" but all the hypotheses are "two tailed" which basically means all you can say is there is an effect - not whether it's a good one or bad one. The pseudoscience is claiming these hypotheses are certain.

I suggest reading the submitted article, starting from the heading "What are your other concerns?"

The article was about people using tdcs for durations and at levels of current that haven't been tested, measured, and documented, and then claiming that it has a known, beneficial effect, while implying that there are no negative side-effects.

When scientists study these effects, they study them over groups of people. For some individuals, it hurts where it should help. For others, they get a larger-than-average boost. At the same time, research seems to suggest that some abilities are increased while others decrease, for a given protocol.

It's not pseudoscience that a lot of people are trying a new, untested thing. It's pseudoscience if they claim benefits based on subjective perception or claim that the same protocol will help everyone, without documenting objective, replicable proof.

It is a quite useful definition. Until it's proven, someone claiming that it's great is spewing quackery.

Forgive my votum separatum, but:

> The biggest risk is that we just don't know what all the risks are. I think that's the biggest risk.

I would call it "an opportunity". And as far as it is being done voluntarily, and there is a non-zero entry barrier, I am indebted to all those who (maybe) risk their health and lives for possible progress of science, medicine and technology.

Compare it to extreme sports, where there is risk, but often with little or no long-term benefit for the rest of society.

If we restrict ourselves only to "safe", "regulated" and "within the sacred walls of academia" experiments, we will miss (or seriously delay) a lot of things. Especially:

> I don't know that any hospital review board would actually let us do that experiment, so we might never know what that does to brain activity.

Yes, but unless these experiments are done by pairs or groups, you are getting what is passed off as scientific results from someone who is experimenting on their own brain with a sample size of one and no control group. How do you trust the results from an experiment conducted on the experimenter's brain? What if the experimenter loses the capacity to properly conduct the experiment in the process? How would you know the difference between that and he or she being incompetent in the first place, aside from the fact that they're attempting this in the first place?

Check out Erowid[1] and see how people dealt with those 'scary chemicals'. People were being their own chemist & pharmacy at much higher doses, for much longer periods than any doctor had ever prescribed. There are certainly uncertainties, but enough people saying similar things actually do start to hone in on very real affects (that aren't/can't actually be known from an 'ethical' experiment).

[1] https://www.erowid.org/

A lot of great discoveries started from anecdotes.

(Or put in in another way: why don't we measure if the number of deers in Germany hair correlates with weather in Australia? Because they are even no anecdotes it does, or wild guesses why it might.)

Sure, a lot of self-reported self-tinkering may be qualified more like high-risk fun. Yet, people performing experiments on their own is not a new story.

The problem is that no one gets any decent data out of that harm. The benefit is pretty minimal compared to the societal cost of potential harm. We can even ignore the personal costs completely and just focus on the societal costs of these people harming themselves and no longer being productive and instead being a burden, it still seems like a poor trade-off.

So, if you are going to self-experiment, please take copious, detailed and careful notes, video and pictures I guess.

It's also very worthwhile to note that groups of well educated, titled experts do horrible things now and then. Take the lobotomy for example, which won it's inventor (Dr. Egas Moniz) the Nobel Peace Prize. It's still around, and has it's place as an incredibly extreme measure, but it was horribly overused at first.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-history-of-the-lobotomy

The same argument goes for electroshock therapy, forced sterilization of 'mongoloids',

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/03/the-science-of-harm/

and a whole bunch of stuff done in World War II. How about lead based paint?

Learning is filled with mistakes but 'Trust us, leave these things to professionals. You could really hurt yourself.' isn't an answer.

What people do with their own brains, ultimately is their own responsibility.

An opportunity which comes blind, and with your brain as the stakes strikes me as something more akin to "A Gamble". It might actually be an incredibly poor gamble too.

It's a gamble for those doing it. If you're willing to let them (and I don't see sufficient grounds on which to stop them) then it's pure upside for everyone else, as we learn the results. Very callously speaking, of course. And the upsides are much less when they're not thoroughly and scientifically recording their results, which they're probably not.

The thing is, you're assuming that the methodology employed by people acting as their own guinea pigs will yield useful data. I think this will be a case of GIGO, and the answers we need will eventually come from study, not personal sacrifice.

Curious why you choose extreme sports as your example.

I know that a lot more people die at the easy end of the spectrum when kayaking. The ones who do it at the extreme level know what they are doing are usually very aware of their own ability.

So the TLDR is its basically like exercise where you can quite easily hurt yourself if you have no idea what you're doing, and you probably do not especially if you're a broscience devotee, and most people make pretty dumb decisions about appropriate levels of repetition, effort, and pain.

Another way of putting it is people with poor judgment can now at some effort and money, destroy their brains, not just their knees and shoulders. Eh.

Another good analogy is alcohol consumption, although unlike alcohol it appears both brain stimulation and exercise can have a net positive effect.

With exercise there are at least people who do know what they're doing you can ask. In this case there isn't anybody who really knows what they're doing, at least not to the point that they can get any benefits out of it.

I think the real "only" way to improve your brain is to improve the sophistication of the "software" that makes up the wiring of your brain. I'm pretty sure from a logical standpoint that electricity alone doesn't do this.

TDCS seems like using a sledgehammer to tune a piano.

Wait, you're telling me that a highly sensitive organ that maintains a complicated electromagnetic and chemical signaling system within a medium of fragile and compressed axions is difficult to tweak with grossly tuned omnidirectional fields?!

Surely, you jest.

Nicely put. I'd venture that a lot of the "plug in and go" crowd might be better served with some vigorous exercise rather than electrical stimulation. At least one of the two has viable, peer reviewed studies and results to consider.

But hey, Darwin Awards ain't going to write themselves.

In addition to vigorous exercise, add in all the promising results from studies on mindfulness meditation as well. But clearly the cyberpunk aesthetic, and techno-solutionism is what is motivating here, it's not the evidence.

I'd never have thought there would be anyone who'd want to live in a Peter Watts novel, but here we are.

Governments seem to think 1984 is an instruction manual so this is not uncommon.

A good idea would be to create a website were self experimenters can log their results, describe their setups, take tests and answer questionnaires. Similar to what erowid did for drugs back in the days - the self reported "trip reports".

Of course - warn people that it's dangerous, etc etc, but people are still going to do it so why not use that as 'volunteer' experimental data.

That's a start. But given that the report is subjective, and its a report on brain-altering drugs, as a data set its of questionable usefulness. E.g. all those that were changed to be hyper-focused will not be able to change their attention to reporting - so many will be missing from the reports. Others may become depressive and incapable of reporting as well.

Its like "everybody who didn't survive the experiment, raise your hands!"

Huh. I thought it's something about DIY EEG devices or something like that and is quite surprised with what some people do with their heads...

Peter: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head, remember that?

Egon: That would have worked if you didn’t stop me.

Hope someone writes a similar letter about nootropics. There's little evidence about their long term effects.

I think centrophenoxine and racetams are fairly well tolerated. I've cycled them on and off for a few years with only positive outcomes. They've been studied for decades. It's probably worse to take something like tylenol pm every night, which is FDA approved, OTC etc. http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-dr...

But where's the link to centrophenoxine and racetams? Your link only talks about anticholinergic drugs. I have seen such results about benzodiazepine http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-ra...

When you are chemically toying with your brain, it is good to know if there are any adverse long terms effects. Risk vs. reward. Surely some non chemical ways of modifying the your brain can also have adverse effects: like eroding concentration due to constant multitasking.

Here is an account of long term centrophenoxine use. Not sure there is lots of study demonstrating 35 years of use is safe in large qty of the population so this should be treated as an anecdotal report only. It does cite other study he has done.

http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/64596-my-personal-35-ye...

There are links to outcomes of studies on oxiracetam here which is my go to racetam:

https://examine.com/supplements/oxiracetam/

nootropics have been around for a long time and the base agents like aniracetam have been studied for decades.

also, you're "messing" with the chemicals in your brain any time you consume something... unless you're aware of studies that have shown negative affects attributed to nootropic use.

I use a stack of nootropics and it's better than coffee, but not like some magic wonder drug, it just helps with alertness and focus.

I also use a tcds machine when I really need to get things done, I have found, for myself, an arrangement that kicks my brain into full gear.

the downsides of my config are: my teeth feel like they've got batteries stuck to them for a week or so after. it's not that bad, but it's uncomfortable. I get over powered I suppose is a good enough word combo, I feel too awake and need to sit in a dark room and relax for a bit.

the upsides are: ultra focus, very able to context switch and maintain previous data whilst working on large infrastructure issues and or writing complex software applications for large infrastructure goals. much much more so than I get when it's just me and a cup of coffee. depression just goes away, hell I forgot what it was like to be depressed for a while, it was nice, it's like all the negative thoughts aren't able to make themselves known. I am currently on a 6 month break to give me a good idea of lasting effects (depression is back sadly).

I would have to say that the benefits of both tcds and nootropics are not yet fully understood, and neither are the downsides, but I can say for myself, it's been a positive experience.

my only advice on the tcds portion, if you have the skills, build it yourself, you want really good components, or buy a really nicely made Analog one, there's a difference between smoothly generated output and a cheap digital machine you buy off amazon for 100 bucks. you can feel the difference.

Out of curiosity what do you take? My only experience is popping a modafinil in the morning when I know I'm going to have a long day of grinding away.

The actual open letter:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24689/full

My brothers and I saw a child psychiatrist in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She had stuck needles in our head and tried to treat us via electric shock for depression.

We were all high functioning with above average intelligence.

Ever since I had problems remebering names and faces of most people I met and other memory problems.

She said we were too smart to have autism but high functioning autism wasn't discovered until later in the 1990s so we might have been misdiagnosed.

It makes it hard for me to find work and be accepted.

Apparently there's already commercial device for this. I came across a paper about it.

“Unfocus” on foc.us: commercial tDCS headset impairs working memory - http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-015-4391-9

Given that the human brain is full of electrical impulses it makes sense that external impulses can change our brains. The article mentions some people seeing the opposite results from the same protocol. It seems likely we will need more precise methods of stimulation to see better results given how complex our brains are.

I'm the one they featured in this article.. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7592_supp/full/53...

Has it worked for you before?

Frustration comes from how slow and opaque research in this area is. I think their warning is very appropriate and timely. Having said that, I think a lot of benefit can be had from transparent research.

> a zapping session may produce an effect exactly the opposite of what's intended

Sounds a lot like anti-depressant medication.

Does wearing monitor headphones possess not obvious risks to your brain functions?

That depends on how badly miswired they are, I suppose.

I had no idea people actually tried stuff like this.

Real brain hacking is about subliminal conditioning. Leave it to WIRED and similar publications to muddy the water and dumb down the populace.

I think you are the one that is right about this "brainhacking" stuff.

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