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Comment by etrautmann | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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