Brain-stimulation trials get personal to lift depression
nature.com
nature.com
https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/Adam-Gazzaley
As an aside, I've found meditation to be very helpful in treating my non-clinical depression. It's also one of the key tools I use to help with my addiction/alcoholism issues.
And please, if you're thinking of taking your own life reach out to someone.
From there, maybe experiment with silent meditation. I got there by focusing on successively simple stimuli (city -> picture -> mental picture -> simple shapes -> dot -> nothing).
Best decision I've made this year
So when you notice your mind wandering this is mindfulness. Imagine you're coding all day long, and then you have this moment where you notice that you're not paying attention to coding, but instead thinking about what it would be like to be a ninja. You might have been thinking about being a ninja for 5-10 minutes before you realized it. But this moment when you realize, oh hey I was thinking about something other that what I thought I was thinking about is a moment of mindfulness. And this is what you're practicing.
So when you notice your mind wandering, be happy, this is a moment of mindfulness. Your mind was probably wandering for a while before you realized it, but this moment is the moment you realized it.
https://shivayashiva.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/centering-prac...
There is also a kind of meditation practice called "just note gone" where the idea is to start giving absense of stimulation a distinct notice (by noticing when something you had been perceiving is no longer there). I think most sit down and meditate practices tend to focus on that kind of thing (feeling the absense of stimulation as a distinct thing) via different methods.
A common form of meditation is focusing on your breath. This meditation is composed of two parts, trying to pay attention to breath, and noticing when your mind wanders.
Most people think the most important portion of that exercise is focusing on breath. But in truth it's the second part, the noticing.. The first part is growing your attention, but the second part is practicing your mindfulness.
It, quite literally, is practice.
I don't use an app, but I know a few people that have had some success with them.
Follow your breath, count each breath from 1-10, repeat.
Start over if you lose count.
Continue for 2-200 minutes.
You’re meditating.
If you need more help try the Urban Dharma podcast, Kusala is a great guy.
You might want to check out the book, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. The free Headspace meditations are also a good lightweight introduction IMO.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150505152140.h...
- Effects are measurable but very very small
- Frequent stimulation is required to achieve the desired effect
- The desired effect diminishes over time
This seems really promising, particularly because they're changing the treatment for specific patients rather than using a one-size-fits-all model. I hope their trials go well.
On the one hand, it's sort of scary. On the other hand, what are you supposed to do when nothing, not art nor work nor drugs nor thought, does anything to ameliorate the pain?
I can see both sides of this, at once, like I'm looking at an ambiguous image: duck, or rabbit?
On one hand, it's absurd: "Electrochemical system is changed by electricity! Shocker! Be afeared'n'affrighted!" The brain is a physical system, your personality is a result of the behavior of that system, so changing the physical system is going to change the personality. It's a more controlled version of Phineas Gage and the railroad spike.
(Plus, dirty little secret: Electroconvulsive therapy works. It has nasty side-effects, but it makes depression go away rather quickly. So the basic idea of chasing away mental problems by shocking brain tissue is not new, despite a decades-long effort on the part of artists to make people think ECT is simply meaningless torture.)
On the other hand, I can see how this would be challenging to someone who finds emotional states deeply meaningful, especially if they (as most people who look for "meaningful emotional states" seem to) find sad states more meaningful than happy ones.
It's the myth of the happy pill, by which I mean the myth that depression is this wonderful, meaningful Long, Dark Night Of The Soul and that taking something to fight it is "making you feel better" in a coercive sense, and depriving you of that meaning, and, possibly, preventing you from getting to the root of the problem, which must needs be done through talk therapy.
My conclusion is this: Emotions in and of themselves aren't meaningful, treating symptoms doesn't mean you can't also look for root causes, and, sometimes, an organic dysfunction is the root cause, as opposed to something you can talk out.
Why? Because the implication of a 'happy button' in the hands of everyone and anyone horrifies me. Sure, you and I might have better things to do than to hold that sucker down and experience unending monotone bliss for the remainder of days, but how sure are you that the majority of humanity won't? How many lives might be wasted because someone's instinct was to go for immediate bliss instead of trying to make things better in the long run? It'd be the final drug.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d739jq/can-we-sti...
Are you just saying, your worried about someone getting more and more depressed by using the device?
If there's so much as a small flaw and the stimulation it applies in return causes the original stimulus to worsen instead of be relieved, I could imagine the reaction from the algorithm continuing to make the situation worse if not carefully designed.
it is quite sick