I just hacked my brain (2015)
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
This guy has the right idea:
> Dennis Eckmeier
> Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience Consulting, and Advocacy
> As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3. don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about to hit the switch: don't. :P
Style points for bravery, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't want to pump over a milliamp of direct current right underneath the squishy mass of goo that contains my conscious self. Especially not with an uncontrolled source like a battery - any sort of stimulator really ought to be current limited.
A milliamp is an awful lot, IEC 60601 specifies a 0.1 mA patient leakage current and I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting even that small leakage current to be applied to the head.
It's still cool, but yeah, nobody try this at home.
It's only bravery if you know the risks. :)
Actually loosing balance due to this could lead to a potentially lethal head injury.
I'm sure some injuries were to be counted on in this case.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-jennifer...
> Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, was among 18 people who entered the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition. They tried to drink as much water as they could without urinating in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console....
"It's just water. Relax."
> "Can you get water poisoning and, like, die?" asked the female disc jockey.
> "Not with water," a male disc jockey replied. "Your body is 98 percent water. Why can't you take in as much water as you want?"
> "Maybe we should have researched this before," the female disc jockey added....
> Strange drank nearly two gallons of water in over three hours on Jan. 12, 2007. During the contest, she could be heard complaining about pain to disc jockeys at 107.9 "The End."
> "Oh, it hurts," Strange said, while one male disc jockey remarked that she looked pregnant and another, a woman, said "That is so funny."...
> Strange left after taking second place, winning a pair of concert tickets. She then called in sick at work and died in her bathroom just hours after the contest.
>That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this
It's also the kind of thinking that leads to getting killed by 9V batteries. https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
So? It's part of a more general argument against assuming household items are safe when you're using them in highly unusual ways or far outside of normal parameters.
But if you need a specific example of someone killing themselves with a 9V battery to get the message, a sibling comment actually linked to a Darwin award where someone did just that.
You're asking the wrong question. If you don't want to be a dumbass, the question that should be asked isn't "has this been shown (to me) to be dangerous?" Answering no then proceeding is a good way to harm yourself out of ignorance.
The right questions are along the lines of "has this been shown to be safe?", "if not, do I have actually have a full enough understanding to find out?", and "if I die doing this, am I in the running for a Darwin award?"
Then again, it doesn't have to show that - since the person in the article didn't come to use it in "that way" after serious study, research and precautions, but by assuming its harmeless in general and using it in an ad-hoc manner.
They could quite easily, with the same assumption, which is what the parent warns against, use it in a dangerous way.
Since you want a specific example, from further down the comments: https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
My concern with doing this with more than a demo setup would be elecrolysis injury due to long-term exposure to direct current. Humans are basically big bags of electrolyte solution, so applying DC for long periods of time results in ions bunching up at the electrodes and all sorts of nasty chemical effects. This is the main danger when children inadvertantly swallow coin cell batteries: it's not actually the heat that causes GI damage (heat generation from a shorted coin cell is minimal), it's the electrolysis-induced chemical burns that result when the battery pumps a few tens of mA through GI tissue.
Is it possible to achieve the same effect using an AC waveform? That would likely be safer since it won't result in polarization.
EDIT: also, I wouldn't do this to myself, at least not with a 9V battery and a couple of pieces of aluminum foil...
When in bed, ready to sleep, I could condition myself to believe the bed was tipping over to the side, up to the point where I would have the reflex of grabbing the sheets to keep myself from falling, similar to jolting awake up after falling in a dream.
I wonder if something could be done to manipulate these perceptions without actually zapping the brain.
Sometime in my 30s I discovered I could "make my ears retract involuntarily". I'll think about pulling them back without actually trying to do so, and at some time in the near future that I can't anticipate, they'll retract.
I remember, as a kid, testing for charged 9V batteries touching the bare electrodes with my tongue. It was a funny feeling, but that was way before the "little chemist" became the dumbed down shadow of itself and everyone was screaming "safety".
For science, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now measuring the resistance of ~5mm of my tongue: it's 90kOhms, that should be a lower bound regarding the experiment.
Ah good. Nothing like a good ol' electroshock brain treatment from the 1800s, also known as the golden age of brain medicine.