Electrical currents to the brain improve memory for older adults | Hacker News Reader

Electrical currents to the brain improve memory for older adults

theverge.com

51 pointslxm20 comments

"It’s noninvasive and safe"

I've read one detailed account of how someone who had this treatment to relieve depression received brain damage as a result, and had difficulty getting acknowledgement it happened afterwards as people continued to cite this phrase, so I am extremely skeptical. This isn't a thing where you want side effects..

You don't know if you're comparing the same things beyond the part where both involve electric stimulation to the brain. If I'm right in guessing that you're referring to electroshock therapy then these two treatments are about as similar as drinking one glass of water or drinking four liters.

It was noted elsewhere that this is like trying to fix a hard drive with a magnet, and I think that analogy works. The size of the magnet isn't really the issue if you don't know what you're doing.

Not really, the brain is not like a hard drive. It is a tangled mesh of wired up neurons that constantly actively fire and stimulate each other to stay functional. They do not function in a remotely similar way.

But if you insist on an analogy to putting a magnet next to a hard drive, then you're basically talking about erasing neuronal connections and destroying cells. Mild electric stimulation does not do this.

And again, don't confuse something like transcranial direct-current stimulation for something like electroconvulsive therapy. One uses up to 4 mA, the other 800 mA.

Seriously, this whole discussion feels like my in-laws complaining about the "scary WiFi" radiation because they don't see the difference between that and radioactivity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy

I was not referring to electroconvulsive therapy, and my point was that we're interfacing with a very custom, very complex system with an imprecise tool.

you're making up your own analogy by taking the magnet thing and running with it.

let me rephrase the earlier commenter's magnet analogy.

a scalpel can end a human life, it can also be used as the tool of salvation : the difference being the methods used and the skill behind the hands holding that blade.

let's apply the analogy practically with regard to what we're talking about.

The brain, fundamentally, uses small and precisely metered bursts of electricity as one means to network components together to create a functional whole. By zapping whole sub-sections of neuronal material we're apply a similar concept as to what is already used by the brain in a severely imprecise and brute manner.

a harddrive writes with small bursts of precisely confined and aimed magnetism. It can also be err'd and cleared with large amounts of strong magnetism.

no one ever claimed that a hard drive is anything similar to a brain; the analogy was towards the methodology behind trying to manipulate very-small and complicated structures with very large and powerful tools incapable of finite and small manipulation.

"this isnt a thing where you want side effects"

ok, name me 1 medical procedure or medication that has no chance of side effects in all people.

For instance with regards to medical procedure a colonoscopy is a pretty routine procedure. However if you've ever had one then will make you sign a form that you accept the possible risks and one of those is that there is a small chance that something tears and you bleed out. the pros of getting one far outweigh the cons however

I find the all or nothing argument quite moronic in just about everything i can think of.

Something I think we often forget about the past is that when they did the things we now look back on as see as being borderline inscrutable, it was invariably driven by the belief that it was also safe and productive. It just turns out they were wrong.

This reminded me of the not especially brief trend of lobotomization for health benefits. In current society people might like to imagine the reality was something to do with socioeconomics, race, or other various identities. In reality people did genuinely believe in this. One of the victims of this practice was none other than the sister of JFK, Rosemary Kennedy [1]. She went from being a troubled young adult to being incontinent and having the mental capacity of a 2 year old. She was institutionalized with the entire incident being kept secret for decades.

I suppose the nice thing is that a treatment like this (back to the electroshock your brain for health) will implicitly entail a reasonable degree of informed consent, because it sounds like a bad idea on the surface. And so if somebody agree to do it, they've presumably done some due diligence and not just relied on The Verge. Approved medical treatments which "seem" much safer, like taking a pill, can entail just as great of risk, but their apparently benign nature belies the importance of similar due diligence.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

At least this is explicitly for older patients. I had a grandmother who got alzheimers bad before she passed. Even if it has bad long term effects, if you start developing alzheimers then 5-10 more years of good memory in exchange for a completely shot brain afterwards would probably be a deal I'd take. Halfway through she had to be put in elder care because she didn't recognize my grandpa and threatened him with a knife. You might as well be gone anyways at that point.

sounds safe and foolproof and definitely not a medical technique that might be found to be questionable in the future

It’s safe in the sense that the currents are weak enough not to cause thermal damage to the brain (though it can cause skin redness) or directly evoke seizure-like activity.

The whole point is to change brain activity, and obviously one hopes it does so in a “good” way, but ensuring that this reliably happens is a much thornier problem. One of the earlier products, which was supposed to make you better at video games, actually made people slightly worse!

Somewhat related:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...

> Today, a new study (Bretherton et al., 2019) from the University of Leeds reports that self-administered non-invasive transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) via the outer ear—performed for 15 minutes daily for two weeks at home—boosted "rest and digest" parasympathetic activity and reduced "fight or flight" sympathetic activity in a cohort of adults 55+ years old.

Transcranial direct-current stimulation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st...

Here it is transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), isn't?

This would be like attaching electrodes to your hard drive to try to fix bugs in your computer, maybe it helps defrag and free up memory but I wouldn't trust it to be risk free until we got more data.

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