DARPA hacked a science writer’s brain and turned her into a sharpshooter | Hacker News Reader

DARPA hacked a science writer’s brain and turned her into a sharpshooter

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229 pointsbookofjoe148 comments

They discuss flow-state and they state that it amplifies learning. Flow state is always described as being in a state of intense focus and where you might not even notice the passage of time.

I have experienced this state many times in life, it usually triggers when I'm deeply focused on a task. In this state things become easy and time seems to fly by. There is another state though and that one has only triggered in "life and death" situations for me. One was during an actual life and death situation involving a rock slide and the other when playing Counter-Strike and my whole team got wiped out and the opposing team converged on my position.

In both of those occasions you have your usual emotional detachment but instead feel as if you are watching yourself do the actions instead of feeling like you are doing them. Time slows down though, and even though you are relaxed and calm you feel the performance difference from what you are normally able to do and your fear is the knowledge that if you come out of this state before the danger is over you are done for.

That second state feels different and I'm sure its the 'flow' people that do extreme sports talk about. Is there a different name for that state? or is that too just called 'flow' aswell?.

When I went skydiving, my body did it, and I was somewhere else at the time. I saw, and tried to talk myself through it, but body did what body did (it was a solo dive and I landed fine). I had no experience, no fear or joy or anything about it. I just watched myself do it. The instructor jumped with me, and was nearby giving hand signals like "check altitude", and I would indeed turn my head towards the altimeter, but to save my life I couldn't tell you what it said.

I talked to a paratrooper years later, and he said some people just do that. They disassociate completely from the experience. It's probably not a good thing, since you're basically in shock, doing the work to stay alive and not really a "team player". but it is what it is.

Thank you for articulating it, I’ve felt the exact same thing, in both run of the mill flow when coding / gaming / sparring, and the “other flow” you describe in real life threatening situations.

For me too, normal flow time speeds up, and in the other - slows down. You feel detached from your actions - like if I do this it will maximize my chances of survival as I see them now, with no connection or fear that being on the wrong side of the odds might mean your death. You just calculate and do what needs to be done. I’ve noticed that I also tremble a little bit afterwards, which I attribute to the flood of adrenaline … maybe this is just flow but with adrenaline? (Adrenaline flow?)

I was once driving through a bend of a sharp narrow cliff road, and some idiot truck driver was overtaking another truck, right as I entered the bend … with some quick reaction and placement of the car managed to pass both somehow, but I noticed that the other 3 people in the car all had very different reaction to this situation, - indifference, panic, crying, hyperventilation…

I remember how hard it was to sympathize with them right after it happened, as while I was in this hyped analytical state I just felt it was weird the rest were not calm about it as well.

Maybe it was because I was behind the wheel, but in similar situation as a passenger I would do the adrenaline flow as well, where I would coldly calculate if alerting / helping the driver would increase or decrease our chances of survival… so I don’t know, maybe we all have different intrinsic survival strategies?

I’m just glad I’m not participating in a shooting war where I have to make those decisions all the time, I probably wouldn’t like what kind of person that would turn me into …

"so I don’t know, maybe we all have different intrinsic survival strategies"

Definitely. But it also varies for each person and time and day.

I had life and death situations, with me calmly and quickly doing the right thing (including the bullet time) while everyone else were literally running in circles. And I was also joining the panic circle at other times.

But I know that I usually perform well under extra odinary pressure situations - but slack off and get distracted in routine situations. For other people it's the other way around. And I think that makes sense evolutionary wise, so when there is an emergency, some people are adequate to handle it and save the tribe. And other people acomplish the boring, but still critical day to day jobs with care (which I can also do, but it is an effort for me).

Yeah, metoo; I thrive in intense situations when most are panicking and have serious issues staying motivated day to day.

I'm also grateful I never got into the military, because I would either be dead or loving it.

I have experienced both states in similar (programming, then my life or death) situations. I have found a third state, which I believe is related, that has happened a few times, and always with the same criteria.

The first is that someone else is about to come to harm, typically through falling onto something or something heavy is about to fall on them. Never me.

The second criterion is that I am unaware of the first, until later.

The third commonality is that I black out, or something. Anywhere from a few to as many as fifteen or twenty seconds are just ... skipped. I am in one place in one position, and then *blip* I am somewhere else, in a different position.

The fourth thing is that I have apparently done something acrobatic, or contorted my body, moved a few yards with alacrity, or whatnot. Muscles are strained or even torn, I come to in an odd position. Parts that do not normally hurt are hurting.

It's more than a little disturbing, because while I have stopped someone from falling face-first into a lot of cutlery, or a Sony Trinitron monitor from crushing the foot of an intern I have warned to be careful, there's absolutely no volition involved, no conscious thought, no precursor, it was like the governors were disabled and the limiters ignored as some kind of hindbrain function decided to run a big interrupt over a threat I might not have even been looking at was perceived. I have to reconstruct from my new position and whatever is now throbbing what kind of motion I had undertaken.

It makes me think that the Peter Watts' Blindsight idea, where our "self" being a waste of brainpower narrating and explaining (perhaps erroneously) what the true decision maker was doing as if the self was the entity responsible ... is more or less correct.

I'd like to know if there's a name for that.

The time skip with location displacement reminds me of a game I once played as a kid. Where someone would crouch down and take very deep breaths, then take a final deep breath, stand up and hold it and someone else would try to make them pass out by stretching the skin on their neck against the wall.

It was a very dumb game in hindsight but quite popular at the time. The amusing part was moving them to a different location and everyone would try and pretend to be doing something else.

From the point of view of the person passing out you felt as if you were teleported in place and time, and depending on how well everyone else could hold their laughter you would even wonder if everything before was just a dream.

Your description sounds a lot like trauma response. Often in a true trauma response you don’t know what happened, and your body can lose it failsaves in that state.

You could ask a doc and perhaps someone skilled in hypnotherapy.

I did read Blindsight and I do think that the self is a story that the mind is constantly creating which narrates and explains things but disagree that it is a waste of brainpower since it is the only thing that can give value to things.

That other 'unconscious self' just sees things by what they really are and not what they mean, it has a theoretical understanding of what things are important to the 'conscious self' but it doesn't really understand why. In that 'life and death' flow state when playing that CS match I took out the whole team in the most incredible game I ever played but I remember how I felt as it happened. It was bored and it did not see the point of a game where you just dragged your mouse over and clicked on the pictures, its not like you could ever miss so what was the point of playing it?.

Not OP, but they likely mean a waste of brainpower in the survival or ability to function as an agent sense. Ontologically of course it's not a waste but that's not part of evolution's cost function.

> It makes me think that the Peter Watts' Blindsight idea, where our "self" being a waste of brainpower narrating and explaining (perhaps erroneously) what the true decision maker was doing as if the self was the entity responsible ... is more or less correct.

I definitely think it’s likely to some extent. Kahneman’s "Thinking Fast and Slow" hypothesis of Systems 1 and 2 is if course very much related (even though it has been criticized) and in these sorts of fight or flight situations it’s clear that there’s neither time or need to ask System 2 anything or even bother informing it about what’s happening. Updating short-term memory might also be an unneeded luxury, which could explain the blackout.

The overriding of normal physical safety regimes is commonly reported in these types of situations as well.

But it’s indeed an interesting question why your (and others’?) subjective experience of the "help other NOW" scenario has been so different from the usually reported "help yourself NOW" experience (detachment, slowdown of time, etc.) Though of course it's impossible to know whether "you" did actually experience that as it was happening but just don't remember it afterwards!

It thinks therefore I am.

It’s a recurring theme in the books written by Scott Bakker.

> I'd like to know if there's a name for that.

Some people call it "Spidey-senses" or "Spidy-senses" after Spider Man, but from your description of the blackout parts reminds me more of how vampire super-speed is portrayed in movies, so a vampire trance maybe?

Sounds similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker but in a benevolent way.

I felt the second one once, and explained it to a therapist, who called it shock hypnosis.

Apparently this shuts down advanced functions and just focuses your brain on immediate survival.

I don't know that I would describe it the same way, but I definitely experienced some sort of survival mode last month, when I (a software engineer) delivered my daughter at home, in a very much unplanned fashion.

I can remember the exact moment where I realised it was impossible to get my wife to hospital (we'd actually just been there and they sent us home). Something flicked, and it was just "Well, this is happening." I wouldn't describe myself as calm — but I definitely knew I had a responsibility and I was just going to do it. Of course, I was on the phone to the ambulance and following instructions.

Only a month later, I remember the experience in general, but aside from the moment described above, the rest of the details are pretty hazy. Fortunately, my daughter was/is fine.

Why did they send you home if you were so close to childbirth?

Medical professionals ability to ignore, belittle, and misdiagnose women is unfortunately legendary.

Also, labour can occur surprisingly quickly, as happened to a friend of ours who gave birth on our driveway whilst dropping off their first child on the way to the hospital.

My mother recalls hearing doctors saying she was too calm to deliver on the day I was born.

By the time it was clear I was on the way it was too late to administer anesthesia.

But it was not the doctor’s pain to feel.

Probably by mistake. Every childbirth is different. Mostly things progress slowly, sometimes it happens quickly.

Usually they measure the regularity and intensity of the contractions. If the contractions are short and far between, the hospital will send the mother home, because it will probably be several hours before the child comes. However, some childbirths don't follow these rules.

It’s common to bring women in early labour in then send them home for a bit to wait it out until contractions become more frequent. At least, here in the UK that’s common. Idea is better to be more relaxed while the body does its thing.

As if a woman in labor could ever possibly be 'more relaxed'!

This is a thing! Lots of things can “stall” contractions, prolonging the already long and drawn out process that opens up a woman so that she can pass a child through an opening normally no larger than a pipet. Lights, beeping, iv’s, etc.

I think we have a difference of the definition of 'relaxed' in this case.

A normal definition would be along the lines of sipping mai-tais on the beach.

But in the case of active labor, then yes, you're correct. I have close family members that are quite familiar with stalled labor (30+ hours). However, in that particular case, it was due to really bad doctors.

sometimes women go too early (cervix not dilated a certain amount yet, contractions are too far apart) and the hospital doesn't want to occupy a bed for someone who might still be a full day away from active labor

I just wonder why giving birth in the hospital is so normalized; if there's no warning signs during pregnancy or close to birth, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved (mother, child, health care system) to deliver at home? No emergency / stressful trip to the hospital, no roadside / parking lot births, no stress of being in a foreign environment, and you still get taken care of at home by a rotation of midwives.

You should read "the molecule of more". What you describe happens when dopaminergic circuits take control of the brain and prevent other circuits from interfering.

When your boss said "deliver more", I don't think that's what they had in mind

(congratulations!)

I’ve also experienced time showing down in a life or death situation. The funny thing is, it’s seemingly impossible to know whether my subjective time slowed down or I just remembered it that way.

It makes sense that your brain would remember a very dangerous situation in great detail to aid with survival in a similar situation.

>Flow state is always described as being in a state of intense focus and where you might not even notice the passage of time.

Also known as the "What? It's 4am? I was just playing Civilization!" phenomenon.

>Time slows down though, and even though you are relaxed and calm you feel the performance difference from what you are normally able to do and your fear is the knowledge that if you come out of this state before the danger is over you are done for.

It's always a bit mindblowing to remember that what we perceive are ultimately all just manifestations and creations of our brains. There's no such thing as time or light or sound or smell or taste or whatever else in our plane of existence, they're simply how we perceive it.

>That second state feels different and I'm sure its the 'flow' people that do extreme sports talk about. Is there a different name for that state?

I've often heard of it referred to as the "Fight-or-Flight Response" triggered by an increase in adrenaline, "sharpening your senses" per se in order to better respond to potential threats and/or the situation at hand. It's very expensive biologically speaking, though.

> Also known as the "What? It's 4am? I was just playing Civilization!" phenomenon.

Bedtime? Just ... one ... more ... turn ...

> One was during an actual life and death situation involving a rock slide and the other when playing Counter-Strike and my whole team got wiped out and the opposing team converged on my position.

Luckily, never experienced an actual life and death situation. But I do get into a flow state quite frequently while playing FPS games. Best way I can describe it is being in a state of complete automation, incredibly quick reflexes compared to your usual self, and making multiple correct decision in quick succession. It usually lasts a few seconds to a minute until you snap out of it after stepping on that random claymore at the top of the ladder ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The only way I know how long the sequence actually lasted is by rewatching the video recording and realizing it wasn't 5 minutes but a few seconds long.

Playing Doom 2016 or Doom Eternal is the quickest way for me to get into flow state. My eyes zoom out, I see tiny pixels moving and associate them, react to them, hand and eyes perfectly in sync. My brain basically turns off anything that isn't related to rip and tear. It's such a weird sensation because I know I'm in it because I'm not focusing my eyes on any one thing, it's like I focus to infinity and just sit still and shred.

I sometimes get in the zone a little playing Eternal, it's fun when it clicks but I can't zone in completely.

I'm also currently playing GT7 and if I'm medicated and JUST tired enough I can fall into this intense zone where I feel like a pro, connected to the car and laying down clean and fast laps. It's an amazing feeling but it's so short lived.

Everything bothering me, even physical things just disappear and I'm focused on the game. This is huge for me, due to skin sensitivities every few seconds I'm normally pulled from focus with a slight itch.

It would be great to be able to easily replicate.

Doom Eternal was a visceral experience. The music was absolutely top notch.

> Is there a different name for that state?

I call it "overdrive" or "NFS-brain" after the racing game series.

Wouldn't be the perception of things being easier/ performance improvement just another effect of having your brain soaked in chemicals?

I have been in life and death situations, once dragged by strong currents deep into the sea while swimming alone. I also moutain bike.

For me both states of mind are very different.

When doing sports there's definitely adrenaline but there is also a lot of confidence in what you are doing coming from knowledge, experience and having the right gear.

When I was trying to swim back to my campsite it was pure adrenaline without any experience or knowledge on how to swim in those conditions.

And the possibility of death was so intense and real that I entered a mode where I became my own guide, repeating myself to stay calm, save energy and try to swim sideways to get out of the area with the rip currents (that was totally made up, but maybe worked).

I ended up getting out of the water a mile from my campsite.

There's no mountain I could hit today that could match that experience.

It sounds like you made the right decision, "swim sideways" is what I have always heard to do if you find yourself in a rip current. I have luckily never had to use that information, but whenever I'm at the beach I try to repeat it to myself just in case, so at least hopefully it's somewhere readily accessible to my animal brain if it becomes important for survival.

The life and death one is weird when it happens.

I had a nice hunk of boar one time - but I undercooked it.

I tried to swallow a piece (having failed in my attempt to chew it) and it just rolled up in my throat - no way up, no way down.

Home alone and unable to breathe.

There was zero conscious consideration of the move sticking my finger down my throat to bring the meat back up. It just happened.

My conscious efforts to come up with a solution were irrelevant, the body acted seemingly on its own directed by some subconscious process that saved my life.

Huh. Interesting.

eating undercooked boar and deliberately swallowing without chewing, seems like you enjoy living on the simultaneously boring and dangerous side.

Shit man, I can't even hate you for that.

It wasn't that I didn't chew, it just didn't make a difference.

Honestly, it was fucking dumb - damned near as thoughtless as the manoeuvre which followed.

Part of me believes that the only animal equipped to eat a pig is the pig itself.

But I'm a guy who'll cook bacon without a shirt on - what is life without a little danger?

If I remember correctly, some have called it the "Zone" and it is described in the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. It has been a long while since I read it.

I think flow state is triggered by focus, bodily control, and a deep knowledge of what is required to achieve a task.

For instance, "flow toys" in the music scene are exactly for this. They require precision movements and focus to look how they're supposed to. You're constantly tuning minute parameters to achieve the task, sometimes making your body compromise in ways it hasn't before.

In shooting I'm almost always able to achieve a flow state by controlling my breathing. The way I was taught to shoot was breathing in rhythm, combined with maintaining sight picture and sight alignment I can almost "feel" it activate. This much more prevalent when I've done moving target drills. The world around me melts away, though I can hear interrupts as distant but interpretable sounds. Physical objects in front of me feel more predictable and slower. My senses are definitely heightened to a degree, and my olfactory senses especially are noticeably different in their operation.

Gaming can definitely trigger flow state. I have similar breathing rituals and focus when I play CS. Knowing the corners of a map, how to gode or stalk opponents, and the probability of another teams position has put me in flows where I'm merely balancing prioritization instead of trying to point and click.

In Street Fighter terminology, I believe you are describing the difference between 無の拳 (https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Power_of_Nothingness) and 殺意の波動 (https://streetfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Satsui_no_Hado).

The Power of Nothingness is a state of consciousness transcending ordinary perspective, born through spiritual and mental refinement. It is the power to act without being attached to emotions and thought, free of fear, anger, pride, and ego, to draw upon the contents of one's heart intuitively without obstacle and hesitation, and to be aware of the world and to know one's place and meaning within its vastness, to flow with all of creation without the need of worry, desire, and doubt.

The Satsui no Hado is described as power rooted in the darker natural basis of the human instinct, including competition, survival, to trample on, impose, and thrive over opposition, and the manifestation of destruction borne out of conflict and fighting.

Japanese martial arts have a concept of mushin (no mind, from mushin no shin = the mind without mind). It's when all your thoughts go away and you just move as needed.

I’ve always wanted to try TDCS, AFAIK the only way currently for recreational use is to DIY the setup. This freaks me out, fiddling with and possibly bricking your brain is not like hacking an e-ink store label or Philips toothbrush.

I think the best way for brain hacking (other than drugs) may be Altman’s Brain Machine, which works by modulated light pulses, Adafruit used to sell kits but it should be easy to build one yourself: https://www.adafruit.com/product/287, https://makezine.com/article/home/build-a-brain-machine-wit/

Just buy a neuromyst , I own one . Its generally the most recommended one if you check out the TDCS subreddit

Do you like it? What do you use it the most for?

Thank you

Please share more details on your experiences using the device

I'm not suggesting that the product won't work or that it's snake oil, but when I looked it up on Amazon the "people who bought this also bought" section listed a 'GPS bug detector', a 'Vitamin B2 to cure migraines' product, and a geiger counter specifically designed for checking your food.

those also seem legitimate?

It also seems to suggest a certain gullibility?

I’m not sure that it suggest anything besides the fact that many people buying these products on Amazon also happen to buy other “fringe” products, perhaps because of paranoid tendencies.

Until something like this becomes mainstream, buyers will probably fall into two categories:

1. These paranoid types who are willing to try things most people won’t look twice at

2. Nerd/bio hacker types who have some fascination/interest in the subject

I’d guess there is only overlap when products are actually grounded in some real science, e.g. the people buying stuff for paranoid fringe reasons are also buying far crazier stuff that the bio hacker would reject outright and for good reason.

That seems to be your recommendations. My "people who bought this also bought" is showing another tDCS kit, a tDCS book and a tDCS cap.

To be fair my Amazon shopping history is pretty weird so it might well be that.

Do you - or anyone else for that matter - have experience with the class of neuro-feedback EEG category of devices (NeoRythm, Muse, etc)

I researched heavily for a while a few years back. I felt that the devices themselves couldn't accurately act as EEGs (setting aside whether you believe they could be used for enhancing brain function or not)

Has this changed? Are there better devices out there now?

did we just break their website?

Sadly I can trust Reddit no more. I feel like there’s a weird tendency on subreddits to just filter down to one or two brands and just trash everything else.

There is a quite long list of all available TDCS devices and their specs available on that subreddit . It such a niche thing that there isn't much bias at the moment

After all a TDCS devices just sends a specific current for a period of specified time .

Whatever brand's marketing can get in there first, snag a moderator role, and then flood this discussions.

True for everything, and is why I pray for the Dead Internet Theory to happen.

One of my most San Francisco experiences, about a month after moving here:

I used an app to find a therapist after experiencing some gnarly trauma. Twenty minutes into the consult session, the therapist asks me if I'd be interested in trying an "experimental treatment proven to help process traumas." She pulled a device out of her desk drawer, and it looked kind of like a beanie hat made from electrical wires.

So, that's how I found out she was using the therapy matching app to find volunteers for her research. The literature she showed me was all related to TDCS (hadn't heard about TDCS previously).

I left pretty quickly, before the session ended, which I remember because my car was TOWED.

Seems like a Silicon Valley plot line

I’ve never successfully made it through a full episode of either Portlandia or Silicon Valley because they’re both just too real for me not in a good way.

I love the SV series, watched it twice end to end

And you are 100% right, pretty much everything in it is very real, portrayed in a cartoonish way, but so real

I’ve met real life versions of almost all the characters in it and even have attended a birthday party in Alcatraz (it was actually a ton of fun, although definitely weird and eerie too)

Hopefully you get to someday laugh at all this stuff

i struggle with the episodes and i was a consultant on the show. very traumatizing.

So interesting. How was it working on the show? What makes the episodes so hard to watch?

Nonsense tech deadline PTSD

The VCs and the founders.

Same idea (mostly) with Mr Robot

How much did it cost to get your car back?

Around $700.

DAMN.

You can buy a professionally made TDCS machine, check out the TDCS reddit page for recommendations.

There are several commercial devices, though I don't know if they have the performance you are looking for

I've tried the diy approach for programming and sports. Some limited success but it's difficult to get all the parameters like placement, duration, and current figured out, especially for sports. I gave up on it because you can have negative outcomes if you do it wrong. Nothing I did felt permanent in its effect.

A word of caution with DIY/commercial products. Tested one product out, caused me to see flashing lights and another time caused a burning sensation.

If you happen to be in the Boston area there is a tDCS study going on right now that is looking for participants. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152197

Man these headlines are getting worse.

They put a few electrodes on her head that calmed her down and put her in a flow state, so she could focus better while in a military simulator.

She wasn't popping targets at 900m, she was just calmed down and able to focus in a controlled exercise.

She also just wrote a book, so it's getting a lot of attention. I remember when this first came out and tDCS got a lot of attention -- and then kinda died off cuz it wasn't a magical focus pill and doing it wrong could temporarily blind you.

> They put a few electrodes on her head that calmed her down and put her in a flow state, so she could focus better while in a military simulator.

That's incredible though. It cannot be understated how nontrivial it is to even be able to do this, and how interesting it is that they have the technology put together to replicate it.

There is a very solid NPR podcast about TDCS as well, you can find here:

Students Zap Their Brains For a Boost, For Better Or Worse - NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/07/50...

Very interesting. Not the intent of the article, but it shows the power of positive thinking, affirmations, visualization et al. Silencing the inner critic seems to be the common theme.

By the end of the article, I thought this same thing. The electrical current soothed a few nerves, shut down the inner voice, and let the person just focus instead of blaming themselves. This won't exactly be replicable across a whole bunch of people.

Another theory is that everyone is naturally a good shooter but they have all sorts of problems from lack of concentration to body twitching to uncalibrated vision. Fix any combination of these problems and you will have a good shooter.

>Another theory is that everyone is naturally a good shooter but they have all sorts of problems from lack of concentration to body twitching to uncalibrated vision. Fix any combination of these problems and you will have a good shooter.

Isn't this just a matter of perspective though? Anyone is a good X if you remove the things that prevent that person from being a good X.

Yes. In the context of the article, a brain tuning device is not going to help around those handicaps.

>She said that for people who have the angry little angry waspy voices in their head, the particular placement of the electrode that I had for that part of the cortex found great success. She said those people have this overactive angry cortex guy just sitting there. When you apply the electric field, it shuts him right up and those people find that their depressive symptoms are alleviated.
I was thinking of conceptualizing this little angry voice as the guy from the “Inside Out” Disney movie, whose head blows up as a volcano. Those were the sorts of angry little voices that I hear frequently as my background elevator music. I never thought of that as being related to being depressed, but I certainly sometimes have a pretty hard time with that. The experience of having that turned off was really interesting. It made me think about what my inner soundscape is daily, and afterwards I really started investigating how to manage that a little bit more deliberately.
Goudarzi: Did the inner negative voices go away immediately or after the currents were flowing for some time?

Adee: I didn’t really notice it go away initially. It wasn’t dramatic. It’s just that when I looked back, I noticed it. After, when I was sort of going about my day, I felt this very deep sense of calm. And it wasn’t only for the duration of the treatment; it was a very slow come down for about the next three days. I just wasn’t this sort of white-knuckling, anxious person—that was really dramatic.

Actually this is pretty hard to do by yourself most people don't recognize this inner talk as self-talk weighing them down, so they can't get off. It took me really some time (opening up to my early experiences in childhood and fully connecting to them from a child's perspective) to recognize this perfectly camouflaged "personality" inside of me talking down on myself.

Now, it isn't gone like described above with the stimulation (cause it's part of myself) but at least I can engage with the voice, acknowledge it and talk back, before I just felt overrun and assaulted.

This negative self talk is called Cognitive Distortion, and is the core of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - but I like to use the street phrase "playing yourself": it's having a dishonest, negative and deceptive self conversation running in your head. And with a simple 10 question checklist one can logically neuter this negative aspect of your own personality quite easily, without electrical stimulation or drugs, and one enters flow to accomplish goals with less friction. If this sounds interesting, try doing a web search of "Cognitive Distortion + Dr. David Burns". You will not regret the time spent investigating, in fact it may supercharge your career.

I was curious about this list of questions. What do you think about this list? https://chat.openai.com/share/64638f92-2790-4938-a1df-75021e...

That's the list. It is amazing what these simple 10 questions can do to one's perspective.

this sounds promising but I just want to be a sharp shooter now

You'll be amazed how fast this works. In 30 minutes your mental state will be significantly improved, if you are subject/victim of any of these extremely common self deceptions.

it seems like it’s going to be messy or a pain to maintain with the whole salt water thing, does it seem like there are lasting effects? brain plasticity changes due to the stimulation or potentially the opposite where you get rebound like with drugs where you are less effective after they wear off than you were before taking them?

Not sure what you're referring to with "the whole salt water thing". This is simply talking, talking with yourself, and learning how to recognize when your self conversation is not honest. Often simply the recognition of dishonesty in one's own self thoughts makes that line of reason evaporate with no additional effort. As far as lasting effect: what happens when you learn "a friend" is a constant liar? You simply stop believing them.

Thanks for the resource. The list is indeed helpful and a good start if one is able to have enough distance to recognize the distortion.

In my case it was so all encompassing (drowned in the noise) that behavioral therapy just increased my paranoia and made me more unstable. At some point I decided to dig deeper and then it 'clicked' and a overwhelming torrent of emotions got released. I guess everyone's journey is different on that one. Some are more in tune with themselves and just need to establish healthy habits to get back on track, which is already hard enough. Others need to confront whatever they are suppressing with all its built up energy (mostly since childhood) and can only then - after integrating - unlock and access the healthy habits routine otherwise they will be helplessly stuck in undermining themselves.

But I agree not everyone needs to confront their demons - so to speak before trying out straightforward methods from behavioral therapy. If you are open and/or desperate enough, you will know if that is the case, is an organic process, albeit very painful.

> I guess everyone's journey is different on that one.

Sounds like your experience is more on the uniquely difficult side; I've been advocating and seeing very positive results from at least a dozen peers since I learned of this method 20+ years ago. For most people, including myself, it was like figuring out a confident is a liar, so one stops listening. Simply not listening to the negative self talk triggers it's own outlook rewiring, typically positively. That negative voice gets humiliated and shuts down.

TDCS always reminds me of my experience as a kid, learning the rudiments of 6502 assembly language by making arbitrary changes to game binaries on my Apple and seeing what effect they had. It was fun to bring a printout to school and show off my 99,999,999-point high score on Falcons or my Ultima III party full of level-99 Green Berets.

Usually, though, the game would just crash. Later I learned what "entropy" was and how hard it was to decrease it by tinkering around randomly with machine language or, for that matter, electricity.

Reminds me of the joke:

Changing code randomly until your program works = bad programmer

Changing code randomly extremely quickly until your program works = machine learning

The article makes no mention of Michael Levin [1], one of the main researchers/labs, around bioelectricity/xenobots. A recent talk of his [2].

Secondly, bioelectricity has nothing or very little to do with electric currents as the one from the socket. There is no "brain zapping" involved or required. In the paper [3] detailing an adult frog limb amputation and full regeneration over 18 months, Michael Levin's lab used a single bioreactor with silk hydrogels applied only for 24 hours (see BioDome fabrication in the paper).

[1] https://drmichaellevin.org

[2] "From Matter to Mind: Bioelectricity, Body Intelligence, and the Future of Regenerative Medicine", https://youtu.be/Ed3ioGO7g10?t=195 At minute 33, https://youtu.be/Ed3ioGO7g10?t=1999: "We don't use any applied fields, no frequencies, no waves, no electromagnetic radiation, no magnets, what we do is we control the native interface by which cells control each other, that is the set of electrical controls that they expose to each other, and you can do this with drugs, with ion channel mutants, with optogenetics and various others techniques."

[3] "Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis", https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164

Related episode of Radiolab from 2014: https://radiolab.org/podcast/9-volt-nirvana

Got enough vocabulary and design drawings from that article to create a new cult.

Cadaver studies have shown that this is almost certainly placebo. Not enough current actually reaches the brain: https://buzsakilab.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Underwo...

The article mentions this explicitly.

Is it possible to blind test this? Like can people feel whether or not the current is passing through their brain? Feels like it should be easy enough to do a study on

Yes, you can feel the current at times. It is pretty mild though.

Yes!

I ran an experiment where we blocked the skin sensations with topical anesthesia and then recorded the responses of individual neurons to tES. Nothing changed, so the sensation is not necessary for its effects.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

We also created the same sensations elsewhere on the scalp, and this was not sufficient to cause neural entrainment either.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1815958116

Placebo/skin effects can certainly mess up a readout based on performance or behavior but they aren’t the full story either.

“Other people tried to put tDCS on a cadaver and said that there wasn’t enough electricity that was penetrating the skull to make any difference in terms of action potentials. But the next meta-analysis found some effectiveness for depression and anxiety. The study[1], published in 2017, was one of the best out there.” 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13882...

Article also mentions living bone is conductive.

this seems easy to refute based on (my personal reproducible) observation of physical phenomenon, such as tasting coins in the back of my throat.

Can you expand on this? If I get a sharp scare I suddenly taste metal for a second

That study is misleading/wrong and has done a huge amount of damage to this field.

What they actually showed is that 1) much of the current does not reach the brain, and 2) the current that does is not sufficient to directly “force” neurons to fire. However, that doesn’t mean the remaining current does nothing at all, as it could still modulate brain activity.

Using direct recordings of individual neurons, I showed that various forms of tES shift spike timing. Simulation causes them to fire sooner or later than they otherwise would. This matters because information is carried in both by overall rate of spiking and the timing of those spikes. Moreover, it’s not just a placebo, because knocking out the sensations with topical anesthetic doesn’t block the neural effects, nor is recreating them sufficient to cause them.

I just wrote a little think-piece about this for PLOS Biology that summarizes what we know—-and don’t—-about it

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

Thanks! That is interesting and well reasoned.

If one wants to change neural computation via a global oscillator, it would seem that a flashing light, auditory tone, or tactile vibration might be a more potent alternative. These stimuli indisputably drive substantial brain wide activity, including many action potentials. I suppose I’m reluctantly team Firing Rate when it comes to mammals—there’s beautiful work on spike ordering in cold blooded animals for example but I’m less aware of computational work where precise spike time matters and not the relative time ie hebbiwn plasticity.

I’m also somewhat influenced by my first hand difficulty when doing in vitro patch clamp to induce sub threshold voltage changes on a neuron with a second probe even just 100um away. Color me skeptical, in part as it’s really hard to do a double-blinded control and the effect sizes seem small.

perhaps the current does not need to actually reach the brain in the way these studies are setup to measure? it’s possible the brain is more sensitive and/or there’s some low powered emf naturally at play in your brain/body, for example

How much does it cost for the layperson, and where can one get it?

I know someone who's state government employer paid for an extremely similar sounding therapy to be administered by themselves at home in 2023 unprompted. As the article says, research into this as a training or learning method has been completely dropped. It's some sort of emotional mood therapy now.

As much as this tech weirds me out I have seen and heard of no negative side effects. (And until today I was extremely skeptical of the sparse positive effects.) I'm really glad I read this article because it gives me a starting point to do more research on it.

If you want to read up on negative side effects, "TMS ruined my life" will get you stories. TMS isn't tDCS, but it's similar enough to at least give you pause. Personally I had TMS for anxiety and depression and it worked for me, but that's just as anecdotal as a bad story. I don't think we are at a point with understanding the brain to really understand what we're doing, other than it seems to work, most of the time.

I find it very interesting how when i search that term, 3 of the top 5 results are obviously SEO'd puff pieces from clinics themselves posted to their website, conspicuously containing multiple uses of the phrase "TMS ruined my life". The actual content of the page reads exactly like one of those $50,000 rehab places that scam vulnerable people out of huge sums of money. Like they're trying to keep those vulnerable people from thinking twice about their personal wellbeing and instead blindly keep their faith in the entity which will quickly, safely, and pleasantly fix all your problems (tm)

Embarrassingly, I may be wrong about knowing someone who went through this therapy. I talked to them and there's some disagreement about what exactly it was. I know it wasn't TDS or anything near that powerful/inensive but I can't confirm it was TDCS.

I got a DIY device online for about $200. Check out the r/TCDS subreddit for great suggestions.

Caution this is very very experimental but you can build your own, and there are kits on Amazon that sell products as well. There's a whole universe of jargon and methodologies concerning "montage" but the community likes to study these through scientific right.

Here is a starting point

https://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/2e7idx/simple_montage...

I'm not an expert, attempt at your own risk

Old Reddit link for those who prefer the 'classic' layout :) : https://old.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/2e7idx/simple_montage...

The experiment concluded after a single post zap run? Not even a second run the day after to see if it stuck?

No, because she wasn't a participant in the study. She was a journalist they were giving a demo to.

The demo concluded after a single post zap run? Not even a second run the day after to see if it stuck?

Nope. That's what demos are: a short demonstration of the capabilities. They likely discussed long-term effects, but it's out of scope to demonstrate it.

What you're thinking of is a trial; this is not what that was.

There is a NASA research study going on right now to evaluate whether tDCS helps with tasks such as docking a floating satellite to the International Space Station.

If you are in the Boston area and meet their criteria you can sign up at: https://rally.massgeneralbrigham.org/study/nasabrainstim

I am not affiliated with the researchers except as a study participant, but I can answer questions about what it was like to participate.

Scant details on what constitutes a "sharpshooter"

Reminds me of Rainbows End, the sci-fi book. In it, the mom was a government worker who would go through a procedure of sorts to download skills into her brain.

Hmmm. Would this work for athletes, Olympic, Professional and Amateur?

I bet Pros and Olympians would like to hone their skills even further.

The article brings that up. It's a worthwhile read if you want to know more. Presumably no Olympian had any meaningful results because, to paraphrase the Olympic athlete quoted, if this gave anyone an edge then everyone would be using it. The original experiment happened over a decade ago and the journalist who went through it is being interviewed. I believe the current application of this technology is not being used to help people learn skills.

I wonder if it helps me retain stuff like documentation / code. Maybe it'll help people going through med school?

People have experimented on themselves and found it to support that

I tried it for skiing, had a couple of sessions where I seemed to learn and apply advanced concepts faster. But it was inconsistent, hard to keep the pads moist and in the right position. I only ever tried it before my sessions, impractical to use it during.

So, she dreamed of it for four years, and suddenly it succeeded. What a wonderful science writer!

Is this the same tech stanford is using to cure depression

This gets brought up in [Homo Deus](https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/) as an example of the kinds of things we may see as post-humanist people augment their capabilities to increasingly incredible heights.

as an anecdote, tDCS is starting to be used for treating depression

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