GoFlow: a DIY tDCS brain-boosting kit
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Only if you're primed by your culture to blanch at transhumanism.
> What if some students can afford tDCS kits, but others can’t?
What if some students can afford college, computers, calculators, tutoring, study guides, etc. but others can't? This is one of the silliest purported ethical issues I've ever seen, but it consistently gets contemplating nods from those pretending to be wise, so long as we're talking about a new, scary technology, and not a mundane, accepted reality.
I think they meant the stigma of "cheating" or somehow getting something without working for it. I think you're right though.
Lots of people worry a great deal about these things as well, and would see tDCS as just another factor on that list, making the whole situation worse.
It doesn't sound exactly expensive though, so the point is kind of moot.
But they don't advocate delegalizing them either.
I'm all for allowing drug use of any kind into professional sports. I think it's silly that we watch rather grotesque caricatures of humans swinging bats or tackling people, then pretend to be shocked and admonish them when we find out they're "cheating" by using chemicals. As if the health risks associated with steroids and HGH somehow outweigh the simple risks of broken bones and mutilated joints that are a direct consequence of pushing a body to its limits and beyond on a daily basis.
The ramifications of the average human being able to learn more in less time are relatively gigantic. So gigantic, in fact, that I think they dwarf what small social-inequity considerations are raised (if it can really be done for a $90 kit right off the bat, then just wait until economies of scale kick in).
Every new privilege granted to the top socioeconomic class is an appropriate opportunity to ask the question "why solve this problem instead of improving peoples' lives by tackling inequality?" The answer can be that one is simply working on what one is good at. However that answer doesn't mean the question is silly or appropriate to sideline.
I'd certainly expect that to have an impact on social inequality, but not in the direction of increasing it.
Who is 'granting' any 'privileges' to anyone - where do these kinds of notions even come from?
Reducing the particulars of actual people's real lives to instances of abstract categories is silly, inappropriate, and insulting; if you know someone who you think would benefit from this device, but who can't afford to buy one, then you can buy one for him yourself. If you know many such people, you can start a foundation to buy them for people, and contribute your own energies to developing even lower-cost open-spec implementations, a la Raspberry Pi.
There are plenty of actual solutions you can pursue when you address problems within the particulars of their own contexts. But those who instead prefer merely to dawdle with abstractions, propose preemptive universal-scope policies, and cast people's real circumstances into arbitrary taxonomies are themselves the one promoting some kind of "class-based social hierarchy".
To the extent that class issues genuinely match up, these interventions ought to be greeted, especially as this tDCS is cheaper than I remember my programmable TI-84 calculator in high school being!
I found this link, however, which is pretty interesting, that shows conductivities of various tissue types, if anybody is interested. It looks like the skull is not much of an electrical barrier.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/54/16/002/pdf/0031-9155_...
From Wikipedia about EEG:
> A typical adult human EEG signal is about 10µV to 100 µV in amplitude when measured from the scalp and is about 10–20 mV when measured from subdural electrodes.
Good luck though!
Where both electrodes on your back? Did you use some conductive gel gloop? Was this a dc or an ac signal? Why 3 batteries? Where they in series or parallel?
May I also ask what your device is used for?
Apologies for the interrogation!
(Good Luck with the grafts btw.)
It's a long story but it seems a modest electric field can encourage axon regrowth in damaged spinal cords. Good evidence for this including a phase 1 human trial in 2005 but nothing since. Here is one of the first papers:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.902500204/abs...
My arduino controlled device:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105950978003980827748/posts/hQY2...
Or even more advanced, connect it to a computer/tablet through USB or bluetooth, mimic a keyboard/mouse and use your real keyboard key presses/mouse movement to reset the countdown. I wouldn't use this directly though, but instead through opto-couplers to avoid electric shocks or other safety issues!
Related to watchdog, you should probably also activate the hardware watchdog of the microcontroller to make sure it doesn't crash.
27V at 100mA is 2.7Watt dissipation, quite a lot when in contact with skin!
However, I'm also a software engineer for a medical device company and I spend a great deal of time assessing and mitigating the safety of various operations. Please take care to understand the failure modes of anything you build and attach to your own body. When you get to the point of using an Arduino (or anything else that uses software), the number of failure points goes up dramatically. Try to consider how anything could fail and what the consequences will be.
I was skeptical that simple, unguided tDCS could have significant effects so I searched some more and found a very nice overview paper: http://www.aipass.org/files/TDCS_State%20of%20the%20art.pdf "Transcranial direct current stimulation: State of the art 2008"
I was looking for something, anything, that would tell me if there's significant research in the area and if simple procedures that could be carried out using this kit would work.
(Also you might note that the Nature article was linked 9 hours after my post :) In some ways it does give a better overview of the technique, I'd link it if I had found it.)
This keeps getting thrown around but I'm having a hard time identifying a good source (other than a bunch of blogs repeating the same 'fact'). The best I can do is this set of slides which claim 'a 2.1x improvement' [1], but no confirmation that it's actually in use.
The brain is very poorly understood, and throwing random electrical fields across it "because I saw it on extremetech" is a terrible idea.
Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328501.600-zap-your-...
Which references Experimental Brain Research, vol 213, p 9: http://www.mendeley.com/research/transcranial-direct-current...
Nevertheless, they probably wouldn't have funded it without some indication that it could be useful.
Reasons range from "it works" through "it's a safe useful placebo" through "it might work" to "it doesn't work, but it'll confuse (and scare) the communists and divert them from our real research."
and found resistor values by tinkering in simulator (I'm a noob) and I arrived at this:
http://www.falstad.com/circuit/#%24+1+5.0E-6+10.200277308269...
Now time to check how it works in the real world. ;-)
tDCS has also been found to be effective in treating major despression (http://www.brainstimulation.columbia.edu/doc/journal_club/pa...)
They had a tiny sample size of 40 people, split into 3 groups.
I agree that it'd be great if there was a lot more, and better, research into this.
To answer your question: I'd be happy to plug myself into a $99 device, so long as it was built competently.
If it has any effect then the side effects would be my first major concern.
Forget about sign-ups, this is well enough organized to attract pre-purchases (plus I want one sooner).
I am not going to give my money in exchange for a product I'll trust with my health to a company that thinks "U LEARNED RUBY? Y TAKE SO LONG" is proper/fitting advertisement.
Here's a review on the topic from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110413/full/472156a.html
Given the kind of claims being made, don't we need more than this?
OK. Fine. Wonderous possibilities - transhumanism and all that.
This is hardly a "proven" scientific thing and the benefits are somewhat murky. What I'm seeing on HN, surprisingly, are people talking about buying some contraption that purports to make them smarter and the CONSENSUS seems to be that that is entirely reasonable. Disturbing.
More disturbing I'm seeing comments about people experimenting on themselves with crudely crafted contraptions and hurting themselves and others simply offering advice about voltage regulators and the like. This is clearly a "sucker born every minute" territory." I'm really surprised to see this on HN.
I get the impression that I could post about some kind of startup in which I am going to disrupt biotech by curing cancer with some kind of Wi-Fi therapy and probably what I would get as a response is hints on how to optimize the timing protocols, reduce latency, and so forth.
But you should note that these are not quack journals and disreputable colleges - these are real journals and real researchers. Note that most of the reports are fair - "might be effective" and "deserves further investigation" tend not to be the language used by quacks.
Maybe I've misunderstood your point?
Does anyone have a map of cathode / anode electrode positions?
also there is reddit.com/r/tdcs for more info
See that it can be an interesting concept. Look at the article "mmm why not". Click on GoFlow.com link, see the meme in the front page. It's a bad one. Close page, will never come back.
Given that we have good evidence that this technology is safe and remarkably effective, is it ethical to NOT deploy this technology on those government executives on whose decision-making and information-processing ability American lives depend?
I'm pretty well convinced that over the next decade we'll see this and similar drugs proliferate among white collar jobs. Let's face it: our work is boring and the body is not well adapted to it. It's difficult to keep the mind engaged when the body thinks it's a good time to nap or chat with the tribe.
If you look back at photos of the space race, two things are likely to be prominent: coffee and cigarettes. The brilliant engineers who put men on the moon using slide rules also dosed themselves with stimulants in order to maintain focus. These days, cigarettes are on the wane, and something will need to replace and improve upon them.
A common criticism is, "what if everyone is on them?" Well, so what if they are? The automatic assumption is that we'll all be working 16 hour shifts, but I don't see any reason to expect that. If I can maintain focus and do a day's worth of highly productive work in four hours, why not expect the work day to drop to four or six hours (six giving a net benefit to the employer) over time?
Everyone doing it will just result in it being the expected behavior to get more work out of 8+ hours on the job.
1) How do we quantify the number of programmers subjected to these conditions? Squeaky wheels get noticed. Personally, I've had only a few stretches where I was expected to work more than around 40 hours per week. I've also had several stretches where I only worked less.
2) How do we compare what is still a very young field (computer programming) to other fields? How do we compare knowledge work with manufacturing? How many hours per week do you work compared to a textile manufacturing worker in the late 1800s? Did their productivity scale directly with hours? Does yours?
3) You simply don't have any reason other than pessimism to reach your conclusion.
"The FDA advisory committee voted 12 to 1 against approval, citing concerns about a number of reported cases of skin rash reactions in a trial that included 933 patients on modafinil, including two severe cases which appeared to be "definite" erythema multiforme or Stevens–Johnson syndrome. One of the two severe cases involved hospitalization."
The Wikipedia page also says: "From the date of initial marketing, December 1998, to January 30, 2007, FDA received six cases of severe cutaneous adverse reactions associated with modafinil, including erythema multiforme (EM), Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS), toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), and drug rash with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS) involving adult and pediatric patients.
I have to admit, six cases in eight years doesn't strike fear into me.
The $99 kit is a solderless, and no tools necessary setup.
- Matt @flowstateengage
But in general it has been really useful in learning coffee script and teaching my friend how to longboard.