Noninvasive theta-burst stimulation enhances skill learning
nature.com
nature.com
For rapid motor skill improvement I suggest microdosing LSD or shrooms and then doing the resp. excercise/practice. Ideally with a teacher/master present, to correct/help.
Also applying the techniques from the famous "The Inner Game of Tennis" book during the trip window helps/boosts the effects for me.
The more difficult the motor skill is and the more coordination with other sensory input it requires, the better the gains.
I am tango dancer and this is a hobby that takes years to master.
Some people would say a decade or more, until you get to an acceptable level.
Even more, if you have zero musicality and two left feet, like I did, when I started. It was an uphill battle for years.
I only discovered this hack by accident, during the lockdown, about six years into this hobby.
I believe I cut years off my tango learning time, ever after. And there is strong evidence based on the feedback of people from the community I dance in, who know me/danced with me for years, before and after.
My partner only started tango two years ago. She is also microdosing regularly when she trains and sometimes even for social dancing, when we go to events where the level is very high/you are expected to dance with lots of experienced partners.
Most people believe she is dancing since at least four, but sometimes over five years.
Certainly, my sample size is two.
But it makes sense when you look at what the research on psychedelics suggests about increased neural plasticity during a trip (if that is even what you want to call it when microdosing).
My first experience was random, when I tried a new, legal LSD variant[1], during the end of the pandemic, summer 2021.
I tried first ~40µg, while still finishing work (code).
Didn't feel anything so I took another 40 and then went dancing two hours later. At 80µg the LSD was just below psychoactive, so that dose was too high, in retrospect. I now use 40µ and that is perfect for me.
The only indicator I had, after the night, was external. Three followers came to me, out of the blue, and told me: "you were my best tanda tonight, thank you." (A tanda is a block of three-four songs danced together, before you change partners).
That struck me as odd/very surprising, at the level of dancing I was at then. A comment like this was something I would hear once-twice a year, if lucky. But three in one night?
After that the praise kept coming from other tango people I danced with for years before, i.e. they felt the change.
That's when I started experimenting with it and it has just become another tool to improve since then.
People who disregard this I tell to talk to dozens of dancers who know me for years.
They didn't know about what caused it. Yet they saw/see and felt/feel the change in my dancing and particularly musicality (which was, until then, my biggest struggle).
[1] LSD.shop
Both feel not noticably different from pure LSD I took years before.
As an outside observer, I got to a point where I could usually tell which days they were microdosing. The biggest tell was that their self confidence went up significantly. They would consider routine accomplishments to be great achievements. They would have an increased sense of wonder after even basic realizations. If anything, their actual problem solving abilities were diminished or at least slowed on those days.
All but one of them eventually discontinued it, realizing that it was doing more to distort their perceptions than actually improving themselves. One has unfortunately continued with increasing doses over the years to try to chase the early feelings. He’s reaching a point of delusions of grandeur and he’s accumulating a lot of weird pseudo-religious ideas and theories. It’s very concerning.
I have no doubt that micro dosing changes how people feel about their own performance after watching this play out over several years, but I’m far from convinced that it actually has a direct effect on improving learning in the ways the influencers are claiming. I could see how altering self-perceptions could improve confidence enough to make someone perform differently, but I have some serious doubts about the drug actually improving cognition or learning.
Some doubt is good and healthy. When doubt is preventing you from living a good life then some temporary chemical bypassing can be good, but if there is no doubt in your way then you're just chasing the high.
So it ticks all boxes for me as an amature enthusiast for a potential 'enhance my cognition' method. I wonder, where the catch?
Some of the authors' earlier work in rodents painted a really exciting picture of directly driving neuronal activity from outside the brain. However, that data came from an animal with a small, smooth brain and the stimulation was actually delivered onto the skull (rather than the skin). Thus, they could make electric fields of ~400 V/m in their animals, whereas fields of ~1 V/m are about all you can expect from non-invasive (i.e., scalp) electrical stimulation of an awake, healthy human (at least one that you want to keep healthy!).
We recently did some experiments with macaques receiving tTIS through the scalp, which are much more similar to humans. It could shift the timing of individual neurons' ongoing activity, but not directly force them to spike. It generally wasn't strong enough to impose new rhythms on the brain, just muck up existing ones. This isn't nothing--"mistimed" neural activity is involved in lots of diseases and ways to fix that might be very valuable--but it's very different fro the dominant story.
Here are our results, if you want to read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.25.559340v1
With your second question; brain stimulation is reasoned to be less addictive than those substances, and of course less selective in its effect. Furthermore the studies that report positive benefits can show these benefits lasting almost 24h following a single stimulation session....however, having done my doctorate on this technology I can tell you it is definitely no panacea, and lately many critiques of this type of intervention have been published.
The hope is often to enhance whatever's already going on in the brain--and this is a sensible goal because there's often less neural synchrony in some diseases (e.g, schizophrenia) or situations (e.g., memory lapses).
However, the brain has its own internal dynamics--and they're complicated! You can 't just blithely write a new thing on top of them and expect it to work. In our experiments, doing so often backfires: stimulating at 5 Hz often makes makes cells already firing at 5 Hz act less rhythmically, not more. The reason is that the brain's oscillations drift in frequency and abruptly reset, so they "compete" with the imposed oscillation. This is a pretty well-studied phenomeon in other contexts (e.g., sloshing in rocket fuel tanks or nearby pipes cancelling each other in organs).
TI is exciting because you could potentially sense what's going on and adjust the stimulation accordingly, but we've got a lot of work to go.
>TI stimulation is a novel brain stimulation strategy that employs two or more independent stimulation channels delivering HF currents (oscillating at f1 and f1 + Δf) within the kHz range, which are assumed to be inert in terms of inducing neuronal activity6,82. The two currents generate a modulated electric field, with the envelope oscillating at the low-frequency Δf (target frequency) where the currents join or cross. The peak of the envelope amplitude can be steered toward target areas located deeper in the brain by tuning the electrode position and current ratio across stimulation channels
The other major difference is how it affects the neurons. tDCS, tACS and even TMS create electric fields that electrically polarize the neurons. TI...doesn't. The stimulus itself changes too rapidly and only the envelope fluctuates at the "target frequency." However, that envelope isn't real: something has to extract/demodulate it from the carriers and it's not entirely clear how--or how well--that happens.
Can’t we all just be different and be ok with it?