Plasticity through patterned ultrasound-induced brainwave entrainment in mice | Hacker News Reader

Plasticity through patterned ultrasound-induced brainwave entrainment in mice

science.org

90 pointsbookofjoe52 comments

Seems neat. Is anyone here experimenting with such things on themselves? I'd love to switch my brain from depression to functional.

not remotely medical advice; talk to your psych if it's suitable for you, but TMS is similar and FDA approved for depression, if you're able to access that. TDCS is more accessible if you're wanting to try something out at home.

Not sure if ultrasound stimulation of the human brain is really in the realm of hobbyists, but there is a DIY transcranial direct current stimulation scene (DIYTDCSS): https://old.reddit.com/r/tDCS/

Wow, that explains a lot. One trip I went on there was a older man, bald but otherwise extremely clean cut, the sort to wear slacks, loafers, and a dress shirt tucked in - casually, and quite healthy looking. He almost had a sort of super villain type appearance, somehow.

Anyhow, he had a fairly large briefcase type device he carried everywhere with him and was trying to convince everybody to come try his 'electric brain stimulation.' Surprisingly, nobody seemed too interested in going into a hotel room with a stranger to get their brains plugged into the wall. He seemed to have zapped away all inhibitions, and common sense. Sure made for an interesting character though!

The wetware devices (like the hobby EEGs) of the early internet made it a point to never be plugged in to mains..

There's a bit of a correlation causation issue with understanding these studies of one. It seems quite possible that they zap away inhibitions, but equally likely that one has reduced inhibitions if one is inclined to solder things together and push them against one's skull to see what happens.

This was a crazy discovery for me. The main two consumer groups of brain-tech users are a) new-age psuedoscience spas like the Berkeley Brain Spa that buy old equipment and show you pretty graphs, and b) terminally online people melting their brains for vague IQ benefits

Yes, but I think the near future is sensing: the risks are too great and the laws too complex to treat modulation seriously this decade, IMO. Sensing, on the other hand, is suddenly possible. Once the army of devs that implemented a billion GPT+PDF clones get wind that mind reading is now possible, it’s going to be a tech frenzy like we’ve never seen. IMO

Have a look at the work from https://www.houstonmethodist.org/faculty/santosh-helekar/

Here's some papers; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Santosh-Helekar

And if fields are your thing, here's one being used to control aging (In Hydra..); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APcjc_J2jjQ&t=1499s

1. You increase plasticity in your brain

2. You learn harder that there's no hope for the future

3. ???

Depression is (usually) a erogenous state of thought, not a chemical issue, and I don't see how increased plasticity could help in this case.

Would this be useful for learning new languages as an adult? I have wondered if intelligence agencies used methods for heightening neuroplasticity in order to allow adult agents-in-training to be able to achieve near-native fluency in new languages. Of course, there are probably some behavioral changes they would seek to make while their trainees were especially neuroplastic...

Omelette du Fromage

I wonder this has applications for brain degeneration in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS.

Anything improving neuroplasticity could be great additions to the treatments for these diseases. I’d like to see more of this get out there and approved.

If those were facilitated by structural decomposition, one might expect that this kind of physical treatment might accelerate it, no?

I would have expected a sham-treatment arm to the experiment, because how do you differentiate between "an intervention 30 minutes beforehand caused improved learning" and "our specific intervention 30 minutes beforehand caused improved learning."

Just sort of philosophy thoughts: learning, manipulating of mind by light waves exist now. I mean screen is sort of color wave pattern points(pixels).

I wanna to say it will be the same advantages and problems.

Still wait .bi - b-rain, i-mage processing format. Like a .txt)

I read entrainment as "entertainment" which seems like a different thing altogether

Agree, and exist aphorism in languages "when ship is sinking - mices going out from this ship first". Just first thoughts.

In English it's rats

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/like-rats-fleeing-a...

Long lasting neuronal plasticity sounds a bit scary. It might mean your personality could gradually change.

You mean... Kind of like living? Are you the same now as you were a year ago? I find it scarier to think that my personality might become static! Plasticity is the ability to learn new things.

Um, yeah and forget old things ...

We'll just have our trusty robot companions remember our entire lives and remind us as we go.

It'll be _perfect_.

This is kinda the nature of life. I struggled with depression until my mid-late 20s. At 35, my high school years seem like a blur - my college years are starting to feel the same. I'm pretty ok with this.

No, it’s kind of like living when you are 4 years old. Very different than when you’re 40.

> You mean... Kind of like living?

Well, no, and that's the point! It's not like living, it's an alteration to the natural course of life. Whether it's without negative consequences or not remains to be seen.

Alan Watts has some profound talks about this which I found quite mind-blowing and wish I had learned earlier in life.

Which talks?

Is that worse than your personality not changing?

I am happy with who I am today.

Who you are today likely isn’t who you were 15 years ago. And likely won’t be who you are in 15 years.

But I imagine you’re thinking significant changes where you’re an entirely different person, and I’m thinking just the gradual change we see in everyone. …except my dad. You could set your watch based on the tempo of his mood.

> It might mean your personality could gradually change

Hmm… that might actually be nice. :)

Would it be nice if you no longer know who you are (as a person), or what you are capable of?

Until some kind of personality engineering methods emerge to shape your development you might not be in control of the changes.

Eh, I’d always know who I am as a person… and who I was holds little value, frankly, because the past is the past. And it’s not like I’ve ever had a ton of control over my personality. I didn’t decide to be a pedantic nerd. I didn’t decide to have ADHD. I didn’t decide much about myself at all, really. I’ve simply gone along and gotten along. Also, “We’ve always done it this way” isn’t always useful.

It honestly sounds like a great recipe to being even more open-minded, avoiding zealotry and overly-conservative stick-in-the-mud-ness. What’s not to love?

Not gonna lie, I’d probably sign up for a clinical trial of this procedure, just to experience it. But the risk of something going wrong is significant.

In mice.

Inmiced. Thanks!

Respectfully, for the umpteenth time: is the title of the article as published in Science magazine not up to the standards of HN?

I think it's more about clarification vs. clickbait titles.

I think this question answers itself really.

Correct. The HN community regards it as the high-order bit whether a study was conducted in humans or not. This has evolved into a de facto convention or, if you like, standard over the years.

dang, thanks for your patience here.

It's time for me to move on from this obsession with titled mice (!) and so I will.

Summary audiobook of the paper : https://player.oration.app/33ede964-b1be-439e-877a-2105254a9...

This is neat! How much is reading one PDF costing you? I saw in your previous post you were using OpenAI to process the text to speech.

Thanks! The bulk of the cost is using OpenAI’s text-to-speech API, which is $0.015 per 1,000 characters. Oration generates both a full and summarized audiobook as well.

So far, I’ve found that service to provide a really good price and quality level, compared to offerings from AWS, Azure and other vendors. If you happen to be an iOS user, give the app a try! (https://oration.app) The iOS app is completely free for the time being, so we can focus on really giving our users a great experience. Eventually, I plan to introduce some paid plans but will keep a generous free tier.

great non-answer :)

Thanks! I tried the app out and was really blown away by how good the voice quality was. Definitely interested to see this project make progress!

Please don't do this in HN comments. The repetition goes against the intended spirit of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), plus it's against the rules to use HN primarily for promotion (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

They literally already sell this for penis "function" (health? performance?) in a service called Gainswave. Most people call it a gimmick. But if science has determined you can create brain plasticity with it then surely there's some merit downstairs.

You are confusing two different things. Both use low power ultrasound but the mechanisms of action are quite different. The first is meant to increase blood flow by breaking up deposits, etc. The second induces lipid streaming and pores in the membrane of neurons triggering action potentials.

When there are no deposits, things stream more easily, like blood. They're more alike than you think.

I don’t know how to break it to you, but cell membranes are not blood vessels. Things go across… differently.

This was predicted by Star Trek :) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_IyWFwXw0E

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