Can you supercharge your brain?
mosaicscience.com
mosaicscience.com
I've done between 30 and 40 sessions over a period of three years, still ongoing. The intention was to increase my working memory, but it has also helped with several other minor issues. By my own estimations, my fluid intelligence has gone up significantly, it's really noticeable and I now also score significantly higher on IQ tests.
I've combined that with my own nootropics stack and mental exercise regime, which further enhanced my intelligence, now pushing me into genius territory. It's a blessing, that's for sure, I can now much better strategize my life, but there are also some downsides, like an uptick in neurotic behavior.
I'm currently working on changing my website, winfred.com [3] to a site that lists all the details of the work I've done on myself. Does anyone think there is value in publishing something like that?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/tDCS/comments/qn6s5/diy_tdcs_howto/
[2] http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://winfred.com/
No, there is no evidence at all. However, the medication I have been taking, is known to improve the ability to focus in people with a certain DNA marker. And I have that DNA marker and I take this medication. The same goes with tDCS, over and over it is proven to improve certain brain functions, I have been using this device for the last 3 years now, the device has built in checks that show me that the current is actually going through my skull, I've seen the studies that show the flow of the electrons and I know where the electrodes are placed. I think we can make some assertions on the effects this has had on my brain?
Regarding the minor issues, I sometimes have small bouts of depression, nothing too bad really, I never contemplate suicide for example, but still, it is nice that after a tDCS session these depressions tend to disappear. It could be coincidence, but there are research papers http://www.tmslab.org/publications/165.pdf that also seem to imply that tDCS helps with depressions.
The mental exercise consisted mainly of no longer using my episodic memory (I have very limited time related memory storage, it's really pathetic in some sense) and reading hundreds of audiobooks on the following topics:
Psychology, Early Roman Civilization, Early Christian Religion, General History, Battle Tactics, Modern Warfare, Late Christian Religions, Philosophy, Story Telling, Programming (well, I just learned that on the computer, not with an audio book).
As a result of doing that for a long time (over 10 years), 5 hours per day, I am now a theoretical subject matter expert on a wide range of topics.
Can you expand on this? What is the medication you have been taking? With Dual N Back, do you think it improves WM on a temporary basis or is the increase permanent?
If you have the gene, when taken during the day, Modafinil allows you to focus for up to 12 hours straight, on the subject of your choosing (but you should choose something, or your attention span is wasted). With that focus, it is much easier to learn new things.
[1] http://youscript.com/healthcare-professionals/why-youscript/...
In my experience, trying to assess the effects of a medication or technique on yourself is an exercise in frustration. Although you can do legitimate double-blind experiments on yourself, it's usually impossible to properly control the variables which can affect the outcome (diet, exercise, sleep, work, stress, relationships, etc. all have an impact).
So, I'm a big fan of the "assume it works because the studies say it should" approach that you describe. It's not clean or certain but it's eminently practical, and it has the fringe benefit of giving you a lot of opportunities to benefit from placebo :)
One of the problems I ran into while studying is the decay of the information. It takes quite some time to store all this information (and even more if you try to do some hypothesizing or brain storming with multiple aspects of the information), that by the time I had a decent amount of knowledge, I started noticing that parts of it had already gone bad (proven partly or completely false after I read it) and needed maintenance.
From my perspective it didn't require much dedication. I like reading, all I had to do is make sure I read almost only non-fiction and that the knowledge maps of the subject fields overlap enough so I can get maximal understanding on the first reading. It's just an entertaining puzzle that doesn't have a predetermined outcome.
But I certainly wouldn't expect the sort of rigor others are asking for in this thread - obviously this is more hobby than science, and I'd consider personal reports interesting despite being anecdotal.
Are these current, professionally published, individually administered IQ tests? There are only so many brands of those. "IQ tests" on the Internet are completely bogus and are not validated.
The statement you make, even if observed under the most rigorous conditions with proper tests, may just mean that you are enjoying a training effect after taking so many IQ tests. Most people don't take many IQ tests over the course of a whole lifetime, and are taken by surprise by the item content of any given IQ test. Some kinds of IQ test items have HUGE training effects (also known as practice effects), and you only get one shot at using those to estimate your IQ. (The Wechsler Block Design subtest is an outstanding example of IQ test items with strong practice effects.)
How much carry-over from all this do you get in the rest of your daily life activities outside the testing room? That's always the relevant question for any intervention that is supposed to increase IQ. Does anyone else comment that you are smarter now than you used to be?
That's amazing. As someone who dabbles in nootropics and casually follows tDCS, that looks fantastic and I wish you the best in the future. We're not far from something utterly fantastical in terms of human augmentation and people like you are on the forefront.
That said: What have you won with this? What have you been able to do as a near-genius that you could not have done otherwise? What about the practical correlates of intelligence, like income or social status?
I think a major flaw in many of these self-experiments is that it uses tests that seem to have decent validity, but don't cross-validate that with real-world results.
I would definitely read whatever you published; I've bookmarked your website and will extract anything I can from it.
In other aspects of life, well, that's a hard one. I consider myself one of the world's first cyborgs, with several implants (I have both magnetic sensory perception and RFID implant to computer authentication to give you some examples).
The plans I'm working on now in my leisure time are full of self indulgence. I'm working on art pieces that I'll be using for my performance art work, where I'm integrating my implants with my clothing and transportation. I have all the parts and materials, it's mainly a matter of giving each aspect of the project the time it needs to complete.
Are the implants your projects? Would you not have been able to do them before you started with nootropes and tDCS?
Do you feel like your art is better or more refined?
I hope these questions aren't invasive; feel free to not answer any of them; I just thought it valuable to ask because there are very few people that seem to have gone as far into this as you have, you claim to have strong results, and I'd honestly really, really like to have additional motivation to continue doing them myself.
Further, academia is corrupt. Very little of the work academics do is interesting. The academic process is intensely political and the probability of something getting published is as much a function of who reviews it as it is of the quality of the work, if not more. I say this as someone exposed to academia currently.
Never limit what you can draw conclusions from! Draw conclusions from anything you can observe; but do moderate the strength of your conclusion, and the degree to which you integrate that conclusion, by the strength of the process used to produce that evidence.
The question then is can the changes induced by this external stimulus have more positive than negative impact on your brain? That would be easier to answer with a better understanding of how the brain worked (as opposed to what parts of it were active when it was working) but it can certainly be an interesting source of experimentation.
What surprises me most about this research is that we have not yet invented 'wire heads' or folks who are addicted to the artificial stimulation of the pleasure cortex of their brain. There is a clear market for such a device, it would not require smuggling any narcotics, and it would seem to be nominally cheap to manufacture. Further, it would seem that finding a way to reliably stimulate the pleasure centers is a much more tractable problem than trying to stimulate memory or intelligence.
I keep an eye on this research, I've known too many people with clinical depression for whom existing therapies were unsuccessful in treating that depression, but I expect to see the illicit use appear on the market first, then I'll know we're close to answering the question posed by the article.
For the technique in the parent article - transcranial stimulation - any stimulation of the pleasure centers is incidental and minor. That tDCS seems to have interesting side-effects is still unexplained.
There are some ongoing studies of Deep Brain Stimulation with implanted electrodes as a treatment for depression, but it's not a casual thing to undertake.
I have no idea if that will be a fruitful path for them but it has the 'feature' that it can act in any part of the brain.
I hadn't seen this before. Very cool!
To be fair, it does remind me of Ringworld, where 'wirehead' addicts would starve themselves to remain plugged in. Wild!
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3372849/
[2] http://www.tmslab.org/publications/164.pdf
[3] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10710628_Facilitatio...
[4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51068527_Improving_w...
Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region:
"The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers’ brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. “Most tDCS studies don’t achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline.”
This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven’t involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. “A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I’ve learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn,” he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work “the secret sauce”."
Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training:
"Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert."
Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point:
"So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."
> Those who had the parietal area involved in numerical cognition stimulated learned the new number system more quickly than those who got sham stimulation, the researchers report today in the Journal of Neuroscience. But at the end of the weeklong study their reaction times were slower when they had to put their newfound knowledge to use to solve a new task that they hadn’t seen during the training sessions. ”They had trouble accessing what they’d learned,” Cohen Kadosh said.
> The volunteers who had the prefrontal area involved in learning and memory stimulated showed the opposite pattern. They were slower than the control group to learn the new numerical system, but they performed faster on the new test at the end of the experiment. The bottom line, says Cohen Kadosh, is that stimulating either brain region had both benefits and drawbacks. ”Just like with drugs, there seem to be side effects,” he said.
I find myself extremely skeptical of these results.
* Huge incentive to keep getting positive results because money was/is needed * Higher ups insisting this is great and works before the science is finished - this can cause a lot of pressure to focus on positive results and gloss over negative * Scatter gun approach - they're doing a lot of different experiments, and are allowed to fail on lots of them: "they want to promote research that is very cutting-edge and very risky; a 90 per cent failure rate in their portfolio is okay, because the 10 per cent that works will change the world" - it's pretty likely somewhere in that region of experiments will show results just through sheer chance. Are they controlling for this? * A wide number of not particularly related benefits from a single, simple cause whose mechanism is not understood (I understand that breakthroughs occasionally look like this, but it's also a hallmark of snake oil) * Possible cherry picking: "This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good" and "people do not respond equally to stimulation, and no one yet knows exactly why". Could the reason be that they are sometimes seeing positive results due to chance or placebo?
Overall, their claims are extraordinary and their evidence is anything but. I'm not saying there's nothing here, but so far I am not convinced that these researchers aren't fooling themselves.
Update - Said corporation : http://www.electrocoremedical.com/
The article from another source :
http://www.bodyshox.com/blog/science/body-hack-healing-spark
Do other animals feel this duality? Or this phenomenon unique to human beings?
With mindfulness, you place the focus of introspection on your mind: what emotions are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? Have you lost focus? When attempting to learn are you keeping your mind active? It's sort of like "situational awareness" turned inward, or honing your mind to make deliberate practice even more effective. "An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."
It is quite disconcerting that we have taken this kind of dualistic thinking to be the norm and assumed that thats how things are and that we are doomed to live in a perpetual conflict within ourselves. We have made great scientific discoveries and have spent enormous amounts of energy in learning how the world works. But we have spent so little time on studying ourselves as to why we behave in certain way. All we have come up with so far are conflict inducing strategies like mindfulness.
However, studies have shown that such behavior has negative impacts on you (bad feelings reduce your immune system, etc), so mindfulness is avoiding that trap. As for your original question, you can't figure out when to stop eating because humans largely disregard instinct. Obesity has many causes.
A lot of things that appear to be bunkum are in fact bunkum. But some things which appear to be bunkum are in fact profound truth.
So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.
1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?";
2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy.";
3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great."
4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc.
After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges.
One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms.
The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives.
The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).
The good news is that with practice, your foreground process can learn to recognize these conflicts as they are forming and gently steer them to a non-conflicting state before they get out of control. So, the end result is conflict reduction, not conflict induction.
Concentration is the ability to focus on a task. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of your concentration.
Concentration is akin to a programming thread or groups of threads working on tasks. Mindfulness is akin to the thread scheduler and process manager components.
Mindfulness is being aware of what you're doing. Even if you are doing something habitual, noticing that you're doing it. If you're angry, knowing why, feeling the anger, making a decision to try and do something about it or not.
It's different than concentration because concentration indicates some intensity. Mindfulness doesn't need to be intense. You can be mindful and be doing nothing, or you can be mindful and be doing many things. It just means that you're more aware of what you're doing.
I'm sure other animals have this duality, but I would expect that they aren't as introspective as humans, so they probably don't notice it.
It's not that your brain has a 'controller'. In fact, that's about as far away from the truth as I can imagine. It's that your brain is made of many parts, and is part of your entire body. You can't really control it as a whole, but you can make an environment where it's easier to work with the cognitive side of things.
Mindfulness is being practiced in relaxing the barriers to cognition.
Concentration, on the other hand, is more like the ability to override the reward loop, and continue with a task that is getting deprioritized.
That said, I feel that your comment is off-topic and dismissive of the technical subject being discussed.
The brain is just a biological machine. There's no reason to believe that we can't improve its performance by manipulating its physical properties directly through technology.
2. So far as I can tell, Nash was never treated with electroconvulsive therapy.
3. ECT has scarcely anything in common with tDCS.
4. Nash did all his best work before he became schizophrenic. I would be more inclined to blame the major mental illness for any falloff in the quantity or quality of his output, rather than the treatment he received for it.