My brain on electricity: A 130-day tDCS experiment(adifferentdrum.org)
adifferentdrum.org
My brain on electricity: A 130-day tDCS experiment
http://www.adifferentdrum.org/my-brain-on-electricity-a-130-day-tdcs-experiment/
5 comments
The moment they mention left/right brain, lost credibility. How long does this myth have to be debunked before it catches up with the mainstream?
Pseudoscientific rubbish. The conclusion is entirely based on the assumption that there wouldn't have been any progress in the n-back task without brain stimulation and that is 1. pure speculation, 2. implausible because practice usually makes you better at a task. Also: placebo. The general idea that we can "unlock" more brain power by simply applying electrical currents to the brain is utterly silly.
Eyeballing it, the pre-tDCS trend is relatively flat compared to the tDCS period. A t-test is wrong, of course, but I would be fairly surprised if a more appropriate analysis estimated a much smaller improvement. (I can't try anything because the Excel spreadsheet he provides only includes averages in ad hoc formatting, while I'd much prefer the raw per-round scores contained in his Brainworkshop's data/stats.txt file.)
> The general idea that we can "unlock" more brain power by simply applying electrical currents to the brain is utterly silly.
You might as well argue against the concept of 'stimulants' with that argument... The brain is an adaptation-executing organ which (among other things) seeks to conserve resources, which may not be the same set of trade-offs we would prefer in a modern environment.
> The general idea that we can "unlock" more brain power by simply applying electrical currents to the brain is utterly silly.
You might as well argue against the concept of 'stimulants' with that argument... The brain is an adaptation-executing organ which (among other things) seeks to conserve resources, which may not be the same set of trade-offs we would prefer in a modern environment.
While this might be nonsense, the general idea isn't: some DARPA-funded projects have been playing around with tDCS for a while now with remarkable success.[0]
[0]: http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana/
[0]: http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana/
Here is a review:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154388/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4154388/
He states in the article that "considering that I have done the dual n back task (on and off) over two years before starting the tDCS experiment, my baseline was well-established."
"on and off" versus regularly during the experiment. So the baseline was not well-established.
But what are the long-term effects of active systems like tDCS? Anyone know?
We don't. tDCS is in its infant stages but because it's easy to do there is a TON of research coming out. Low hanging fruit is as treatment for depression. Much harder is any kind of cognition enhancement. DIY tDCS has been around for a few years, but this is the first example of tDCS self-science that at least tried to collect useful data (that I'm aware of).
I know of an open source developer who has written some extremely complicated kernel code and credits his success to personal tDCS experiments.
I still think we need more data on this.
I still think we need more data on this.