
Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers - sanj
http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2016/07/11/caution-brain-hacking
======
etrautmann
Neuroscientist here: Just listened to a talk from a reseacher who studied tDCS
and tACS in human subjects, and found that IQ scores were actually going down
relative to control groups. It's absolutely not clear what the appropriate
protocols are, and behavioral outcomes could be incredibly sensitive to
factors such as 1) electrode placement, 2) stimulation frequency, 3)
amplitude, 4) direct or alternating current, etc.

On top of that, benefits may come at the cost of other unobserved effects
(i.e. faster learning and plasticity, accompanied by faster forgetting, to
oversimplify).

~~~
phkahler
>> Neuroscientist here: Just listened to a talk from a reseacher who studied
tDCS and tACS in human subjects, and found that IQ scores were actually going
down relative to control groups.

So really, someone experimenting on their own could be considered more ethical
than researchers doing it to other people ;-) This is really an area where
having all the data is critical and that publication bias we keep reading
about at HN can actually be harmful to people relying on published results.
One could say "they shouldn't be doing that", but don't researchers want their
results to be used for something, or is it just about publication?

~~~
2close4comfort
No I think that medical research can now be preformed by anyone. I think that
there are going to be great advances that come from this amateur research in
the next 5 years and I think it is the next evolution of hacking. People in
general are capable of the kind of science required to achieve reproducible
results. Most of this "research" is driven by a personal motivation (personal
or some one close) where traditional medicine is unable to help. Research is
driven by what can be sold afterwards and not the reward of knowledge gained
from the results. And even then if knowledge was captured it often be
inaccessible to those whom could turn that into a practical application of
that science. So really this comes off as questioning the Doctors' absolute
authority as masters in their field, and someone with out credentials coming
up with just as meaningful results being tossed aside as amateurs not having a
full understanding of what they are doing. I would say that in my personal
experience that medicine is largely more art than science you rarely find
Doctors that are interested in solving the unusual.

~~~
collyw
"No I think that medical research can now be preformed by anyone."

They should have at least some knowledge of how research works. Whats the
point in experimenting if you aren't adding a control group for example?

~~~
phkahler
Some people just want to make themselves better. They don't care about a
control group. They only care to see if they can produce a positive effect on
the one subject that matters to them. Most of them would probably go to a
doctor for this if it were readily accessible.

------
louprado
RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance
sharp-shooting ability.

At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of loss when the tCDS
system was no longer available to her. She sounded like a drug addict that
pines for that feeling of their _first high_ and then risks spending their
life in vain trying to recover that feeling.

If your life literally depends on a skill and supervised tCDS can improve it,
then the reward may outweigh the unknown risks. But for other tasks/skills, it
is difficult to justify.

Edit: typos, clarity

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-
nirvana](http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana)

~~~
spdustin
A quote from the reporter's blog [0]: "When the nice neuroscientists put the
electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet
was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the
fuck up."

I'll be honest, that is a pretty compelling testimonial for many folks.

[0]: [http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-
th...](http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-through-
electrochemistry/)

~~~
kbenson
From that blog post:

 _And then, finally, the main question: what role does doubt and fear play in
our lives if its eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make
more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or
when we’re freed from them? If we all wore these caps, would the world be a
better place?_

That's a really interesting thought. Not so much "would the world be better",
as there is a presumption present in that question that more rational decision
making is necessarily better, but if tDCS works similar to how it did with her
with other people, we might have a way to study rational decision making in
groups in interesting ways.

~~~
srtjstjsj
It's a leap to say that suppressing doubt and fear makes people more rational.
It could just as well make people more impulsive.

~~~
qrybam
It's also a leap to say the world would be a better place. One person's
version of rationality can be quite different to another's. Imagine of someone
feels that the only rational thing for them to do is to do something "normally
rational" people would find irrational- like kill your neighbour's dog because
it's bark is keeping you up at night, but social pressures, anxiety and fear
actually keep them in check from the perspective of the whole population.

Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self
limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off?

~~~
kbenson
Well, rationality doesn't exist in a vacuum. Those societal pressures are
taken into account in a rational choice.

> Are psychopaths not a good indicator of what might happen if your self
> limiting emotions/thoughts were turned off?

Possibly? If your goal is the ultimate advancement of the self, then
sociopathic tendencies might yield the best results. We've evolved to have
strong emotions regarding our offspring and those of our tribe, because that's
proven a beneficial strategy for the _species_ , but that is, in some respect,
to the detriment of the individual. Most of us are fine with this decision,
because of our feelings regarding our and our future offspring, but if you
have no care for family, friends or the species as a whole, then gaming the
system for your own advancement is probably the rational choice.

There are interesting implications to your sentence though. The blogger
explained the loss of (generally perceived as) negative emotions, but what if
they were not put in a situation to notice, or were unable to because of the
condition itself, a loss in what we generally perceive as positive emotions,
such as empathy and sympathy? This of course assumes that there was some
emotional state change, and it wasn't a placebo effect.

------
kjell
The first 40 minutes of this week's "Invisibilia" touches on the effects
transcranial magnetic stimulation had on a woman who lived with undiagnosed
aspergers for most of her life.

> ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: Until she was 54 years old, Kim (ph) was totally
> unaware that there were things in the world that she could not see.

> KIM: Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head, and
> now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after
> the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.

[http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/invisibilia-an-
exper...](http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/485138695/invisibilia-an-experiment-
helps-one-woman-see-the-world-in-a-new-way)

(The TMS study "Kim" participated in took place at the same hospital that the
co-author of this letter works, Beth Israel Deaconess.)

~~~
gr3yh47
The linked transcript is fairly short and DEFINITELY worth a read.

Very interesting stuff.

~~~
holografix
There is a much longer and even more fascinating article here on HN about a
similar case. You should search for it, if I was in front of a computer I'd
find it for you. In it the man seems to have a lasting effect and is "cured"
from Aspergers ends up splitting with his wife of I remember correctly.

~~~
rjeli
[http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-
aut...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/an-experimental-autism-
treatment-cost-me-my-marriage)

------
gwbas1c
I think the thing that a lot of hackers don't understand is unintended
consequences. It's fine when you're hacking a computer game, and the worst
case scenario is that the game malfunctions. Things like overclocking a PC, or
re-tuning a car, have more tangible consequences, but those consequences
ultimately mean that the hacker will damage an easily replaceable commodity.

A person's brain is not replaceable.

~~~
6stringmerc
That's one of the reasons I've stayed away from 'beta blocker' medications
even though they're designed to tone down stage fright to a bare minimum.
There are, from what I've read, potential side effects that can be rather
severe. As in, some real unwelcome motor/cognition changes. That's enough
cautionary literature to keep me away. Strangely enough though, I'm not anti-
supplement (vitamins, PH stacks, etc) in the least.

~~~
graeme
Can you point to any papers? I'm curious. A friend (actually not me) was just
asking about them. He gets anxiety, and wanted to have them on hand in case of
a severe attack. But he's wary of medications generally and is on the fence
about taking them.

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
Beta blockers aren't great for sudden panic attacks. I took them for years,
and while they're great for toning down the anxiety baseline, they don't even
remotely approach benzos when it comes to mitigating severe panic. Sadly the
only medications you can reasonably get out there that will address an
incipient or in progress panic attack are benzos.

There are other supplements/medications that are helpful (phenibut is my goto
since I no longer wanted to take benzos), but none of them are fast acting or
powerful enough to stop something that's already happening.

~~~
graeme
Ah, interesting. I checked with my friend, and it turns out they had gotten
mixed up. They were prescribed benzos, not beta blockers.

What made you stop taking them? My friend has been making good progress
without them, but still gets some rough days. And what supplements/medicines
do you use, apart from phenibut?

(To be clear, they've already spoken with a doctor, psychologist, consulted
drugs.com listing of side effect, etc.)

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
I stopped taking them for two reasons.

1\. I have an absurdly high tolerance to them (and almost all GABAergics, for
that matter.) I always have, and also have an absurd alcohol tolerance. So,
while clonazepam worked for me, I was taking roughly the maximum dosage
designated for severe seizure disorders (I was taking 18mg/day, which if
anyone is familiar with clonazepam, they'll know how absurd that is.)

2\. I was starting to feel dumb. I'm not 100% sure if that was the clonazepam
or the quetiapine or the topamax, but one or all of them was making me forget
my friends' and family's names. So, I dropped them like they were hot.

I'll give a small rundown of my stack below. I certainly won't say my stack is
bulletproof, and for people with addictive personalities it could certainly be
actively harmful. I won't discuss dosages either, because frankly my phenibut
dosage is irresponsible, but once again that goes directly towards my
GABAergic tolerance.

\-----

Tianeptine - for depression. It's a fast acting novel TCA that works via
unknown mechanisms. In higher dosages it exhibits opioid activity, and if
someone suffers from addictive tendencies it should absolutely be avoided.

Phenibut - for anxiety. It's converted directly into GABA in the brain. It's
relatively fast acting. Some people, but definitely not all, can suffer from
horrible withdrawals if they take it for a long time and then stop taking it.
I've never had problems with it if I've run out though, and I take it daily.

Adrafinil - for fatigue and sleepiness. I suffer from an autoimmune disorder
and am chronically fatigued. Adrafinil is a pro-drug for modafinil, and gets
rid of your tiredness without being otherwise stimulating.

Caffeine - tiredness. I get mine powdered, but it doesn't really matter.

Vitamin D - this one helped with my depression enormously. I decided to give
it a try one day after my dad was diagnosed with SAD, and did a loading dose.
Within 3 days the dark circles had disappeared from under my eyes and my
depression lifted significantly.

Those are everything I take on a day to day basis. I also have conditional
nootropics for days when I'm in the mood for them/need to be extra productive.
Noopept, aniracetam, oxiracetam, N-Acetyl Selank Amidate for days I'm feeling
extra anxious, N-Acetyl Semax Amidate for a mental boost, and a few others I
rarely use.

~~~
quietkatalyst
How much Vitamin D are you taking? I have been supplementing with it, but it
did not put much of a dent in my winter depression. And what is considered to
be a loading dose?

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
10,000 IU per day. A loading dose is in the range of 100,000IU to 1,000,000IU,
depending on age and body weight. Hypervitaminosis D only occurs when you take
a loading dose level for months or years; it's not possible to acutely
overdose on vitamin D.

~~~
gherkin0
That's a lot. Vitamin D tests are easy to get, so I just took a few over a few
months to find a dose that would keep me at ~50ng/ml. Previous to that, I had
taken 5000+ IU/day for some time and the test showed my levels were very high.

It looks like this site has a nice chart:
[https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/further-topics/i-tested-
my-v...](https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/further-topics/i-tested-my-vitamin-d-
level-what-do-my-results-mean/)

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
I did end up taking a Vitamin D test after I had started supplementing, and on
that dosage I'm still a little below normal levels.

------
lawless123
""Some people were administering it to their kids," he says. "

WTF , fair enough if you want to risk it on yourself but not your children
with still developing brains.

~~~
gwbas1c
The whole thing just reminds me about the radium water craze years ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor)
[https://67.media.tumblr.com/1899ba50f59df9c88dace35c13c2c1a7...](https://67.media.tumblr.com/1899ba50f59df9c88dace35c13c2c1a7/tumblr_nvvm8tVOyn1rwjpnyo1_500.jpg)

~~~
DigitalJack
I watched a documentary on Netflix a while back that talked about the Radium
health craze and carelessness. I think it was about the rise of investigative
chemistry with regard to poisonings, etc.

The radium portion was horrifying to think about.

~~~
komali2
As long as the mindset of "we're done hearing from experts!" is allowed to
resurface again and again, we'll have this problem. See: Anti-vaccers, the
insanity with radium, maybe even Bob Marley's toe cancer.

------
stared
Forgive my votum separatum, but:

> The biggest risk is that we just don't know what all the risks are. I think
> that's the biggest risk.

I would call it "an opportunity". And as far as it is being done voluntarily,
and there is a non-zero entry barrier, I am indebted to all those who (maybe)
risk their health and lives for possible progress of science, medicine and
technology.

Compare it to extreme sports, where there is risk, but often with little or no
long-term benefit for the rest of society.

If we restrict ourselves only to "safe", "regulated" and "within the sacred
walls of academia" experiments, we will miss (or seriously delay) a lot of
things. Especially:

> I don't know that any hospital review board would actually let us do that
> experiment, so we might never know what that does to brain activity.

~~~
ccrush
Yes, but unless these experiments are done by pairs or groups, you are getting
what is passed off as scientific results from someone who is experimenting on
their own brain with a sample size of one and no control group. How do you
trust the results from an experiment conducted on the experimenter's brain?
What if the experimenter loses the capacity to properly conduct the experiment
in the process? How would you know the difference between that and he or she
being incompetent in the first place, aside from the fact that they're
attempting this in the first place?

~~~
toufka
Check out Erowid[1] and see how people dealt with those 'scary chemicals'.
People were being their own chemist & pharmacy at much higher doses, for much
longer periods than any doctor had ever prescribed. There are certainly
uncertainties, but enough people saying similar things actually do start to
hone in on very real affects (that aren't/can't actually be known from an
'ethical' experiment).

[1] [https://www.erowid.org/](https://www.erowid.org/)

------
VLM
So the TLDR is its basically like exercise where you can quite easily hurt
yourself if you have no idea what you're doing, and you probably do not
especially if you're a broscience devotee, and most people make pretty dumb
decisions about appropriate levels of repetition, effort, and pain.

Another way of putting it is people with poor judgment can now at some effort
and money, destroy their brains, not just their knees and shoulders. Eh.

Another good analogy is alcohol consumption, although unlike alcohol it
appears both brain stimulation and exercise can have a net positive effect.

~~~
DasIch
With exercise there are at least people who do know what they're doing you can
ask. In this case there isn't anybody who really knows what they're doing, at
least not to the point that they can get any benefits out of it.

~~~
ihaveahadron
I think the real "only" way to improve your brain is to improve the
sophistication of the "software" that makes up the wiring of your brain. I'm
pretty sure from a logical standpoint that electricity alone doesn't do this.

------
api
TDCS seems like using a sledgehammer to tune a piano.

~~~
6stringmerc
Nicely put. I'd venture that a lot of the "plug in and go" crowd might be
better served with some vigorous exercise rather than electrical stimulation.
At least one of the two has viable, peer reviewed studies and results to
consider.

But hey, Darwin Awards ain't going to write themselves.

~~~
freshhawk
In addition to vigorous exercise, add in all the promising results from
studies on mindfulness meditation as well. But clearly the cyberpunk
aesthetic, and techno-solutionism is what is motivating here, it's not the
evidence.

~~~
throwanem
I'd never have thought there would be anyone who'd _want_ to live in a Peter
Watts novel, but here we are.

~~~
api
Governments seem to think 1984 is an instruction manual so this is not
uncommon.

------
justsaysmthng
A good idea would be to create a website were self experimenters can log their
results, describe their setups, take tests and answer questionnaires. Similar
to what erowid did for drugs back in the days - the self reported "trip
reports".

Of course - warn people that it's dangerous, etc etc, but people are still
going to do it so why not use that as 'volunteer' experimental data.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's a start. But given that the report is subjective, and its a report on
brain-altering drugs, as a data set its of questionable usefulness. E.g. all
those that were changed to be hyper-focused will not be able to change their
attention to reporting - so many will be missing from the reports. Others may
become depressive and incapable of reporting as well.

Its like "everybody who didn't survive the experiment, raise your hands!"

------
drdaeman
Huh. I thought it's something about DIY EEG devices or something like that and
is quite surprised with what some people do with their heads...

------
bcheung
Peter: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your
head, remember that?

Egon: That would have worked if you didn’t stop me.

------
shas3
Hope someone writes a similar letter about nootropics. There's little evidence
about their long term effects.

~~~
ninjakeyboard
I think centrophenoxine and racetams are fairly well tolerated. I've cycled
them on and off for a few years with only positive outcomes. They've been
studied for decades. It's probably worse to take something like tylenol pm
every night, which is FDA approved, OTC etc.
[http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-
dr...](http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-drugs-like-
benadryl-linked-increased-dementia-risk-201501287667)

~~~
shas3
But where's the link to centrophenoxine and racetams? Your link only talks
about anticholinergic drugs. I have seen such results about benzodiazepine
[http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-
ra...](http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-raise-risk-
alzheimers-disease-201409107397)

When you are chemically toying with your brain, it is good to know if there
are any adverse long terms effects. Risk vs. reward. Surely some non chemical
ways of modifying the your brain can also have adverse effects: like eroding
concentration due to constant multitasking.

~~~
ninjakeyboard
Here is an account of long term centrophenoxine use. Not sure there is lots of
study demonstrating 35 years of use is safe in large qty of the population so
this should be treated as an anecdotal report only. It does cite other study
he has done.

[http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/64596-my-
personal-35-ye...](http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/64596-my-
personal-35-year-report-on-the-value-of-centrophenoxine-in-antiaging-by-
professor-imre-zs-nagy/)

There are links to outcomes of studies on oxiracetam here which is my go to
racetam:

[https://examine.com/supplements/oxiracetam/](https://examine.com/supplements/oxiracetam/)

------
gnoway
The actual open letter:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24689/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24689/full)

------
orionblastar
My brothers and I saw a child psychiatrist in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
She had stuck needles in our head and tried to treat us via electric shock for
depression.

We were all high functioning with above average intelligence.

Ever since I had problems remebering names and faces of most people I met and
other memory problems.

She said we were too smart to have autism but high functioning autism wasn't
discovered until later in the 1990s so we might have been misdiagnosed.

It makes it hard for me to find work and be accepted.

------
rudedogg
Apparently there's already commercial device for this. I came across a paper
about it.

“Unfocus” on foc.us: commercial tDCS headset impairs working memory -
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-015-4391-9](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-015-4391-9)

------
artifaxx
Given that the human brain is full of electrical impulses it makes sense that
external impulses can change our brains. The article mentions some people
seeing the opposite results from the same protocol. It seems likely we will
need more precise methods of stimulation to see better results given how
complex our brains are.

------
lincolnpark
I'm the one they featured in this article..
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7592_supp/full/53...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v531/n7592_supp/full/531S6a.html)

~~~
323454
Has it worked for you before?

------
desireco42
Frustration comes from how slow and opaque research in this area is. I think
their warning is very appropriate and timely. Having said that, I think a lot
of benefit can be had from transparent research.

------
smegel
> a zapping session may produce an effect exactly the opposite of what's
> intended

Sounds a lot like anti-depressant medication.

------
ommunist
Does wearing monitor headphones possess not obvious risks to your brain
functions?

~~~
throwanem
That depends on how badly miswired they are, I suppose.

------
SShrike
I had no idea people actually tried stuff like this.

------
simbalion
Real brain hacking is about subliminal conditioning. Leave it to WIRED and
similar publications to muddy the water and dumb down the populace.

~~~
ihaveahadron
I think you are the one that is right about this "brainhacking" stuff.

