
The ethics of brain boosting - cromulent
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/brainboosting.html
======
ntkachov
I say throw ethics out the door. In sports the idea is to entertain and
compete fairly so steroids reduce the value of sports.

Memory and math? What is this a competition? Why on earth would you not want
to increase your capacity for memory and math?

The analogy is that steroids are to a mover as this thing is to an engineer.
Do you really care how your mover found his strength?

~~~
JOnAgain
The ethical question comes up because these won't be free. There's already a
large and widening gap between those who have and those who don't.
Particularly in America, who your parents are have a very large impact on your
potential as an individual -- access to schools, materials, etc.

With a widening gap, would such a device further increase the gap between
those who go on to be the "have's" vs. the "have nots"? Would this introduce a
more substantial barrier to entry for the upper class? What if the device cost
$1000? What if it cost $1000/month?

What would happen to society if 50% or more of society was structurally unable
to move up in the class system? There is unrest today (occupy protests) and
the common perception is that it isn't even a big problem in the US yet. How
bad would it get if people actually thought it was as bad as it is? And then
what if it got worse?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-
economic_mobility_in_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-
economic_mobility_in_the_United_States)

~~~
saulrh
Devil's advocate: brain boosters wouldn't widen the gap significantly because
socioeconomic status is not primarily determined by intelligence. That's the
entire point of lack of socioeconomic mobility. Instead, the benefits of brain
boosters would primarily be to raise the _overall_ quality of life. Brain
boosters have the greatest effect when used by scientists and engineers, and
the resulting improvements in infrastructure, medicine, and technology serve
everybody.

~~~
JOnAgain
>> socioeconomic status is not primarily determined by intelligence

maybe not status, but it's a big factor in mobility. Not saying you can't do
it without, but those at the top of the class definitely move up.
Scholarships, Doctors, Lawyers, Scientists, Engineers -- all make it to the
top 2/5ths.

>> Brain boosters have the greatest effect when used by scientists and
engineers

Exactly -- pushes those already 'on top' even higher.

~~~
orangecat
_Exactly -- pushes those already 'on top' even higher._

It's positive-sum. If researchers taking cognitive enhancements are able to
accelerate the process of curing Alzheimer's or getting self-driving cars on
the road, I'm not going to complain if they earn billions in the process.

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robertskmiles
I found that section on 'cheating' completely bizarre. The reason something
like a cheat-sheet counts as cheating is not that it's _easier_ , it's that
_you haven't really learned it_. The moral issue comes from the idea that the
exam is meant to give an idea of how well you know something, and if you cheat
you can get a good result without really knowing the subject matter.

If you are actually learning, and the effect is not temporary, then it's
obviously not cheating, no matter how easy it is.

~~~
nessus42
All the classes I took at MIT let students bring a "cheat sheet" to exams.
Additionally, many exams were completely open-book. I know that this is
neither here nor there, but I felt compelled to comment on the notion that if
you haven't _memorized_ something, that you haven't learned it. This idea is
all too prevalent.

~~~
robertskmiles
Absolutely. If the exam is trying to assess how you would do in an environment
where you are free to look things up (like the real world most of the time),
then that makes good sense. The point generalises to this:

Exams are an attempt to measure something about you. Cheating is an attempt to
make the result of the exam better than the reality of the thing the exam is
trying to measure. Morally this puts it in the same class as lying and other
deception.

So whether carrying information into the exam is cheating or not, depends on
the exam. If it's trying to measure what you can remember, it's cheating.
Otherwise, it may not be.

If this technology helps you to actually learn, then you aren't just
increasing the result of the exam, you're actually increasing the thing the
exam is trying to measure.

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mekoka
So if I understand well, they stumbled upon a method for brain boosting that
seems very promising and yet, could be very affordable and also very easily
made at home or from a DIY kit. They emphasize how good it would be for
humanity, how very bad side-effects their limited studies have shown, etc.
Enough to make anyone wonder why this isn't on the market yet.

Only now, they're questioning the ethics of letting people know about it, and
they do that... _by talking about it_?

I believe it would now be more dangerous and irresponsible to keep things
secret, the cat's out of the bag. People who read such an article with the
details provided, only have enough information to have an approximate
understanding of how this thing works, but it won't stop them from
experimenting. Already, I see instructions being posted on this very thread.

~~~
Udo
It's a reverse psychology marketing ploy. Those guys need funding and are
looking into commercial applications which this article is designed to invoke
interest for. I think those claims of performance increases when applied to
healthy brains can safely be assumed to be highly questionable.

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ChristianMarks
I've built one for ~ $30 in parts from Radio Shack using an LM317 current
limiter. There is an odd bootstrapping problem involved with tDCS devices: you
need to have the device connected to comprehend the instructions! Researchers
speak of anodal and cathodal stimulation, and the convention is that + is
anodal and - is cathodal. So far so good--at least this comports with vacuum
tube conventions, which will be familiar to all readers of Hacker News.
Researchers speak of anodal stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex. The tDCS device has to be connected (with the positive connection over
the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortext) to even begin to comprehend that
left means left from the perspective of the subject, but right from the
perspective of a viewer viewing the subject's face. The right negative contact
can go over the right eyebrow (but there are other protocols). This is one of
the clearest: <http://www.ncrrn.org/papers/symposium_tdcs/hamilton_tdcs.pdf>.

As you can see, there is an inviolable convention among researchers not to
unambiguously mark the anode + contact on the left dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex, and the cathode - contact over the subject's right eyebrow. Instead,
what we see on the third slide is a cartoon drawing of a subject in which two
contacts are labeled "active" and "reference". There is an arrow leading from
the active contact to the reference contact labeled "anodal" and another arrow
from the reference contact labeled "cathodal". This refers to an ancient
convention in electronics, in which current was assumed to flow from the anode
to the cathode, even though electrons flow from the cathode to the anode. The
literature is replete with such helpful diagrams. One would like a completely
unambiguous statement: the anode is the positive connection, and it is secured
to the left side of the subject's scalp; the cathode is the negative
connection, and it secured over the subject's right eyebrow. Or one of the
eight combinations possible by arbitrarily switching anode with cathode,
positive with negative, and left with right. But I have been unable to locate
a statement in the literature that would condescend to so direct and simple a
description.

Here is another article with a diagram showing node placement for tDCS.
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165017306...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165017306001068).
Note that the anode is placed over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
and the cathode is placed on the forehead. That beats the anodal and cathodal
arrows of the previous diagram. What we still don't have is the identification
of + with anodal and - with cathodal. And so one must continue searching
through the literature--which should be done in any case--until one comes to
something approximating a consensus on node placement and the meaning of
anodal and cathodal versus positive and negative.

Finally, here's a compilation from a less than unimpeachable source:
<http://www.drmueller-healthpsychology.com/tDCS.html>. The author misreads 1mA
as one microamp. That's one milliamp. But we do get a straightforward
statement about node placement from Fregni, F., Boggio, P., Nitsche, M., et
al. (2006). Letters to the Editor: Treatment of major depression with
transcranial direct current stimulation. Bipolar Disorders, 8:203-205. This is
confirmed in <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031874>, though you have to
know that anode means positive and cathode means negative.

I should say that in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I
managed to induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire
visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the
supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the
literature.

~~~
noxn
Would you consider explaining how to build one?

~~~
draggnar
a quick search brought me to this: <http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/> (don't do
it!)

~~~
aaronblohowiak
EEG is the opposite of TDCS. EEG listens for brain waves, tdcs runs a current
through your skull.

------
Tichy
Related, I have recently been thinking about Star Trek economics. I don't know
much about Star Trek, except that they don't use money. Yet there seem to be
differences in "wealth", at least in that some get to be commanders of huge
space vessels, whereas others are confined to low level jobs on said vessels.

Presumably there is the notion of "only ability counts", but what happens once
genetic engineering levels everybody's abilities? It seems to me from then on
the logical conclusion is that in a Star Trek universe mankind would become a
super organism spawning individuals according to need. The individual would
necessarily be transcended.

~~~
wavephorm
Star Trek was a meritocratic socialist economy with a World Government, of
which we really only see the military/starfleet aspect of everything. There
was a hierarchy of jobs based on performance, and there was never any mention
of genetic discrimination as far as I know.

~~~
dmoney
<http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Genetic_engineering>

_This would lead to the banning of genetic engineering on Earth by the
mid-22nd century, even research which could be used to cure critical
illnesses. This ban was implemented because of the general fear of creating
more tyrants such as Khan. It was also felt that parents would feel compelled
to have their children genetically engineered, especially if "enhanced"
individuals are allowed to compete in normal society._

 _..._

 _By the 24th century, the United Federation of Planets allowed limited use of
genetic engineering to correct existing genetically-related medical
conditions. Persons known to be genetically enhanced, however, were not
allowed to serve in Starfleet, and were especially banned from practicing
medicine._

------
axiom
Looking at the actual research it seems the improvements were typically on the
order of 10%. So this isn't going to turn Homer Simpson into Einstein.

I wonder how this compares over the long term to just working an extra 20
minutes per day, or even just drinking a cup of coffee.

~~~
Udo
At 10% it's also worth comparing to a placebo control group - I have the
suspicion that the results of such a study could annihilate the "improvement"
claim entirely if an independent study were to be conducted on this.

------
majmun
"The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to
fire. "

wouldn't this just make you do connections in your reasoning that you usually
wouldn't do (maybe for a good reason) (is this why this method is ethically
questionable?)

~~~
bpodgursky
The question I think is, is that "good reason" a reason that was relevant as
our brains were evolving millions of years ago, but is irrelevant now?

Our brains evolved in a way which maximized reproductive potential, and while
having strong cognitive abilities was clearly favored to an extent, there was
a constant tradeoff between larger brains and food/energy input. Now that we
don't have the same critical food shortages, we can set our own objective
functions. Ex, now most people would probably choose a brain with +50 iq
points which required an extra 1000 kcals a day, but a few tens of thousands
of years ago, those requirements would probably have been fatal...

------
Tichy
"The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost
brain function sounds too good to be true."

Like books, for example? Or computers (not that cheap, but widely available).

I am not holding my breath on that device... My usual line of thinking: if it
is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself?
(Another one where that applies is the super memory mice).

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so
herself?_

If nature is a woman (rather than a collection of stochastic processes), then
she is a strong argument against letting women into the same building as a
computer.

Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of
spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and
systems that evolved from a completely different purpose and didn't get the
full rewrite they needed.

The nature methodology makes waterfall look like a perfect process:

1) Make a random change.

2) If conversions go up, commit. Otherwise revert.

~~~
Flenser
_If nature is a woman (rather than a collection of stochastic processes), then
she is a strong argument against letting women into the same building as a
computer._

This along with the following paragraph come across as somewhat misogynistic.
I'm sure you didn't mean it to. Saying "person" instead of "women" would have
avoided that.

I liked your description of nature's methodology as a development process.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The meat of my post was a factual counterpoint to Tichy's, and it amused me to
make a stylistic counterpoint as well (namely mocking his Gaia-worshipping
tone, which anthropomorphizes a random process).

So yes, I did mean to make it sound somewhat mysogynistic.

------
jeggers5
Wish they showed something more statistical. As in, by how much did people's
memory skills really improve?

That whole article doesn't really even explain how it works either, just some
dabbling around "ethics" (really?). Just seems quite vague and unfocussed.

Really exciting prospect if it works though!

~~~
kiiski
I think an article named "The ethics of..." is meant to "dabble around ethics"
rather than explaining the technology. There must be other articles/papers
about that.

~~~
jeggers5
Yes, but because it's such a weird/new piece of technology, I think an
explanation of how well it actually works would be a good compliment to the
article, there's no point in talking about ethics if it doesn't actually work.

~~~
kiiski
How well it _currently_ works is irrelevant from ethics point of view. Ethics
are only concerned with how it could potentially be used. That's important to
think about, so that the researchers know what direction to go and how to
conduct their research so that it wont cause problems in the future.

------
api
"we need to control the release of the genie"

Has never, and will never be done.

Oh, and I will believe all the people who whine about the virtue of the
natural, un-augmented human, and about how unfair augmentation is, when they
start advocating that athletes compete naked.

------
ivankirigin
Any good link describing the research? Ethics considerations are irrelevant
for technology that isn't yet proven

~~~
HPBEggo
Agreed. Discussing ethics when no one even fully understands what the
technology is seems rather pointless.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The fallacy here is "no one understands what the technology is". The research
folks think they understand it enough to ask the question about the downsides.

I continue to scan research in this area because I know that at some point
there will be a recreational drug equivalent that runs off batteries. That is
going to destroy a lot of wealth in the underground drug business. That will
cause some violent changes in society.

As for TDCS I expect it to move along to the point where this may be like a
calculator, not "required" but an accelerator for people with ones.

------
walrus
If I'm understanding correctly, the device makes certain neuron pathways more
likely to fire. What happens if, for example, you enable this device every
time you enter a potentially frustrating situation? Would you become
frustrated more easily?

------
mrinterweb
This research sounds very similar to the research done by Dr. Bob Beck on his
"Brain Tuner" in 1983. Bob Beck had some other radical beliefs such as blood
electrification that he claimed could cure all sorts of maladies. I wonder how
much the transcranial direct current stimulation differs from Bob Beck's Brain
Tuner.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRx0Luz86Uc&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRx0Luz86Uc&feature=related)

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gtani
Interesting juxtapose.. if the #3 story about the 2011 Adderall /ritalin
shortage drops off the front page, read that too.

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ricksta
This can be built easily by connecting 9v battery, a potentiometer, and a
multimeter on current mode in series. The potentiometer basically controls the
current and the multimeter displays how much you are putting in yourself.

I'm curious on what the benefits of this is but also scared of the side
effects if there are any.

Anyone else tried this?

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hobin
I was kind of hoping this would be about accessing an external hard disk from
my brain. I can't count the number of times I wished I could've saved a few
seconds by not having to look everything up on the internet.

------
colonel_panic
I've heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation, but not direct current
stimulation. Can anyone give us a rundown of the difference in results?

------
glenra
Okay, but where can I buy one of these devices for under $100?

~~~
jeggers5
You can't, yet.

