
How brain activity changes based on various activities - critiq
https://medium.com/@dileepbapat/cost-of-cellphone-notification-e1ca4c4495b0#.plzhwc9lh
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asifjamil
Hate to rain on this person's parade, but his findings are mostly meaningless.
You cannot simply infer neurological activity from a single electrode. Besides
the need for a proper ground/reference, you also need electrodes placed in the
correct anatomical locations to derive any meaningful insights into attention
networks.

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critiq
Yes I do understand it like measuring temperature at one point on mac and
trying to predict what application its running. However thats not what I
wanted (though I dont know what I wanted), I was curious how activity changes
and If am not wrong these activity comes at cost both energy and capacity to
think / focus. Who knows if you can wear fitbit for mind tomorrow :)

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nonbel
Unless something has happened to drastically alter EEG analysis since last I
checked, this is meaningless with one electrode. You need at least one other
specifically to measure eye/muscle movement, etc.

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nabla9
I think the author means single channel and not single electrode. At least the
picture suggests that there are three electrodes (one to the skull two white
ear clips for ground/reference). For bipolar electrodes you need three:
channel, ground and reference. For unipolar electrodes, just two.

You can remove artifacts like eye and muscle movements with prepossessing, not
as well as with electrodes, but still.

I'm more worried about electrode connections and electrode quality in these
amateur EEG applications. You also want high quality active electrodes if you
take EEG outside laboratory. I'm also skeptical about these dry skin
electrodes (no alcohol scrubbing and conductive paste). NeuroSky devices are
surprisingly cheap. I would be very interested to know how well they work in
practice.

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nonbel
Thanks. It said one electrode and after glancing at the picture I thought the
ear clips were headphones for some reason.

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daok
People are way too negative. This guy is trying something and showing what he
did. Not every discover came from proper scientific laboratory or with a
standard procedure. Instead of hating what he is doing, I would encourage him
to go further. In my opinion, I prefer those kind of research than nothing at
all and found interesting his conclusion. Keep trying and improve and some day
it will be probably something.

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jimmaswell
If the research is bad, how is it "too negative" to point it out? Should we
pretend it's good in order to be "less negative"?

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nonbel
This is common. Journals will even refuse to publish things for being "too
negative":

“In October 2006, Potti and Nevins described in Nature Medicine how examining
the sensitivity of cell lines to particular drugs could predict patients’
responses to cancer therapies for a range of cancers. [...] We had
difficulties pretty early on,” Baggerly says. He and Coombes say they found
errors in the 2006 paper, including genes that didn’t seem to belong on the
list and tumor samples that were incorrectly labeled. [...] But Potti and
Nevins continued to publish papers using the same method. This troubled
Baggerly. He became obsessed with determining why the Duke team could make
their prediction models work when he and Coombes could not.In subsequent
papers by the Duke group, Baggerly says he found new errors and contacted both
Lancet Oncology and the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), where they had
appeared. Both declined to publish Baggerly’s letters [...] Baggerly then
learned that Duke was running three clinical trials using the Potti- Nevins
approach to assign patients to treatment. He took a new tack: publishing a
paper of his own. He and Coombes shared their critique of several papers
published by Potti and Nevins with a “prominent” biological journal, he says,
whose editors suggested that the paper was too negative. "
[http://www.sciencemag.org.edu/content/329/5992/614](http://www.sciencemag.org.edu/content/329/5992/614)

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critiq
Thanks for both comments, as I mentioned in other comment I am curious if it
can be fitbit for mind tomorrow :)

