
Noninvasive Deep Brain Stimulation via Temporally Interfering Electric Fields - kensai
http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674%2817%2930584-6
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theprop
Great work!!! This could be amazing...if you can stimulate a reasonable number
of neurons without an implant, it's a game-changer!!

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outlace
This seems like a big step forward for TMS technology. Without this fancy
interference based method it was previously impossible to stimulate deep brain
regions without a significant focality tradeoff.

~~~
kensai
Just a reminder: it's electric, not magnetic. So I guess it revolutionizes
more the DCS (direct current stimulation) technology, more than the TMS
(transcranial magnetic stimulation). ;)

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outlace
whoops, thanks. In that case, I hope something analogous is possible with TMS

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namuol
Startup idea: fashionable hats that block EM waves.

Edit: Misread the abstract. Thought this involved _indirect_ EM radiation
(i.e. "contact-free" deep brain stimulation).

~~~
cr0sh
Better startup idea: Electronic recreational "drugs"

Actually - if you were able to figure out how to do this - it would be better
to develop it far as possible, in secret, then release the information
(schematics, code, etc) public domain under an alias - probably to one of the
wireheading communities, maybe to a newsgroup or something.

Because once it got out there, things might just come down hard on anyone
trying to monetize it.

As an aside, there is a researcher out there who claims (and has written
papers on it - which can be found if searched for) to have come up with a form
of "digital heroin", using ultrasonic stimulation of the brain. He claims it
worked so well, that students he worked with begged him to allow them to
continue to use the machines. I was able to find his archive of papers and
grab them all a while back. There was more than a bit of interesting stuff in
there. From what I recall, the ultrasonic stimulation system was a fairly
high-power system - to replicate it, one would likely need to repurpose (at a
minimum) a fish finder sonar (or other larger transducer and amp).

None of the papers (from what I recall) talk about this finding - at least
directly. But in various interviews with him, and reading "between the lines"
of the various papers, I found that there was just enough information
available to (at a minimum) begin to research and re-implement it. He became
kind of notorious and reclusive after this was brought up a few years back.
Last I looked into it, he was teaching at ASU, and had moved on from the brain
stimulation research.

I won't give out his name; I've given enough information that if one wanted
to, his information and such could all be found.

~~~
zkms
This reminds me of those blinky goggles that made you see a bunch of trippy
patterns (even though the blinkiness was completely diffuse!), here's the
instructions ([http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build-
gogg...](http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build-
goggles.html)) and here's a proper scientific paper about this phenomenon:
[http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002158)
.

The interesting thing is that the patterns that recur (known as "form
constants,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant)
) in these geometric visual hallucinations are pretty similar to those
obtained by taking hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD). As one might expect, these
"form constants" don't directly originate from the flickering light nor the
LSD molecule -- there's certainly no way to encode a description of those
swirling geometric patterns in a small molecule or in diffuse light -- the
information for those hallucinations has to reside in the brain _somehow_.
Fascinatingly enough, these trippy geometric hallucinations are generated by
the _exact same_ brain structures and mechanisms that the visual system uses
to process edges/contours, surfaces, and textures:
[http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf](http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf)
! Certain operational modes (that LSD or diffuse flickering light can help
create) in the edge/contour/surface/texture-detection machinery -- once
transformed to the visual field's coordinates -- look exactly like the form
constants. These geometric visual hallucinations -- the imagery fed to a
conscious mind whose visual system is temporarily malfunctioning -- have a
deep correspondence with the normal mechanisms of vision, in much the same way
that the "glitches" produced by feeding a H.264 decoder with a slightly
corrupt video file let you immediately appreciate the motion-compensating
machinery of the codec.

There is sublime beauty in seeing these "form constants" in images that look
like geometric visual hallucinations appear in _machine learning_ research.
The universal adversarial perturbations (which, when added to an image, are
said to cause misclassification) in page 6 of
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf)
were striking to see, as they strongly resemble the same beautiful swirly
colourful geometric visual hallucinations that humans experience when taking a
hallucinogenic drug (or staring at diffuse flickery lights with the
hallucination goggles).

~~~
eltoozero
Mitch Altman, Brain Machine, it's an OSH arduino gadget made from a repurposed
POV LED trinket. Bought mine in kit form at the first Maker Faire.

[http://makezine.com/projects/arduino-powered-brain-
machine/](http://makezine.com/projects/arduino-powered-brain-machine/)

