
The Vagus Nerve: A Back Door for Brain Hacking - musgravepeter
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/the-vagus-nerve-a-back-door-for-brain-hacking/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=061115
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adventured
The vagus nerve is fascinating. After a fight with a girlfriend once, I ended
up tearing / straining my esophagus (we were yelling at each other). As far as
the vagus nerve was concerned, it felt like I was having a heart attack.

Over the next year, it continued to plague me. I randomly would feel like I
was about to have a heart attack, with all the symptoms including my arm going
numb, sharp pain in or across the chest, etc. Doctors were all mixed on what
it was (they were all certain it wasn't cardiovascular, but that didn't make
me feel any better, because it sure seemed like it was; and my father died in
his 50s of a heart attack). During that time I couldn't work out, or even go
for a jog without feeling like a heart attack was imminent.

I gradually narrowed it down myself, and fixed it myself. It was of course
esophageal spasms. Hot liquids, things with caffeine, and physical activity
would agitate or stimulate the esophagus and vagus nerve. After some
experimentation, I found that the damage wasn't healing, because routine
things continued to agitate it; what would otherwise be normal amounts of acid
were contributing to the problem. What ended up fixing it? Maximum strength
Pepcid AC; took about four months, of reducing the acid levels way down,
giving the esophagus time to heal. Since then, everything has been fine.

~~~
daeken
Holy shit, this sounds _exactly_ like me. In my case, I fell backwards out of
the shower, but all the same feelings/symptoms. Likewise, doctors are
convinced it's not cardiovascular, and MRIs have shown nothing in my cervical
spine (which is where I figured the problem would be). Taking Prilosec has had
a substantial effect, though things aren't perfect yet; this comment really
encourages me to keep taking it and hope for the best!

~~~
abakker
I had food poisoning. The vomiting caused damage, and I had many similar
symptoms. Some of them led to panic attacks. Needless to say, I had poor
results with Doctors, and ended up on a pretty strict diet for about 2 years
which helped reduce acid. Things are much better now, but I notice that the
symptoms are also linked to my mood. If I'm feeling down/sad, everything
flares up again.

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brandonb
You don't necessarily need a fancy device to stimulate the vagus nerve.
Patients with supraventricular tachycardias are taught to do vagal maneuvers,
the simplest of which is gagging: [http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-
fibrillation/tc/va...](http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/atrial-
fibrillation/tc/vagal-maneuvers-for-a-fast-heart-rate-topic-overview)

In general, imbalance within the autonomic nervous system (of which the vagus
nerve controls half—the parasympathetic portion) has been shown to be related
to everything from heart disease to irritable bowel syndrome to having an
irritable personality:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system)

~~~
easymovet
I tried it out with a signal generator (wav file) and an audio amplifier
cranked way up, it felt like AC and made some muscles twitch but nothing
compared to mechanical vagal maneuvers.

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ChuckMcM
Getting closer. At some point there will be a non-invasive nerve (or neuron)
stimulator system that will replace opioids as the drug of choice. When that
happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high" without any
of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and money
management firms. I expected us to be there by now with much of the deep brain
stimulation research, but I also tend to be optimistic in my estimation of
time to market for many technologies.

~~~
stephengillie
> When that happens it will profoundly affect our society as people "get high"
> without any of the ancillary ecosystem of manufacturers, distributors, and
> money management firms.

Why do you think these industries will evaporate? Who will make, distribute,
and manage the demand for these devices?

~~~
chatmasta
Google, Facebook, etc.

You think "addicted to Facebook" means something now? Just wait until they
literally have a direct line into your brain!

In all seriousness though, it's far more likely tech like this will emerge
from... You guessed it, the tech sector. Large nontech companies have
historically shown an unwillingness to innovate in tech, and if they get out
innovated by a tech company, it's impossible to catch up. Example - amazon vs
big retailers, amazon vs book sellers, etc. (I would be curious to hear
counter examples)

It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to
suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR.

~~~
paulojreis
> It's hard for a big company from a predominantly nontech environment to
> suddenly catch up to an agile tech company years ahead in R&D and HR.

In the same way it should be hard for the "agile tech" companies to play in a
highly regulated and, I would say, high responsibility market. F*cking up with
your users when they are watching cat videos isn't quite the same than doing
it when their health is at stake.

I don't think we (tech industry) are fast because we're "years ahead in R&D
and HR", nor because we're "agile". We are fast because we are reckless and we
completely overlook many, many factors (and many of them, scientifically
relevant and known). Look at how the Soylent guys claim their meals are
nutritionally complete. Were they able to do this because they were "agile"
and "years ahead" than other companies that already play in that field? No:
they are able to say (not "do") this because they're highly overlooking what
nutritionally complete means - mostly, overlooking the fact that we don't know
yet what exactly "nutritionally complete" means.

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cpncrunch
As far as I can tell, there haven't been any placebo-controlled trials yet.
All of the medical conditions listed have a very high placebo effect, and
using a novel device like this will amplify that placebo effect. Right now I
don't think we can even say whether or not this thing works at all.

Also, on a completely different subject, I find it interesting that the
incredibly simple javascript animation uses about 70% of my macbook pro's CPU
time (even after zapping the flash adverts at the top). Chrome really needs a
method to stop javascript execution in pages, especially now that javascript
is replacing flash for animations.

~~~
chestervonwinch
> Chrome really needs a method to stop javascript execution in pages,
> especially now that javascript is replacing flash for animations.

Just turn it off. You wouldn't believe how much quicker pages load.

It's such a pain in the butt when you're visiting a primarily text content
page, and it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43
analytics engines and social media libraries.

Just flip it on when you want it. There's plugins for fast switching and
allowing only for certain sites.

~~~
flavor8
> it jitters and freezes your browser initially while it loads its 43
> analytics engines and social media libraries.

Don't browse without ghostery.

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chatmasta
From what I've seen (not much), a large obstacle in the field of
brain/computer control seems to be signal interpretation. All our methods for
analyzing electrical signals must be non invasive, a requirement which greatly
increases noise. For example, to read EEG data from the brain we need to strap
a net of ~128 electrodes around the skull and use FFT techniques to analyze
128 wave segments. The electrical signal bounces around in the convex skull,
generating noise that pollutes the EEG signal. The fact is, it's hard to read
electrical signals without a direct connection -- there is only so much we can
do from outside the body.

(This is why consumer grade EEG devices can do little more than react in a
binary fashion to relaxed/excited emotional state. The signal difference
between relaxed/excited is easily detectable in aggregate, but more nuanced
signals are hidden amongst the noise of EEG waves bouncing around the skull.)

For this reason, any non invasive method of reading (or in this case,
apparently even controlling) electrical signals will advance the field of
neuroscience exponentially.

This obstacle of noisy data leads to a second obstacle: what is the signal?
Can we duplicate an arbitrary signal and send it through the nervous system on
demand? That's a hard question to answer, especially when we can barely listen
to the signal in the first place.

My question is, what role can machine learning play in this field? The problem
of identifying signal seems more of a computational one than a biological one.
How much data loss do EEG machines suffer from noise? Is all the data intact,
and we just need to figure a way to avoid the noise?

Has there been any research on feeding neural signals into ML algorithms, and
labeling them with results, e.g. "Moved finger," "blinked eyes," etc?

This field strikes me as one with a lot of untapped potential. With the coming
VR revolution, thought-based interaction seems a natural next step.

~~~
amelius
There is already a lot of research done in the area of decomposing signals.
For example, to make an ECG of a foetus' heart, where the heart signal of the
mother is noise that is to be canceled. The classical approach is to use
something that is called a Kalman filter.

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joeyo
Their (ElectroCore's) transcutaneous stimulation protocol is very cool. Being
able to lower the risk profile (eliminating invasive surgery) may mitigate
somewhat the fairly low efficacies that have been demonstrated for previous VN
stimulators. But I'd still be quite worried about unintentional
activation/blockade of non-target branches of the vagus nerve, affecting the
internal organs, and the heart in particular.

The article says that it's "just a matter of hitting a sweet spot of signal
strength", implying that they are trying to take advantage of the topographic
organization of the nerve's fascicles. My understanding, however, is that
achieving spatial selectivity has been hard enough with implantable cuff
electrodes. I'm not sure how they are going to achieve it with a (handheld?)
device.

Still, exciting times for electroceuticals!

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HillRat
A year or so ago I attended a talk by a professor whose research team is doing
a lot of fascinating work with vagus nerve stimulation, particularly in the
realm of physical rehabilitation after major trauma and ischemic events.
Murine models indicated stimulation could trigger bouts of neural plasticity
which, when coupled with physical rehabilitation, dramatically improved the
rats' recovery from induced ischemic trauma. Pretty amazing stuff, especially
when paired with some of the engineering work done on artificial limbs. There
are also potential psychiatric and learning applications -- IIRC, he
specifically singled out language acquisition as a research target -- but
those, I think, are not yet as well-attested.

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personjerry
These titles are getting kinda clickbait-y

~~~
cpncrunch
Clickbait for something that doesn't even have any evidence at all of its
effectiveness (see my other comment here).

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hobbidibble874
Or you can just use a dildo in your anus. Also reliable and cheap stimulator
of vagus.

~~~
visarga
Looked it up, it's true, guys.

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amelius
Here is one solution for tinnitus that uses such a device: [1]

[1]
[http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118](http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118)

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DonGateley
Sounds like using a club where a needle is appropriate.

