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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Seems neat. Is anyone here experimenting with such things on themselves? I'd love to switch my brain from depression to functional.

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Not sure if ultrasound stimulation of the human brain is really in the realm of hobbyists, but there is a DIY transcranial direct current stimulation scene (DIYTDCSS): https://old.reddit.com/r/tDCS/

Wow, that explains a lot. One trip I went on there was a older man, bald but otherwise extremely clean cut, the sort to wear slacks, loafers, and a dress shirt tucked in - casually, and quite healthy looking. He almost had a sort of super villain type appearance, somehow.

Anyhow, he had a fairly large briefcase type device he carried everywhere with him and was trying to convince everybody to come try his 'electric brain stimulation.' Surprisingly, nobody seemed too interested in going into a hotel room with a stranger to get their brains plugged into the wall. He seemed to have zapped away all inhibitions, and common sense. Sure made for an interesting character though!

The wetware devices (like the hobby EEGs) of the early internet made it a point to never be plugged in to mains..

There's a bit of a correlation causation issue with understanding these studies of one. It seems quite possible that they zap away inhibitions, but equally likely that one has reduced inhibitions if one is inclined to solder things together and push them against one's skull to see what happens.

This was a crazy discovery for me. The main two consumer groups of brain-tech users are a) new-age psuedoscience spas like the Berkeley Brain Spa that buy old equipment and show you pretty graphs, and b) terminally online people melting their brains for vague IQ benefits

not remotely medical advice; talk to your psych if it's suitable for you, but TMS is similar and FDA approved for depression, if you're able to access that. TDCS is more accessible if you're wanting to try something out at home.

Yes, but I think the near future is sensing: the risks are too great and the laws too complex to treat modulation seriously this decade, IMO. Sensing, on the other hand, is suddenly possible. Once the army of devs that implemented a billion GPT+PDF clones get wind that mind reading is now possible, it’s going to be a tech frenzy like we’ve never seen. IMO

Have a look at the work from https://www.houstonmethodist.org/faculty/santosh-helekar/

Here's some papers; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Santosh-Helekar

And if fields are your thing, here's one being used to control aging (In Hydra..); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APcjc_J2jjQ&t=1499s

1. You increase plasticity in your brain

2. You learn harder that there's no hope for the future

3. ???

Depression is (usually) a erogenous state of thought, not a chemical issue, and I don't see how increased plasticity could help in this case.

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