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chasing

I feel like the actual medical community is almost certainly working on technology like this that will actually be:

1) Useful.

2) Safe.

That'll be cool. As for what this guy's actually contributing... Not really sure.

(Other projects on their site also kind of sound like bullshit. For example:

"The idea is to stimulate your brain with direct current (in the case of tDCS) or with square waves of current (in the case of CES) which can either raise or lower the potential energy of the stimulated neurons, depending on the orientation of electrodes. This allows them to fire more or less easily, and activates or deactivates a given region, thus engaging certain brain states." -http://www.grindhousewetware.com/thinkingcap.html

Sounds like either pseudo-science or wishful thinking to me.)

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The medical community is working on systems that are far superior to this one, and they are brilliant. Some are already on the market:

* Pacemakers / Artificial hearts (Heart diseases)

* Cochlear implants / Bone anchored hearing aids (Deafness)

* Insulin pumps (Diabetes)

* Deep brain stimulators (Parkinson's)

* Wireless gastrointestinal probes (GI disease/cancer)

They don't sound sexy, but these devices are now wireless sensor nodes with years of battery life. There are some next generation devices that are making their way onto the market as well, such as the Proteus Digital sensor[1] which was approved by the FDA last year.

I'm excited about progress in implantable technologies and also understand why their progress is seems slow--it takes a lot of work to ensure these devices are safe. That safety also necessitates a level of closedness for now: devices are only validated under carefully controlled conditions.

Efforts like this one, however, are incredibly unsafe. They endanger individuals while also making the DIY community look stupid.

[1] http://www.proteus.com/proteus-digital-health-announces-fda-...

Those are all cool, if you're sick or disabled in some way. What about for those of us who are healthy as a horse and want to supersede the natural state? What if I want to be able to sense EM fields, or put a sensor in me to monitor my sleep to avoid the hassle of a headband and a now-super-expensive Zeo, or put a bluetooth transmitter in me to ease data management between internal and external devices, or put a GPS sensor in me, or put a gyro&accelerometer in me that lets me do gestures independent of a wiimote or kinect, how about RFID in my hands and forehead?

Of course those things aren't the coolest imaginable, but some things I can imagine would be really quite hard with the limitations of flesh. I'm currently content to be hopeful for mind uploading, then using artificial/robotic/simulacratic bodies of various sizes with lots of neat features for the times a version of me wishes to explore meatspace...

Nothing pseudo-science about tDCS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_sti...

Interesting. Also: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/specialty_areas/br...

At any rate, if these were researchers at Johns Hopkins, that'd be one thing. But I won't believe that this product does what they claim unless they do actual studies with it and post them on their site. But. I suspect they won't. Because I suspect they're using the Soylent scientific process: "We tried it on ourselves and it seems to work! And didn't kill us!"

tDCS devices are simple like that, just DC current in your brain. There has been a lot of discussion about them on HN: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=tdcs&start=0

If not pseudo science, then still more a wishful thinking and placebo than a proved method:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23084964

That seems to be an article about using transcranial stimulation to treat major depression, but you're replying to something that didn't even mention major depression. Which specifically are you calling pseudoscience: using transcranial stimulation to treat major depression, or is the very belief that current can be routed through the skull the piece of pseudoscience here? Thanks.

What I said was "still more a wishful thinking and placebo than a proved method" and cited "a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, double-blind and sham-controlled trials" which concludes "The clinical utility of tDCS as a treatment for MD remains unclear when clinically relevant outcomes such as response and remission rates are considered."

That means that I don't doubt that you can let the DC flow through your brain but that I believe that even 200 years after the first of such experiments it's still more wishful thinking and placebo than factually "double-blind and sham-controlled" proved that such treatments have some positive lasting effects. On another side, I wouldn't be surprised that some kind of short-term effects can be observed (although I must admit I'm unfamiliar with such, what I know is that yesterday I saw the article writing about the benefits of such treatments in the kind of magazine which also writes about chemtrails(!)). Can you please tell me which controlled studies you consider important?

I've seen studies where applying a DC voltage to your brain significantly increases its performance with no (known) side-effects. Here's the first link I found, if you're curious: http://gizmodo.com/5882754/how-to-electrify-your-brain-to-be...

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