Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328501.600-zap-your-brain-into-the-zone-fast-track-to-pure-focus.html

by fuzzix • 14 years ago

233 57 14 years ago

kghose2• 14 years ago

I'm really trying to get a grip on trans-cranial electric stimulation. The specificity of effects claimed from from such a general manipulation (enhanced learning, better mathematical skills) is a little unbelievable.

Statements like "warns me that if I remove an electrode and break the connection, the voltage passing through my brain will blind me for a good few seconds." which may be a misreporting, don't help to bolster credibility. It may indeed blind you due to some neurophysiological effect, but breaking the connection of a direct current circuit will simply stop the current (unless there is a huge inductor in the circuit somewhere, in which case there will be a spark to your scalp as the SAME current tries to keep flowing).

fuzzix• 14 years ago

"Statements like "warns me that if I remove an electrode and break the connection, the voltage passing through my brain will blind me for a good few seconds." which may be a misreporting"

Could be, could be what the fella actually said - if someone did say that to me I'd be less inclined to allow them apply electrodes to me... and that's the professional.

The amateurs (as linked from the article) are burning themselves...

From http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=7943

"it actually burnt though the skin and left bruise marks. i hope it's gonna go after few days coz i look really silly"

Yeah, I think I'll give it a miss, thanks.

draggnar2• 14 years ago

seems like they used copper coins and no resistor, not surprised that they would burn themselves.

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

You can experience phosphenes if the electrodes are too low and if you break the current. This has happened to me.

chc• 14 years ago

It's not really that general a manipulation. From what I've read, the configuration of the electrodes is very specific. It's not like you can just stick a wire to your head and get smart — the amount of current and the path it takes is crucial. And that sounds much more believable, doesn't it?

itmag2• 14 years ago

Someone, please make some kits for this and sell online. :)

tpatke• 14 years ago

Before I strap electrodes to my skull, I am going to need more convincing than "An article online said...". I am surprised at how many smart people are willing to try this despite the lack of evidence / research.

If I wanted to increase my productivity, I would start by not surfing hackernews. Eventually, I might move on to "home made electric chair I bought off ebay", but I think I will exhaust other possibilities first.

But, hey, that's me. :-)

kstenerud• 14 years ago

There's a fair bit of research on this subject. For example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811910...

mike_esspe• 14 years ago

http://soterixmedical.com/tdcs.php

Tichy2• 14 years ago

"He sticks the anode - the positive pole of the battery - to my temple, and the cathode to my left arm"

Does this even make sense physically? I mean, wouldn't the skull work a bit like a Faraday cage, not allowing any currents into the brain?

I am highly sceptic of this new hype.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

I have no idea about the placements on the temple and left arm, but left-temple / right-temple placements are basically how electroconvulsive ("electroshock") therapy works (in that case, the current is used to generate seizures).

I'm not a doctor, but as far as I understand, the human body is highly conductive -- and there are a number of "wires" and conductive fluids running into and out of the brain. The entire nervous system is, in a very rough sense, electrochemical circuitry.

adient• 14 years ago

Modern ECT would be performed on only the right side of your brain, with one electrode on the temple and one slightly offcenter at the top of your head.

kghose2• 14 years ago

You may be imagining dead bone, like that in displayed skeletons. Bone, in our bodies, is alive. It has blood vessels, it regenerates and can have innervation. Such bone has conduction channels.

But it is true. I don't know what the current paths are - but to activate neurons very tiny current densities are needed, so probably even though the bulk of the current flows along the skin, the little that leaks into the brain is probably what is cause whatever effects are seen.

blrgeek• 14 years ago

Faraday's cage needs to be made of highly conductive material, like sheet metal, or metal wire.

Bone is quite resistive, and would be quite transparent to electricity.

Second, blood (salts/water) makes for a nice conductor.

Tichy2• 14 years ago

Yeah I thought that maybe the bone of the skull insulates, but it is covered in blood vessels that form the cage.

MaysonL• 14 years ago

Given that EEGs record currents from the brain, I see no reason that similarly (even differently) place electrodes would cause current flow to the brain.

demallien• 14 years ago

I missed the party, but I thought you might find the following useful.

A Faraday cage is impervious to electromagnetic waves. It is not impervious to an electrical current. Or rather, if you apply two electrodes with a voltage difference on the Faraday cage, you will get a current flowing between the two electrodes (for a perfect Faraday cage, with a resistance of zero, and a perfect voltage supply, the current would be infinite!). Someone inside the Faraday cage equipped with a multimeter would be able to see this current, which in a real-world Faraday cage will flow along the shortest path between the two electrodes.

If you vary that current over time, you will induce electromagnetic waves on the inside of the Faraday cage - indeed you have just turned your Faraday cage into an antenna. This is pretty much what was being done in the New Scientist article...

udp• 14 years ago

And there was me expecting one of those motivational self-help articles. Christ, things are getting strange.

gwern3• 14 years ago

Indeed. Let's hope it's not just strange, or our lives will resemble the Borges line:

> "He died in exile: as with all men, it was his lot to live in bad times."

itmag2• 14 years ago

I wonder if the part about removing critical thoughts and going into flow would be good for people with poor social skills? Perhaps it would be a way to "get into state", as it's known in the PUA world.

barefoot• 14 years ago

I wonder how much of the documented improvement is placebo effect?

Even if it didn't directly improve focus it seems like it would be a great placebo. Nine volt batteries are probably commonly perceived as being powerful. They are used in stun guns, for example. You also experience unusual side effects after it's applied, further removing any doubt that something unique is happening to you.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

They talk about the value of just focusing on something in the article. I know I'd be focusing on the battery taped to my head...

gwern3• 14 years ago

> I wonder how much of the documented improvement is placebo effect?

I'm sure they controlled for that, as it is stupendously obvious and common to control for, and easy to do - just don't turn on the battery, or measure the effects of the current direction reversed (damages performance according to the other article).

Coax• 14 years ago

Link to full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328501.600-zap-your-...

LarryMade• 14 years ago

Reading around one paper's abstract on testing the after effects of prolonged tDCS, suggest there might be a migraine risk, I dunno, I never have much headaches, so it could be a risk I would not want to take.

bdg• 14 years ago

I read a neat book that partially covered this topic, called "Click" : http://books.google.ca/books?id=RK3OHBGj2SkC&printsec=fr...

The book talks about how interactions between people/things/events work. The author talks about how we can feel more connected based on vulnerability, proximity, flow, similarity, and environment.

The part on flow discussed how a champion racecar driver gets "in the zone" or "flow". As someone who's done programming competitions in the past (in a room where others are writing code against you) I could absolutely relate, time outside just washes out of sight, the curly braces become an extension of you, it's a down-right magical feeling.

There's another concept I feel is related to this, and I don't want to jump the shark here but, if you think about how we reach mastery of things we know (or, in other words, you can read sheet music, but can't play the guitar like a pro because every few notes you make a small pause and think about the next few notes), we're focusing on our impulses, or rather, eliminating them. This TED video does a much more fun/elegant explanation of impulses: http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...

I find it interesting that when I'm personally in a state of "flow", I'm working without any "impulses". To me it appears like the two are related: you need to be able to work without impulses in any given skill before you can enter flow (otherwise, you break out of flow). Now, this isn't enough, and I feel this is where we get back into the "connections" or "relationships" discussed in Click. To me it appears we as programmers have a better predisposition simply because the computer can create for us a synthetic reality free of normal distractions, we can tweak our proximity to a machine should we need to (mod your PC case and feel proud, love your mac book, set up your desktop just the way you like it), we know how vulnerable it can be to different things (viruses, long running programs, leaky memory), we experience it enough that it's very familiar and similar to things we've experienced before (try switching editors or color themes for a day, you'll understand how your similarity impacts your ability to get into flow), we can control almost all of the environment. In this synthetic universe we are better predisposed to making all the mental connections we need to feel like we're using an extension of ourselves rather than a machine.

This goes back to what we've long known: programmers need to know their stuff in and out, and need to work in an environment they have control over.

georgieporgie• 14 years ago

The excellent motorcycle magazine MCN (American one, not the low-quality British one) had a series of articles by a psychologist on flow and how to attain it. According to the series, attaining flow boils down to:

1) Familiarity. You must be doing something at which you are competent.

2) Stress. You must have a moderate challenge. Imagine Notch building his nth dungeon game, and this time he's trying to do it in ten minutes less than his previous best time.

3) No distress. Distress comes from too great a challenge, such that it pulls you out of your flow state (what you call impulses, I believe). Imagine making Notch do his development in C# on .Net, since he's a Java guru (he may well be a .Net guru, too, but let's assume he's a noob for the sake of this example).

Another example of something which causes distress and an inability to reach a flow state would be tackling an integration using a new API which has a non-intuitive interface and lousy documentation.

To build on your example of changing editors or color schemes, I think this explains why we developers are so sensitive about working on other people's code base. It's not simply that it's ugly, or not architected correctly, but that every tiny, unfamiliar element compounds the inability to attain flow. We chastise one another for being self-centered and dismissing others' work as incompetent without objective reason, but within our own brains there's a very real reason. I suppose it is self-centered by definition, though. :-)

api• 14 years ago

I find it frustrating and depressing: this stuff just never seems to get operationalized in a way that's accessible to folks outside university labs.

Where are the startups? Where are the hobbyist groups?

Sthorpe3• 14 years ago

I was just thinking how awesome it would be to have a graph of my brain waves so I could tune them to alpha waves while coding. :)

Sthorpe3• 14 years ago

Holy crap,...just bought this.

http://www.plxwave.com/

bri3d• 14 years ago

http://brmlab.cz/project/brain_hacking/tdcs

blhack• 14 years ago

>Where are the hobbyist groups

In Mesa, AZ: https://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=bHB1ZXIyNXBpaHFpM2...

Our hackerspace, Heatsync Labs, does "Augmenting Humanity" on Monday nights. I believe one of the guys there is building a TMS device right now.

Also this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW7dQ92yDU

nostromo• 14 years ago

Someone pointed me to this on another thread: http://soterixmedical.com/tdcs.php

And this video on how to use it: http://www.jove.com/video/2744/electrode-positioning-and-mon...

aantix• 14 years ago

I'm a willing guinea pig and would love to explore this topic more. Maybe we should start a meetup group in San Francisco? Anyone else interested?

jim.jones1@gmail.com http://www.github.com/aantix

techiferous• 14 years ago

> Where are the startups?

This type of device may need FDA approval which would require the setup of clinical trials, etc. So that would be a significant barrier to entry for startups.

draggnar2• 14 years ago

there is a subreddit r/tdcs

gtani• 14 years ago

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

the above talks about TDCS, but also meditation, bright lights, playing music. Good read

plf• 14 years ago

I know it's probably harmless, but this is one of those things that I rather wait before trying it out. You never know, there could be very small hidden side effects. The brain is so complex and poorly understood that I rather not mess with it in this way.

Examples: maybe this will make you likelier to have a brain seizure when you are just 60 years old, maybe after prolonged use one region of your brain is more active making you behave differently (could be positive or negative), maybe it will make you more susceptible to Parkinson, Alzheimer, etc...

That being said, if everyone was as coward as I am, we would have missed on lots of inventions.

pixelmonkey• 14 years ago

Applying electrical current DIRECTLY to the brain: what could possibly go wrong?

aorshan• 14 years ago

We're getting closer and closer to The Matrix. Before you know it, you're going to be able to upload knowledge straight to your brain.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

Did anyone else think of Larry Niven's "wireheads" when reading this and other recent articles about it?

narrator• 14 years ago

Actually, it makes me think of Bruce Sterling's wireheads.

bni• 14 years ago

It made me think of Focus, as depicted in "A deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge.

sp332• 14 years ago

I thought of "Tek" from William Shatner's (really Ron Goulart's) TekWar.

gwern3• 14 years ago

Wireheads are quite different, and also scarily practical (read, for example, http://www.wireheading.com/ ).

TheSOB88• 14 years ago

Shouldn't it be that getting into the zone and becoming an expert are two different things? I've definitely been able to get into the zone as a programmer, have been for a long time, but I'm far cry from anywhere near expert level. So why do they couple those in the article?

>Yet you don't have to be a pro to experience it - some people report the same ability to focus at a far earlier stage in their training, suggesting they are more naturally predisposed to the flow state than others.

Or maybe flow is what happens when your brain is concentrating, regardless of your knowledge/experience level.

TheCapn• 14 years ago

I agree with you. I can achieve flow while programming sometimes that when I look back wonder how I managed to accomplish certain things in the time I had. Often the code has to be reworked to hash out bugs or inconsistancies but that doesn't mean the state of mind didn't exist.

A more accurate way to display it is -- bare with me -- watching replays in Starcraft 2. I've played the original for years and the sequal since its beta release and I am fairly aware of my limitations, but just once in a while I am able to lock in and accomplish much more intense output than what I'm typically capable of (replays back this up too). I'm not a pro, I still have much to learn but it doesn't mean I can't "lock in".

startupfounder• 14 years ago

I just read this article in what felt like 5 seconds, then I looked up at the clock and 5 minutes had gone by. I looked at my girlfriend and said, "How many of the words did I just read?" and she said, "All of them".

ndefinite• 14 years ago

Love it!

bitsoda• 14 years ago

Around 6th grade I decided to take up roller hockey, but was pretty bummed out when I tried to learn how to move around in rollerskates. I couldn't make much progress for the life of me, until one day, I stumbled across the solid advice of learning to skate _with_ a hockey stick while chasing a tennis ball. I was skating as fluid as a twelve year old could within one week. I had always attributed the accelerated learning to that tennis ball and the subsequent "desire" to chase after it out of necessity, but now I see that focusing on the tennis ball was helpful because it muted my prefrontal cortex activity. Neato.

Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus

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