GoFlow: a DIY tDCS brain-boosting kit

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/121861-goflow-a-diy-tdcs-brain-boosting-kit

by ukdm • 14 years ago

124 88 14 years ago

achy• 14 years ago

Are the measured effects of tDCS really large enough to outweigh any effects from confirmation bias and statistical anomalies? Were the tests performed double-blind using placebo units?

steve-howard• 14 years ago

Gotta agree with the placebo question here. When I'm having a really excellent learning day, it scares me how fast I learn. When I'm not, a 9V battery to the head doesn't sound like the worst idea...

achanlon• 14 years ago

Agreed. I listened to an article recently about a study that purported to show that wearing a 'lab coat' increased performance. Similarly, I believe that the tDCS results could be explained by a form of mental 'priming'.

eagsalazar3• 14 years ago

Read the articles. Studies were done double blind. There is no placebo effect.

njs12345• 14 years ago

This study (paywalled) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811910... shows learning increasing with an increase in applied current, at least — 'This relationship between current strength and learning as measured by change in performance with training was well predicted by a linear model of current strength (r = 0.437, p = 0.0015). This suggests that there was a strong relationship between the amount of current administered during training and the amount of learning, within the range of current strengths tested here.'

gwern4• 14 years ago

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/2012-clark.pdf "TDCS guided using fMRI significantly accelerates learning to identify concealed objects"

scotch_drinker• 14 years ago

At the risk of appealing to authority, I have to assume that if DARPA is using it to train snipers, they know it works whether it's due to the tDCS or mental priming as mentioned below. Obviously, from a theoretical standpoint it's important to know why it's working but from a lifehacking/making better snipers/learning Perl/selling $99 tDCS kits standpoint, it doesn't matter how it works, only that it does.

wickedchicken• 14 years ago

> I have to assume that if DARPA is using it to train snipers, they know it works

This keeps getting thrown around but I'm having a hard time identifying a good source (other than a bunch of blogs repeating the same 'fact'). The best I can do is this set of slides which claim 'a 2.1x improvement' [1], but no confirmation that it's actually in use.

The brain is very poorly understood, and throwing random electrical fields across it "because I saw it on extremetech" is a terrible idea.

[1] http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2008intell/kruse.pdf

marshray• 14 years ago

Well DARPA is an applied research funding organization, not a sniper training organization. So their funding doesn't automatically mean it was successful.

Nevertheless, they probably wouldn't have funded it without some indication that it could be useful.

DanBC8• 14 years ago

DARPA (and other defence budgets) can fund all kinds of weird stuff.

Reasons range from "it works" through "it's a safe useful placebo" through "it might work" to "it doesn't work, but it'll confuse (and scare) the communists and divert them from our real research."

raarky• 14 years ago

Would be interesting to try this about 5 years after the first batch of users lead the charge.

If it has any effect then the side effects would be my first major concern.

mattais5• 14 years ago

The tech is over 40 years old actually. Tons of research out there if you've got some free time.

cheatercheater3• 14 years ago

Can you show some examples of implementation that are 40 years old?

ngonzal• 14 years ago

If you're a student do a search for tdcs in your libraries online catalog. There's tons of journal articles and studies about it! It's all pretty interesting stuff, just be prepared for lots of phd language..

thedangler• 14 years ago

I think this company does it too. But they have more products. http://www.b-alert.com/products/index.html

draggnar2• 14 years ago

that's eeg, it monitors brain waves. tdcs is supposed to stimulate.

cmwright• 14 years ago

This is a really interesting idea -- I wonder how many people will be willing to hook their brains into a $99 device.

tDCS has also been found to be effective in treating major despression (http://www.brainstimulation.columbia.edu/doc/journal_club/pa...)

DanBC8• 14 years ago

Your link does not say it's effective for treating major depression. Your link does say that it might be effective and deserves further investigation.

They had a tiny sample size of 40 people, split into 3 groups.

I agree that it'd be great if there was a lot more, and better, research into this.

To answer your question: I'd be happy to plug myself into a $99 device, so long as it was built competently.

DanBC8• 14 years ago

So, some electrodes (easily available for TENS machines, or you could go more high-tech); conductive gel; one 9v battery; one 4500 ohm resistor; (or probably two batteries and a current regulator).

Does anyone have a map of cathode / anode electrode positions?

draggnar2• 14 years ago

http://www.jove.com/video/2744/electrode-positioning-and-mon...

also there is reddit.com/r/tdcs for more info

pchivers• 14 years ago

I believe that tDCS is used with the same head placements as the 10-20 system used for EEG.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-20_system_(EEG)

arscan• 14 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like the time machine that kip ordered off the internet in napoleon dynamite.

bicknergseng• 14 years ago

Or one of those ab exercisers from a TV infomercial.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

> It’s not hard to see how tDCS could pose some ethical considerations, though.

Only if you're primed by your culture to blanch at transhumanism.

> What if some students can afford tDCS kits, but others can’t?

What if some students can afford college, computers, calculators, tutoring, study guides, etc. but others can't? This is one of the silliest purported ethical issues I've ever seen, but it consistently gets contemplating nods from those pretending to be wise, so long as we're talking about a new, scary technology, and not a mundane, accepted reality.

sp332• 14 years ago

Only if you're primed by your culture to blanch at transhumanism.

I think they meant the stigma of "cheating" or somehow getting something without working for it. I think you're right though.

hrabago• 14 years ago

That doesn't sound like what this is, though. Someone is just in an optimum state for learning, but still has to learn the subject.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

>What if some students can afford college, computers, calculators, tutoring, study guides, etc. but others can't?

Lots of people worry a great deal about these things as well, and would see tDCS as just another factor on that list, making the whole situation worse.

It doesn't sound exactly expensive though, so the point is kind of moot.

phaker3• 14 years ago

Lots of people worry a great deal about these things as well

But they don't advocate delegalizing them either.

godfreykfc• 14 years ago

What if this allows you to run faster. Should we allow this in Olympics? (I haven't made up my mind yet, but leaning towards a no.)

georgieporgie4• 14 years ago

Given that the Olympics is ostensibly rooted in long tradition, I would say no, enhancements should not be allowed.

I'm all for allowing drug use of any kind into professional sports. I think it's silly that we watch rather grotesque caricatures of humans swinging bats or tackling people, then pretend to be shocked and admonish them when we find out they're "cheating" by using chemicals. As if the health risks associated with steroids and HGH somehow outweigh the simple risks of broken bones and mutilated joints that are a direct consequence of pushing a body to its limits and beyond on a daily basis.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

The Olympics, while wonderful, are nothing more than entertainment, so the ethical considerations of "should we or should we not do X" are typically pretty much inconsequential. The ramifications of a runner setting a new record are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty much null.

The ramifications of the average human being able to learn more in less time are relatively gigantic. So gigantic, in fact, that I think they dwarf what small social-inequity considerations are raised (if it can really be done for a $90 kit right off the bat, then just wait until economies of scale kick in).

cheatercheater3• 14 years ago

They put sprinters in vats of water and ice cubes after running to freeze their muscle so that they perform better, and they put thermometers deep in their butts to check for the exact point until which they can be frozen before they get hypothermia. I think if that's allowed then zapping yourself with 9V is definitely in.

thwest• 14 years ago

Some are primed to blanch at transhumanism; Some are primed to accept a class-based social hierarchy as simply mundane and not an ethical issue.

Every new privilege granted to the top socioeconomic class is an appropriate opportunity to ask the question "why solve this problem instead of improving peoples' lives by tackling inequality?" The answer can be that one is simply working on what one is good at. However that answer doesn't mean the question is silly or appropriate to sideline.

lincolnq• 14 years ago

"tackling inequality" can be achieved in many ways. One of these ways could, counterintuitively, be creating an effective way to produce more elites. If your training program / intelligence amplification technology created another Norman Borlaug or Henry Ford or Bill Gates, you might have had a greater impact on the lower socioeconomic class than if you had managed to invent a new vaccine yourself.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

I don't understand how you can look at a $90 kit and call it "a new privilege granted to the top socioeconomic class". It's not a $400 smartness pill or a million dollar brain upgrade. It's a reusable $90 device that increases the benefits of hard work.

I'd certainly expect that to have an impact on social inequality, but not in the direction of increasing it.

Gormo• 14 years ago

What does the fact that some people may not be able to immediately afford the latest innovations have to do with accepting a "class-based social hierarchy", or recognizing any social hierarchy at all?

Who is 'granting' any 'privileges' to anyone - where do these kinds of notions even come from?

Reducing the particulars of actual people's real lives to instances of abstract categories is silly, inappropriate, and insulting; if you know someone who you think would benefit from this device, but who can't afford to buy one, then you can buy one for him yourself. If you know many such people, you can start a foundation to buy them for people, and contribute your own energies to developing even lower-cost open-spec implementations, a la Raspberry Pi.

There are plenty of actual solutions you can pursue when you address problems within the particulars of their own contexts. But those who instead prefer merely to dawdle with abstractions, propose preemptive universal-scope policies, and cast people's real circumstances into arbitrary taxonomies are themselves the one promoting some kind of "class-based social hierarchy".

gwern4• 14 years ago

And it also ignores that a lot of these interventions seem to have U-shaped curves: the smartest benefit least. Iodization shifted averages up by like 13 IQ points - and did little or nothing for the smartest people since they didn't have iodine deficiency almost by definition. Modafinil, ritalin, or nootropics - all have similar results. This even holds true with the elderly, where interventions almost always report strikingly larger results than in young people at the peak of their intelligence.

To the extent that class issues genuinely match up, these interventions ought to be greeted, especially as this tDCS is cheaper than I remember my programmable TI-84 calculator in high school being!

pdx• 14 years ago

As an EE, I was pretty sure I could disprove this, with a quick look at conductivities of bone vs muscle. My theory being that most of the electric current would travel through the scalp, and not pass through the skull to the brain.

I found this link, however, which is pretty interesting, that shows conductivities of various tissue types, if anybody is interested. It looks like the skull is not much of an electrical barrier.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0031-9155/54/16/002/pdf/0031-9155_...

DanBC8• 14 years ago

If the skull was an insulator it'd make EEG really hard. Not saying EEG is easy, but if you can record brain signals (which are very small) I'd think that dc could be having some effect.

From Wikipedia about EEG:

> A typical adult human EEG signal is about 10µV to 100 µV in amplitude when measured from the scalp and is about 10–20 mV when measured from subdural electrodes.

driverdan• 14 years ago

Did you read the scientific research on this topic? I don't know if this specific device works but tDCS has been shown to work in multiple studies.

Tenoke• 14 years ago

I would definitely buy it and use it.

dia803• 14 years ago

A cautionary tale. I'm getting a skin graft on Monday after I gave myself 1% full thickness burns with 3 x 9v batteries. I'm a paraplegic and I fell asleep with electrodes on my back so I'd didn't feel anything but awoke to some pretty nasty burns. I completely underestimated the risk of hurting myself.

finnw2• 14 years ago

Was that with or without a current regulator?

dia803• 14 years ago

Without. I think the current increased beyond what I measured while testing because I started to sweat. v0.02 will have some substantial design changes.

DanBC8• 14 years ago

May I ask about the set-up?

Where both electrodes on your back? Did you use some conductive gel gloop? Was this a dc or an ac signal? Why 3 batteries? Where they in series or parallel?

May I also ask what your device is used for?

Apologies for the interrogation!

(Good Luck with the grafts btw.)

dia803• 14 years ago

Gel-electrodes, 27v DC - clocked at 100ma when I tested it. 27v to get required field strength across the site of my injury, just a back of the envelope guess. Both electrodes on my back 1 above 1 below the site of my injury.

It's a long story but it seems a modest electric field can encourage axon regrowth in damaged spinal cords. Good evidence for this including a phase 1 human trial in 2005 but nothing since. Here is one of the first papers:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.902500204/abs...

My arduino controlled device:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/105950978003980827748/posts/hQY2...

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

All given learning examples are about muscle memory. I.e. maybe it works only good for the cerebellum but not so good for learning other things.

finnw2• 14 years ago

That would not explain the claimed effect on depression

eagsalazar3• 14 years ago

Awesome that someone is doing this however I have to say the parts involved are only worth about $10 so $99 is a bit nuts. Someone should just post the plans and the parts list with instructions and anyone can build one of these safely in a couple hours.

mattais5• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Once the device has been tested to our satisfaction, a full schematic and parts list will be published for the solder junkies out there. Free of charge.

The $99 kit is a solderless, and no tools necessary setup.

- Matt @flowstateengage

shabble• 14 years ago

I would assume (hope?) that you've tried it yourself? If/how did it work for you?

eagsalazar3• 14 years ago

That's awesome. Looking forward to seeing the result.

scotty792• 14 years ago

Here's the schematic for current limiter and description how to pick components for it. http://www.vidisonic.com/2008/07/10/current-limiting-circuit...

scotty792• 14 years ago

I started with bottom left schematic here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_limiting

and found resistor values by tinkering in simulator (I'm a noob) and I arrived at this:

http://www.falstad.com/circuit/#%24+1+5.0E-6+10.200277308269...

Now time to check how it works in the real world. ;-)

thinkdevcode• 14 years ago

I've been fascinated by all of the articles posted on here about tDCS, so I definitely signed up. I'm willing to pay $99 for a device that's probably worth $10 in parts, so long as its easy to use, easy to assemble, and works. Besides, if it works, I wouldn't mind starting my own business selling pre-built tDCS machines.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

I was about to order the kit for the heck of it, until I saw the "meme picture" on their order page.

I am not going to give my money in exchange for a product I'll trust with my health to a company that thinks "U LEARNED RUBY? Y TAKE SO LONG" is proper/fitting advertisement.

sdfjkl• 14 years ago

What are the side effects of this? Has anyone here actually tried it?

georgieporgie4• 14 years ago

On the subject of ethics, I've been looking into Modafinil (Provigil, etc) lately. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a drug which eliminates the cognitive effects of sleepiness. Its current approved use is for treatment of narcolepsy. The effects last for around eight hours, and the drug doesn't induce jitters or negatively impact decision making. Quoting off the top of my head, a military test showed sleep-deprived helicopter pilots operating within 17% of their well-rested accuracy after 36 hours of continuous duty. It can be used to stay awake for very long periods, but it's more interesting for its effects in normal waking periods. Not only does it prevent sleepiness, it increases focus and seems to have anti-depressant properties.

I'm pretty well convinced that over the next decade we'll see this and similar drugs proliferate among white collar jobs. Let's face it: our work is boring and the body is not well adapted to it. It's difficult to keep the mind engaged when the body thinks it's a good time to nap or chat with the tribe.

If you look back at photos of the space race, two things are likely to be prominent: coffee and cigarettes. The brilliant engineers who put men on the moon using slide rules also dosed themselves with stimulants in order to maintain focus. These days, cigarettes are on the wane, and something will need to replace and improve upon them.

A common criticism is, "what if everyone is on them?" Well, so what if they are? The automatic assumption is that we'll all be working 16 hour shifts, but I don't see any reason to expect that. If I can maintain focus and do a day's worth of highly productive work in four hours, why not expect the work day to drop to four or six hours (six giving a net benefit to the employer) over time?

HeyLaughingBoy2• 14 years ago

Based on the common programmer complaint of being on call/working very long hours, I think your conclusion is rather naive.

Everyone doing it will just result in it being the expected behavior to get more work out of 8+ hours on the job.

georgieporgie4• 14 years ago

Several issues:

1) How do we quantify the number of programmers subjected to these conditions? Squeaky wheels get noticed. Personally, I've had only a few stretches where I was expected to work more than around 40 hours per week. I've also had several stretches where I only worked less.

2) How do we compare what is still a very young field (computer programming) to other fields? How do we compare knowledge work with manufacturing? How many hours per week do you work compared to a textile manufacturing worker in the late 1800s? Did their productivity scale directly with hours? Does yours?

3) You simply don't have any reason other than pessimism to reach your conclusion.

dj_axl• 14 years ago

Beware, there is a 2 in 933 chance of developing a severe skin rash reaction, and the FDA has rejected modafinil for this reason. From Wikipedia:

"The FDA advisory committee voted 12 to 1 against approval, citing concerns about a number of reported cases of skin rash reactions in a trial that included 933 patients on modafinil, including two severe cases which appeared to be "definite" erythema multiforme or Stevens–Johnson syndrome. One of the two severe cases involved hospitalization."

georgieporgie4• 14 years ago

That was in a trial for ADHD treatment in adolescents. As a result, they don't advise the use of Modafinil in children. It is unclear to me whether the 933 studied were adolescents, and if so, whether or not a similar rate of rashes are seen in adults.

The Wikipedia page also says: "From the date of initial marketing, December 1998, to January 30, 2007, FDA received six cases of severe cutaneous adverse reactions associated with modafinil, including erythema multiforme (EM), Stevens–Johnson syndrome (SJS), toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), and drug rash with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS) involving adult and pediatric patients.

I have to admit, six cases in eight years doesn't strike fear into me.

djtriptych• 14 years ago

Another ethical wrinkle:

Given that we have good evidence that this technology is safe and remarkably effective, is it ethical to NOT deploy this technology on those government executives on whose decision-making and information-processing ability American lives depend?

DanBC8• 14 years ago

we don't yet have good evidence of neither safety nor efficacy.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

You should do some research before claiming that there isn't evidence for something. If you look at the wikipedia article on tDCS, you'll find a number of peer-reviewed citations regarding its safety and efficacy.

victork2• 14 years ago

My thought process:

See that it can be an interesting concept. Look at the article "mmm why not". Click on GoFlow.com link, see the meme in the front page. It's a bad one. Close page, will never come back.

barrybe• 14 years ago

GoFlow.com is a site about sailing, this site's at http://flowstateengaged.com/

idm• 14 years ago

OP went to the correct site; you posted the URL containing the same bad meme about Ruby.

mbijon• 14 years ago

Why isn't this a Kickstarter project yet?

Forget about sign-ups, this is well enough organized to attract pre-purchases (plus I want one sooner).

mattais5• 14 years ago

Thanks for the love. The kickstarter should be starting soon. Also a full schematic will be posted around the same time if anyone wants to order the parts themselves.

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

At the risk of being downvoted, after the reading all the comments here, disappointingly, it appears P.T. Barnum's often quoted remark (yes I'm aware he may not have said it, irrelevant) about suckers and being born every minute, is especially applicable to HNers. Maybe it's some kind of "too smart for their own good" kind of phenomenon (getting into this business of current regulators and all this jibber jabber); but, perhaps that is just self-serving.

adammichaelc• 14 years ago

AFAIK 70-80 human studies have been done on tDCS, most of them placebo-controlled.

Here's a review on the topic from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110413/full/472156a.html

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

So, the link you gave me is nice and it says this: "Overall, though, the optimism among tDCS's believers remains high." I'm sure it is but my point remains regardless of the votes. This research is very sparse and the benefits are not quite that clear and the possibility that these fairly unclear benefits could be the result of some kind of mental priming or other the should leave suspicion intact.

Given the kind of claims being made, don't we need more than this?

OK. Fine. Wonderous possibilities - transhumanism and all that.

This is hardly a "proven" scientific thing and the benefits are somewhat murky. What I'm seeing on HN, surprisingly, are people talking about buying some contraption that purports to make them smarter and the CONSENSUS seems to be that that is entirely reasonable. Disturbing.

More disturbing I'm seeing comments about people experimenting on themselves with crudely crafted contraptions and hurting themselves and others simply offering advice about voltage regulators and the like. This is clearly a "sucker born every minute" territory." I'm really surprised to see this on HN.

I get the impression that I could post about some kind of startup in which I am going to disrupt biotech by curing cancer with some kind of Wi-Fi therapy and probably what I would get as a response is hints on how to optimize the timing protocols, reduce latency, and so forth.

GoFlow: a DIY tDCS brain-boosting kit

Related Stories