The Vagus Nerve: A Back Door for Brain Hacking

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/the-vagus-nerve-a-back-door-for-brain-hacking/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=061115

by musgravepeter • 11 years ago

112 37 11 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

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.

meatysnapper• 11 years ago

That will kill the drug industry. Maybe we will have a freemium model? Or a 24k gold version for the rich Chinese?

dogecoinbase• 11 years ago

Larry Niven hypothesized this in 1969 after the brain stimulation experiments of the 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29#...

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

Didn't they recently find out that those experiments had accidentally targeted the wrong part of the rodent brain?

That rather than hitting the pleasure center it hit an area related to scavenging?

stephengillie• 11 years ago

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?

chatmasta2• 11 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

   > Why do you think these industries will evaporate?

The primary ingredient in a 'hit' will be energy, and there is already a very well established system for delivering energy to individuals in the economy. The devices themselves will essentially be consumer electronic type devices so that demand will be filled by various factories that produce gadgets. Just as heroin use doesn't really change the spoon or syringe markets as those markets are already so large that carrying along the heroin users doesn't really impact them in any meaningful way.

   > Who will make, distribute, and manage the demand 
   > for these devices?

Those folks will still be around, look at your typical smoke shop for a good corollary. But it is a smaller part of the drug industry than the production and distribution of the product.

jarboot• 11 years ago

Anyone familiar with the tabletop game 'Shadowrun' could compare this to BTL chips!

digi_owl2• 11 years ago

http://www.gizmag.com/thync-hands-on-2/37820/

newuser88273• 11 years ago

If you combine that with the pain stim version into one device and give me the remote, I'll have you barking like a dog whenever I lift my little finger.

The good news is that schools don't have to drug unruly boys anymore...

ourmandave• 11 years ago

There are four lights!

brandonb• 11 years ago

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...

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

easymovet• 11 years ago

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.

adventured2• 11 years ago

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.

zhoujianfu• 11 years ago

It sure is fascinating!

A few years ago I finally realized I had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_response and that was why starting in my mid-twenties I began fainting at the sight of (my own) blood!

malexw• 11 years ago

Hey, it's good to meet someone else who suffers from this. Funny that it only developed for you in your mid-twenties - I've had it all my life. Not from the sight of my own blood, but from reading medical texts (such as the page you linked) or from having human biology explained to me.

One thing that I think people don't understand is that it's completely uncontrollable. I can prevent myself from fainting about a well as a person with a broken leg can just "walk it off". It's very weird to see this effect from a part of the brain that I apparently have no control over.

Have you looked into treatment options at all? I have looked around a bit, but I haven't found any studies into treatment of any kind. I've been considering regularly donating blood in the hopes that regular exposure to that environment would reduce effect.

daeken• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

adventured2• 11 years ago

The famous Ohio State (formerly Florida) football coach, Urban Meyer, suffered through something like this:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=5240377

When I read about his condition, it helped point me in the direction that it might be esophageal spasms.

I remember it was like living in constant terror for the time it was an issue. Even if you try to tell yourself it's not heart related, that you aren't going to randomly suffer a heart attack, everything from the vagus nerve is telling you that it's your heart.

I saw immediate relief from taking the Pepcid max strength product, but initially the relief would only last for six hours, then I'd get chest pains again. So I had to take three or four per day at first. How often I had to take it, decreased by the month roughly.

I cut out all caffeine / stimulants of any sort. I avoided all hot liquids, and all sharp foods that could catch on my esophagus tissue (I was assuming it was getting constantly re-injured, or that potential new scar tissue was very sensitive). Caffeine was making it quite a bit worse. Accelerating my heart would trigger it a lot. I was also having intense problems while trying to sleep, I couldn't lay down at night normally, which again led me to think it was my heart (I felt better sleeping upright). The vagus nerve would get triggered in the middle of sleeping, and it'd cause a big jolt of pain across my chest and wake me up.

I'd suggest those things: no caffeine, no hot liquids, be careful about stimulating your heart (as it might act as an esophageal and vagus nerve trigger), something like pepcid or prilosec (take as much as you need to get it to stop while staying within reasonably safe limits of dose), limit sharp edged foods (really just avoid aggravating the esophagus). Maybe those things will help you heal too (if it's a similar root cause). The biggest thing in my opinion, is you have to figuring out a way to buy your body a window of time where there is little to no re-injury or high level agitation, so it can heal itself.

coldcode• 11 years ago

Reading stories like this confirms that what we don't know about the body might be more than we actually do know.

casion• 11 years ago

I'm dealing with something similar, and finding info on it is very difficult.

For years now, I've passed out very easily. I've been told it's autonomic failure, largely related to misfiring of the vagus nerve. I take medication for this and must wear compression stockings.

Recently I ended up with esophagitis and gastritis. I experienced those awful panic feelings that sometimes would turn into full blown-panic attacks. The chest pain, floating feeling, flashes of vertigo etc.. All related to vagal stimulation from GE phenomenon. Omeprazole helped significantly, as well as dicyclomine. Keeping a detailed food log and marking symptoms has helped me find problematic foods as well. All in all, it's been 6 months and improving, but it's absolutely miserable! Just knowing that you can be sitting there perfectly calm, then suddenly jolted into a panic attack is a daunting thing to deal with.

I don't have much to offer in the way of information, but it is good to know that there's other people out there suffering from the same/similar things.

joeyo• 11 years ago

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!

HillRat• 11 years ago

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.

personjerry• 11 years ago

These titles are getting kinda clickbait-y

cpncrunch2• 11 years ago

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

chatmasta2• 11 years ago

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.

amelius2• 11 years ago

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.

cpncrunch2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

It's becoming less and less an option. No javascript means blank page on a surprisingly large number of websites. Saddening.

flavor8• 11 years ago

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

Don't browse without ghostery.

hobbidibble874• 11 years ago

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

visarga• 11 years ago

Looked it up, it's true, guys.

DonGateley• 11 years ago

Sounds like using a club where a needle is appropriate.

amelius2• 11 years ago

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

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

The Vagus Nerve: A Back Door for Brain Hacking

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