There are ways to misuse this general kind of technology. You are seeing it as a cheap doodad that will stimulate a brain area that, when stimulated, improves learning. That's a good thing.
But consider that as research continues, they will probably find that other effects can be achieved by stimulating other brain areas in other ways. Perhaps they will find an area that enhances reading comprehension, or musical ability, or objectivity.
So imagine we reach a state where we have general purpose brain stimulators in most schools, that can be programmed to stimulate the appropriate part of the brain in the appropriate way for a given lesson.
Great, right?
Now consider this. One researcher has already reported that he can induce by brain stimulation a mystical or religious state, where subjects often report feeling they are in the presence of God. If the school stimulators could be programmed for this kind of stimulation, they could turn into a powerful tool for religious indoctrination.
I would not at all be surprised, if the religious inducement turns out to be true (I believe it has not been replicated yet) that they will find other deep emotional things can be induced, such as feeling of national pride and patriotism. I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the potential abuse of that if every public school has a programmable brain stimulator.
This is why we don't throw ethics out the door--we need a way to make the good aspects of this available (boosting memory and math) WITHOUT just blindly getting the bad parts.
The ethical question comes up because these won't be free. There's already a large and widening gap between those who have and those who don't. Particularly in America, who your parents are have a very large impact on your potential as an individual -- access to schools, materials, etc.
With a widening gap, would such a device further increase the gap between those who go on to be the "have's" vs. the "have nots"? Would this introduce a more substantial barrier to entry for the upper class? What if the device cost $1000? What if it cost $1000/month?
What would happen to society if 50% or more of society was structurally unable to move up in the class system? There is unrest today (occupy protests) and the common perception is that it isn't even a big problem in the US yet. How bad would it get if people actually thought it was as bad as it is? And then what if it got worse?
The ethical problem in my mind is that by taking brain boosting meds you are taking a health risk.
So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens.
To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier.
If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?
These are more similar than you have presented. Athletes compete for contracts at the highest levels. If some athletes use performance enhancing drugs, they will have an edge and pressure will be put on those who do not want to use performance enhancing drugs, for any number of reasons.
On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons.
Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.
well, it's a slippery dialog. I think most people don't really care that much about pro athletes taking EPO, but the crackdowns started when it filtered down to widespread use in high school athletes of HGH and designer steroids. At one point the argument that spending $1,000s of dollars to test one athlete at the Olympic games was a waste of money.
But, well, when i read this, I must say, i have people close to me who would have access to this technology and understand the risks, and I thought, hmm.
This is a classic arms race. Like states giving tax breaks to invent corporations to move. Just like baseball we are probably all better off with some rules.
I found that section on 'cheating' completely bizarre. The reason something like a cheat-sheet counts as cheating is not that it's easier, it's that you haven't really learned it. The moral issue comes from the idea that the exam is meant to give an idea of how well you know something, and if you cheat you can get a good result without really knowing the subject matter.
If you are actually learning, and the effect is not temporary, then it's obviously not cheating, no matter how easy it is.
All the classes I took at MIT let students bring a "cheat sheet" to exams. Additionally, many exams were completely open-book. I know that this is neither here nor there, but I felt compelled to comment on the notion that if you haven't memorized something, that you haven't learned it. This idea is all too prevalent.
So if I understand well, they stumbled upon a method for brain boosting that seems very promising and yet, could be very affordable and also very easily made at home or from a DIY kit. They emphasize how good it would be for humanity, how very bad side-effects their limited studies have shown, etc. Enough to make anyone wonder why this isn't on the market yet.
Only now, they're questioning the ethics of letting people know about it, and they do that... by talking about it?
I believe it would now be more dangerous and irresponsible to keep things secret, the cat's out of the bag. People who read such an article with the details provided, only have enough information to have an approximate understanding of how this thing works, but it won't stop them from experimenting. Already, I see instructions being posted on this very thread.
It's a reverse psychology marketing ploy. Those guys need funding and are looking into commercial applications which this article is designed to invoke interest for. I think those claims of performance increases when applied to healthy brains can safely be assumed to be highly questionable.
People who read such an article with the details provided, only have enough information to have an approximate understanding of how this thing works, but it won't stop them from experimenting. Already, I see instructions being posted on this very thread.
Yeah, I'd be shocked if half the population of HN don't have one of these things inside a week. Somebody should call Jameco and Mouser, etc., and ask if they see a spike in sales of certain electronic components in the next few days!
I probably have most of the parts needed in my parts-box already, so I might just give it a try myself. Nothing like a little reckless self-experimentation...
I've built one for ~ $30 in parts from Radio Shack using an LM317 current limiter. There is an odd bootstrapping problem involved with tDCS devices: you need to have the device connected to comprehend the instructions! Researchers speak of anodal and cathodal stimulation, and the convention is that + is anodal and - is cathodal. So far so good--at least this comports with vacuum tube conventions, which will be familiar to all readers of Hacker News. Researchers speak of anodal stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The tDCS device has to be connected (with the positive connection over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortext) to even begin to comprehend that left means left from the perspective of the subject, but right from the perspective of a viewer viewing the subject's face. The right negative contact can go over the right eyebrow (but there are other protocols). This is one of the clearest: http://www.ncrrn.org/papers/symposium_tdcs/hamilton_tdcs.pdf.
As you can see, there is an inviolable convention among researchers not to unambiguously mark the anode + contact on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the cathode - contact over the subject's right eyebrow. Instead, what we see on the third slide is a cartoon drawing of a subject in which two contacts are labeled "active" and "reference". There is an arrow leading from the active contact to the reference contact labeled "anodal" and another arrow from the reference contact labeled "cathodal". This refers to an ancient convention in electronics, in which current was assumed to flow from the anode to the cathode, even though electrons flow from the cathode to the anode. The literature is replete with such helpful diagrams. One would like a completely unambiguous statement: the anode is the positive connection, and it is secured to the left side of the subject's scalp; the cathode is the negative connection, and it secured over the subject's right eyebrow. Or one of the eight combinations possible by arbitrarily switching anode with cathode, positive with negative, and left with right. But I have been unable to locate a statement in the literature that would condescend to so direct and simple a description.
Here is another article with a diagram showing node placement for tDCS. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165017306.... Note that the anode is placed over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the cathode is placed on the forehead. That beats the anodal and cathodal arrows of the previous diagram. What we still don't have is the identification of + with anodal and - with cathodal. And so one must continue searching through the literature--which should be done in any case--until one comes to something approximating a consensus on node placement and the meaning of anodal and cathodal versus positive and negative.
Finally, here's a compilation from a less than unimpeachable source: http://www.drmueller-healthpsychology.com/tDCS.html.
The author misreads 1mA as one microamp. That's one milliamp. But we do get a straightforward statement about node placement from Fregni, F., Boggio, P., Nitsche, M., et al. (2006). Letters to the Editor: Treatment of major depression with transcranial direct current stimulation. Bipolar Disorders, 8:203-205. This is confirmed in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031874, though you have to know that anode means positive and cathode means negative.
I should say that in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature.
So, after reading this account, I felt compelled to wire up my current-limited power supply at 1mA and ranges from 6-9V using saline-soaked paper towels.
Got some mild phosphenes during the first try by putting the anode too far forward -- although not in my entire visual field like the author, instead just at the top, and the phosphenes stopped once the electrode was securely connected.
OP, what duration do you use? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17940759 indicates that "short-term" is <1s and "long-term" is 10m. It's hard to say objectively, but I think after about 1m I can feel increased concentration and wakefulness.
IIRC, I had it memorized by thinking that "anions" move towards the "anode" ; since "anions" are negative ("anion" = A Negative ION :D ), then the "anode" must be positive... I'm not a EE major, so I could be wrong.
Someone should bring this to market, or at least make a DIY kit available. It sounds super fascinating to experiment with (at super low levels). Perhaps someone from Make is reading this -- if so, this would be a great project to feature!
Reading your post, it occurred to me that its tone sounds very similar to things I've written when I had had a lot of caffeine, or was on methylphenidate ("Ritalin") for a long time. In my case, prolonged methylphenidate use induced mild psychosis, a known effect that is common in long-term users of the pharmacokinetically similar amphetamine family, which also dramatically improves learning performance.
Thus extrapolating, I wonder if tDCS use might also induce psychosis.
Going off methylphenidate on the weekends ameliorated the psychotic effects, but some of the psychosis-induced beliefs persisted for quite a while.
Related, I have recently been thinking about Star Trek economics. I don't know much about Star Trek, except that they don't use money. Yet there seem to be differences in "wealth", at least in that some get to be commanders of huge space vessels, whereas others are confined to low level jobs on said vessels.
Presumably there is the notion of "only ability counts", but what happens once genetic engineering levels everybody's abilities? It seems to me from then on the logical conclusion is that in a Star Trek universe mankind would become a super organism spawning individuals according to need. The individual would necessarily be transcended.
At 10% it's also worth comparing to a placebo control group - I have the suspicion that the results of such a study could annihilate the "improvement" claim entirely if an independent study were to be conducted on this.
"The currents of 1–2 mA make it easier for neurons in these brain regions to fire. "
wouldn't this just make you do connections in your reasoning that you usually wouldn't do (maybe for a good reason) (is this why this method is ethically questionable?)
The question I think is, is that "good reason" a reason that was relevant as our brains were evolving millions of years ago, but is irrelevant now?
Our brains evolved in a way which maximized reproductive potential, and while having strong cognitive abilities was clearly favored to an extent, there was a constant tradeoff between larger brains and food/energy input. Now that we don't have the same critical food shortages, we can set our own objective functions. Ex, now most people would probably choose a brain with +50 iq points which required an extra 1000 kcals a day, but a few tens of thousands of years ago, those requirements would probably have been fatal...
"The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true."
Like books, for example? Or computers (not that cheap, but widely available).
I am not holding my breath on that device... My usual line of thinking: if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself? (Another one where that applies is the super memory mice).
Nature has widely enhanced brain functions. There is variation in intelligence. But since traits are selected for against usefulness and not toward an abstract goal or destination you don't see much variation above or beyond that needed to promote the trait. Even today most people do not need much more abstract reasoning power than the median to survive and reproduce. (By "today" I mean within the last 10,000 years or so.)
But in normal healthy people we see enough variation in abstract reasoning to have a profound effect on their performance in our brand spanking new technological environment of the last couple of thousand years; less than an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. And not just in competitive terms, but in absolute ability. A lot of that advancement can be simply be attributed to better nutrition and better mental and language models. I have little trouble believing that fiddling and tuning up the brain's electrical environment might might have some comparatively striking effects. (I can also see it possible to do great damage as well)
Nature isn't very smart and is very slow. For instance, a mutation that gives 10% fitness advantage (which is pretty much unheard of as far as I know) would only rise to fixation 20% of the time. And in humanity it would take 454 generations to fixate in the population. Since most mutations don't carry such large advantages by themselves, you have to wait for dependent mutations to take place. A second mutation might indeed give 10% advantage but only in the presence of some prior mutation having already fixated, which may itself only give 0.1% advantage.
There are a lot of low-hanging fruits nature has missed because nature only cares about how many copies of genes there are, it doesn't care about human goals. Evolution is a poor optimizer for what it does, it has no optimization for what we want done.
> if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself?
A good question to raise, but it has a lot of plausible answers. For example, maybe having better cognitive ability causes people to spend more time doing science and less time procreating/looking after their offspring.
...if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself?
If nature is a woman (rather than a collection of stochastic processes), then she is a strong argument against letting women into the same building as a computer.
Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and systems that evolved from a completely different purpose and didn't get the full rewrite they needed.
The nature methodology makes waterfall look like a perfect process:
1) Make a random change.
2) If conversions go up, commit. Otherwise revert.
Wish they showed something more statistical. As in, by how much did people's memory skills really improve?
That whole article doesn't really even explain how it works either, just some dabbling around "ethics" (really?). Just seems quite vague and unfocussed.
I think an article named "The ethics of..." is meant to "dabble around ethics" rather than explaining the technology. There must be other articles/papers about that.
Oh, and I will believe all the people who whine about the virtue of the natural, un-augmented human, and about how unfair augmentation is, when they start advocating that athletes compete naked.
This last paper is quite interesting, as arguments can (will...) be based off of it posing that tDCS does provide a long-term benefit. Unfortunately, the gain (in response time and accuracy) over a sham tDCS (e.g., placebo) is quite modest -- 15% with an error bar of 10% for response time, and 5% with an error bar of 5% for accuracy... Check the Figure 4 on page 5.
Really? If we waited until nuclear explosions were proven to consider ethical implications we might be in a very different place. Ethical considerations don't need to stop scientific advancement, but they always must be an ongoing part of the process.
If I'm understanding correctly, the device makes certain neuron pathways more likely to fire. What happens if, for example, you enable this device every time you enter a potentially frustrating situation? Would you become frustrated more easily?
This research sounds very similar to the research done by Dr. Bob Beck on his "Brain Tuner" in 1983. Bob Beck had some other radical beliefs such as blood electrification that he claimed could cure all sorts of maladies. I wonder how much the transcranial direct current stimulation differs from Bob Beck's Brain Tuner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRx0Luz86Uc&feature=relat...
This can be built easily by connecting 9v battery, a potentiometer, and a multimeter on current mode in series. The potentiometer basically controls the current and the multimeter displays how much you are putting in yourself.
I'm curious on what the benefits of this is but also scared of the side effects if there are any.
I was kind of hoping this would be about accessing an external hard disk from my brain. I can't count the number of times I wished I could've saved a few seconds by not having to look everything up on the internet.
There should be a site where one could subscribe to new tech discoveries that are likely to be marketed soon* (i.e. this one) to get an email when it happens.
[+] [-] ntkachov|14 years ago|reply
Memory and math? What is this a competition? Why on earth would you not want to increase your capacity for memory and math?
The analogy is that steroids are to a mover as this thing is to an engineer. Do you really care how your mover found his strength?
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
But consider that as research continues, they will probably find that other effects can be achieved by stimulating other brain areas in other ways. Perhaps they will find an area that enhances reading comprehension, or musical ability, or objectivity.
So imagine we reach a state where we have general purpose brain stimulators in most schools, that can be programmed to stimulate the appropriate part of the brain in the appropriate way for a given lesson.
Great, right?
Now consider this. One researcher has already reported that he can induce by brain stimulation a mystical or religious state, where subjects often report feeling they are in the presence of God. If the school stimulators could be programmed for this kind of stimulation, they could turn into a powerful tool for religious indoctrination.
I would not at all be surprised, if the religious inducement turns out to be true (I believe it has not been replicated yet) that they will find other deep emotional things can be induced, such as feeling of national pride and patriotism. I'm sure I don't need to say anything about the potential abuse of that if every public school has a programmable brain stimulator.
This is why we don't throw ethics out the door--we need a way to make the good aspects of this available (boosting memory and math) WITHOUT just blindly getting the bad parts.
[+] [-] JOnAgain|14 years ago|reply
With a widening gap, would such a device further increase the gap between those who go on to be the "have's" vs. the "have nots"? Would this introduce a more substantial barrier to entry for the upper class? What if the device cost $1000? What if it cost $1000/month?
What would happen to society if 50% or more of society was structurally unable to move up in the class system? There is unrest today (occupy protests) and the common perception is that it isn't even a big problem in the US yet. How bad would it get if people actually thought it was as bad as it is? And then what if it got worse?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...
[+] [-] cop359|14 years ago|reply
So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens.
To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier.
If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?
[+] [-] ahelwer|14 years ago|reply
On the intellectual side of things, you have students competing for scholarships, grants, and research placements. You have people competing for jobs in high-tech industries, and then competing with their colleagues for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses. I'm sure you can come up with more examples. The same problem then exists with devices or drugs which purport to improve learning ability. I could take dextroamphetamine every day. My productivity could go through the roof and I could soak up information like a sponge, easily putting within my grasp that which I strive to accomplish every day. Yet I do not want to do this, for many reasons.
Maybe the device in the article lacks the side effects of regular amphetamine use. It therefore would not be on the same level as nootropic drugs, but saying we should 'throw ethics out the door' is quite a leap.
[+] [-] hello_moto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtani|14 years ago|reply
But, well, when i read this, I must say, i have people close to me who would have access to this technology and understand the risks, and I thought, hmm.
[+] [-] samt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertskmiles|14 years ago|reply
If you are actually learning, and the effect is not temporary, then it's obviously not cheating, no matter how easy it is.
[+] [-] nessus42|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekoka|14 years ago|reply
Only now, they're questioning the ethics of letting people know about it, and they do that... by talking about it?
I believe it would now be more dangerous and irresponsible to keep things secret, the cat's out of the bag. People who read such an article with the details provided, only have enough information to have an approximate understanding of how this thing works, but it won't stop them from experimenting. Already, I see instructions being posted on this very thread.
[+] [-] Udo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|14 years ago|reply
Yeah, I'd be shocked if half the population of HN don't have one of these things inside a week. Somebody should call Jameco and Mouser, etc., and ask if they see a spike in sales of certain electronic components in the next few days!
I probably have most of the parts needed in my parts-box already, so I might just give it a try myself. Nothing like a little reckless self-experimentation...
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|14 years ago|reply
As you can see, there is an inviolable convention among researchers not to unambiguously mark the anode + contact on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the cathode - contact over the subject's right eyebrow. Instead, what we see on the third slide is a cartoon drawing of a subject in which two contacts are labeled "active" and "reference". There is an arrow leading from the active contact to the reference contact labeled "anodal" and another arrow from the reference contact labeled "cathodal". This refers to an ancient convention in electronics, in which current was assumed to flow from the anode to the cathode, even though electrons flow from the cathode to the anode. The literature is replete with such helpful diagrams. One would like a completely unambiguous statement: the anode is the positive connection, and it is secured to the left side of the subject's scalp; the cathode is the negative connection, and it secured over the subject's right eyebrow. Or one of the eight combinations possible by arbitrarily switching anode with cathode, positive with negative, and left with right. But I have been unable to locate a statement in the literature that would condescend to so direct and simple a description.
Here is another article with a diagram showing node placement for tDCS. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165017306.... Note that the anode is placed over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the cathode is placed on the forehead. That beats the anodal and cathodal arrows of the previous diagram. What we still don't have is the identification of + with anodal and - with cathodal. And so one must continue searching through the literature--which should be done in any case--until one comes to something approximating a consensus on node placement and the meaning of anodal and cathodal versus positive and negative.
Finally, here's a compilation from a less than unimpeachable source: http://www.drmueller-healthpsychology.com/tDCS.html. The author misreads 1mA as one microamp. That's one milliamp. But we do get a straightforward statement about node placement from Fregni, F., Boggio, P., Nitsche, M., et al. (2006). Letters to the Editor: Treatment of major depression with transcranial direct current stimulation. Bipolar Disorders, 8:203-205. This is confirmed in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031874, though you have to know that anode means positive and cathode means negative.
I should say that in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature.
[+] [-] amstr|14 years ago|reply
Got some mild phosphenes during the first try by putting the anode too far forward -- although not in my entire visual field like the author, instead just at the top, and the phosphenes stopped once the electrode was securely connected.
OP, what duration do you use? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17940759 indicates that "short-term" is <1s and "long-term" is 10m. It's hard to say objectively, but I think after about 1m I can feel increased concentration and wakefulness.
[+] [-] ajays|14 years ago|reply
This page has some schematics and the results of his own experimentation: http://brmlab.cz/project/brain_hacking/tdcs (not sure how legit it is).
Can you post your schematics and instructions?
[+] [-] draggnar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|14 years ago|reply
Thus extrapolating, I wonder if tDCS use might also induce psychosis.
Going off methylphenidate on the weekends ameliorated the psychotic effects, but some of the psychosis-induced beliefs persisted for quite a while.
I was 9.
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
Presumably there is the notion of "only ability counts", but what happens once genetic engineering levels everybody's abilities? It seems to me from then on the logical conclusion is that in a Star Trek universe mankind would become a super organism spawning individuals according to need. The individual would necessarily be transcended.
[+] [-] axiom|14 years ago|reply
I wonder how this compares over the long term to just working an extra 20 minutes per day, or even just drinking a cup of coffee.
[+] [-] Udo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majmun|14 years ago|reply
wouldn't this just make you do connections in your reasoning that you usually wouldn't do (maybe for a good reason) (is this why this method is ethically questionable?)
[+] [-] bpodgursky|14 years ago|reply
Our brains evolved in a way which maximized reproductive potential, and while having strong cognitive abilities was clearly favored to an extent, there was a constant tradeoff between larger brains and food/energy input. Now that we don't have the same critical food shortages, we can set our own objective functions. Ex, now most people would probably choose a brain with +50 iq points which required an extra 1000 kcals a day, but a few tens of thousands of years ago, those requirements would probably have been fatal...
[+] [-] Tichy|14 years ago|reply
Like books, for example? Or computers (not that cheap, but widely available).
I am not holding my breath on that device... My usual line of thinking: if it is so easy to enhance brain functions, why hasn't nature done so herself? (Another one where that applies is the super memory mice).
[+] [-] commieneko|14 years ago|reply
But in normal healthy people we see enough variation in abstract reasoning to have a profound effect on their performance in our brand spanking new technological environment of the last couple of thousand years; less than an eyeblink in evolutionary terms. And not just in competitive terms, but in absolute ability. A lot of that advancement can be simply be attributed to better nutrition and better mental and language models. I have little trouble believing that fiddling and tuning up the brain's electrical environment might might have some comparatively striking effects. (I can also see it possible to do great damage as well)
[+] [-] Jach|14 years ago|reply
There are a lot of low-hanging fruits nature has missed because nature only cares about how many copies of genes there are, it doesn't care about human goals. Evolution is a poor optimizer for what it does, it has no optimization for what we want done.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waqf|14 years ago|reply
A good question to raise, but it has a lot of plausible answers. For example, maybe having better cognitive ability causes people to spend more time doing science and less time procreating/looking after their offspring.
[+] [-] merkat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
If nature is a woman (rather than a collection of stochastic processes), then she is a strong argument against letting women into the same building as a computer.
Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and systems that evolved from a completely different purpose and didn't get the full rewrite they needed.
The nature methodology makes waterfall look like a perfect process:
1) Make a random change.
2) If conversions go up, commit. Otherwise revert.
[+] [-] jeggers5|14 years ago|reply
That whole article doesn't really even explain how it works either, just some dabbling around "ethics" (really?). Just seems quite vague and unfocussed.
Really exciting prospect if it works though!
[+] [-] kiiski|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
Has never, and will never be done.
Oh, and I will believe all the people who whine about the virtue of the natural, un-augmented human, and about how unfair augmentation is, when they start advocating that athletes compete naked.
[+] [-] ivankirigin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregsadetsky|14 years ago|reply
http://download.cell.com/images/edimages/CurrentBiology/home...
which mentions "The long-lasting effects of TDCS, which can persist for up to 2 months" with a reference to this paper:
http://neuro.cjb.net/content/29/22/7271.full.pdf
This last paper is quite interesting, as arguments can (will...) be based off of it posing that tDCS does provide a long-term benefit. Unfortunately, the gain (in response time and accuracy) over a sham tDCS (e.g., placebo) is quite modest -- 15% with an error bar of 10% for response time, and 5% with an error bar of 5% for accuracy... Check the Figure 4 on page 5.
[+] [-] mrsebastian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekoka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPBEggo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aneth|14 years ago|reply
That said, I'm interested in a maker kit.
[+] [-] walrus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrinterweb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtani|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricksta|14 years ago|reply
I'm curious on what the benefits of this is but also scared of the side effects if there are any.
Anyone else tried this?
[+] [-] hobin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colonel_panic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glenra|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeggers5|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jQueryIsAwesome|14 years ago|reply
* by soon i mean the next 5 years or so.