This is interesting.
What it strongly indicates is that the stimulated brain rises to full
alertness and quite safely. That may
well be good enough. That it also is beneficial
for fibromyalgia is in intriguing as well.
It is neither a cure nor a change agent but works with what is there to
enhance.
Since it is perfectly safe, go foir it and see if it helps
at all. A lot of chronic conditions are
worsened by memory itself and this may just modify that feedback system to
alleviate the problem. As said, nothing
to lose and a possible gain.
Perhaps I need to bottle something and label it placebo. Clinical studies prove it is efficacious in
almost every ailment.
Inside the Strange New World of DIY Brain Stimulation
BY GREG
MILLER
05.05.14 |
When Brent Williams
got to RadioShack that day in the spring of 2012, he knew exactly what he as
looking for: a variable resistor, a current regulator, a circuit board,
and a 9-volt battery. The total came to around $20. Williams is tall and
balding, with wire-rim glasses that make him look like an engineer, which he
is. He directs a center on technology in education at Kennesaw State University
and is the kind of guy who spends his free time chatting up people on his ham
radio or trying to glimpse a passing comet with his telescope. But this project
was different.
When
he got home, he took his supplies into his office. He heated up his soldering iron,
hoping his wife wouldn’t see what he was up to. He fished a few wires out of
his desk and built a simple circuit. Using alligator clips, he connected the
circuit to two kitchen sponges soaked in saline and strapped them to his head
with a sweatband. He positioned one sponge just above his right eyebrow and the
other up high on the left side of his forehead. Then he snapped the battery
into place, turned a small dial, and sent an electric current into his brain.
It’s
been nearly two years since Williams cobbled together his first device, and he
has been electrifying his brain two to three times a week ever since. Often he
does it for about 25 minutes in the evening while reading on the couch.
Sometimes it’s while he’s doing laundry or other chores. It’s become just
another part of his routine, like brushing his teeth.
Williams
got the idea from a news story about how Air Force researchers were studying
whether brain stimulation could cut pilot training time. The military is not
alone in thinking that brain zapping may improve mental function. In recent
years, the method—technically known as transcranial direct current
stimulation—has caught the interest of academic researchers. British
neuroscientists have claimed it can make people better at learning math. A team
at Harvard has found promise for depression and chronic pain. Others are
looking into using it to treat tinnitus and eating disorders and to speed up
stroke recovery. Hundreds of papers have been published, and clinical trials
are under way.
Though these are still early days for the research—many
of the studies are small and the effects modest—it has inspired largely
enthusiastic media coverage (“the electric thinking cap that makes you cleverer
… and happier!” one British newspaper gushed) and spawned a community of DIY
brain zappers.
Williams is one of its leaders. The treatments
have made a huge difference in his life, he says. He retains more information
from the tedious journal articles he has to read for work,
and he feels more creative. On his blog, SpeakWisdom,
he posts technically detailed reviews of stimulation devices and cheerfully
gives advice to anyone considering trying it for the first time. He’s got lots
of company. A subreddit devoted to the practice
has nearly 4,000 subscribers
who actively follow the scientific research and share tips on where to place
the electrodes on your head if, say, you’re depressed, too impulsive, or just
want to amp up your creativity.
Williams
is spreading the brain-zapping idea closer to home too. He has built brain
stimulators for his wife (he couldn’t keep the secret very long) and several
friends and acquaintances. All in all, he has persuaded at least a dozen people
to give it a try. One says she’s gone off antidepressants
for the first time in 20 years. Another says brain stimulation is helping him
get his ADD under control. Several ambitious middle-aged professionals say the
devices have boosted their memory and focus.
Entrepreneurs are starting to get in on the
action. A company called foc.us has already planted a flag with a commercial
brain-stimulation headset released last year. It’s marketed as a gadget for
videogamers looking to improve their skills, thus skirting the need for FDA
approval. The first batch of 3,000 sold out in just a few months. So did the
second.
With
easy access to the research, the equipment, and each other, self-experimenters
aren’t consulting their doctors or waiting for scientific consensus. They’re
zapping first and asking questions as they go.
In October I
meet some of Williams’ converts at a barbecue he is hosting
with his wife, Madge, at their four-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood of
mature trees and well-tended lawns outside Atlanta. The first to arrive are Tom
and Susan Tillery, a couple in their midfifties bearing a plate of brownies.
While Brent tends the grill and Susan helps Madge in the kitchen, I ask Tom
what kind of results he is noticing from the brain stimulation. He compares it
to a runner’s high: not euphoria but a sense of wellness and calm. He assures
me he’s not just doing it to achieve inner peace, though. “I’m doing it to be
better at life,” he says. It’s not like electrotherapy will turn any dumb
schmuck into an intellectual superstar, he says, but it puts you closer to the
top of whatever game you’ve got.
Susan
tried it first. She’d heard about it from Madge, who’d been stimulating her
brain to improve her memory. Madge, who likes to memorize scripture, says
the stimulation has improved her retention dramatically. Susan admits she was
skeptical at first, but she was impressed to find out that researchers at
Harvard were looking into it. “I was so intrigued,” Susan tells me. She
decided to see what it could do for her. The Tillerys own a busy financial
planning firm with offices in four states, and she figured she could use some
extra focus.
She
started stimulating her brain a few times a week. “I put it on while I’m
reading the Bible, so it goes by quickly,” she says. It gave her greater mental
clarity. “It just kind of took the fogginess away.”
It’s a rare thing for a scientist to stand up in front of
a roomful of his peers and rip apart a study from his own lab. But that’s
exactly what Vincent Walsh did in September at a symposium on brain stimulation
at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. Walsh is a cognitive neuroscientist
at University College London, and his lab has done some of the studies that
first made a splash in the media. One, published in Current Biology in 2010,
found that brain stimulation enhanced people’s ability to learn a new number
system based on made-up symbols.
Only
it didn’t really.
“It
doesn’t show what we said it shows; it doesn’t show what people think it
shows,” Walsh said before launching into a dissection of his paper’s flaws.
They ranged from the technical (guesswork about whether parts of the brain are
being excited or inhibited) to the practical (a modest effect with questionable
impact on any actual learning outside the lab). When he finished this devastating
critique, he tore into two more studies from other high-profile labs. And the
problems aren’t limited to these few papers, Walsh said, they’re endemic in
this whole subfield of neuroscience.
Another
crucial issue is how to rule out placebo effects. Though the current flowing
through the brain during stimulation is almost imperceptible (it’s about a
thousand times less than what’s used in electroconvulsive therapy), a slight
tingling sensation under the electrodes can be a giveaway. Scientists are still
grappling with the best way to deal with that.
A
previous speaker had shown a slide with a curve illustrating the typical hype
cycle for new technology. It starts with a steep rise to the “peak of inflated
expectations,” then plunges into the “trough of disillusionment,” before
finally reaching a “plateau of productivity.” Researchers at the meeting seemed
to agree that brain stimulation was somewhere near the peak, and Walsh said the
sooner they turn the corner the better. “It would do the field a service if we
took a head dive into that trough of disillusionment and swam around in it for
a while,” he said. There was nervous laughter in the audience. The DIY crowd,
meanwhile, puts scientists in an awkward position. On one hand, the researchers
genuinely believe the technique has potential. Some of them have filed for
patents and started companies. For both selfish and scientific reasons, they
don’t want the self-experimenters ruining it for everyone by getting hurt or
creating an aura of kookiness around the thing.
Still,
they’re reluctant to condemn the tinkerers outright. “You have to respect
people’s autonomy,” says Roy Hamilton, a neurologist at the University of
Pennsylvania. Hamilton and his colleagues have even considered making a safety
video aimed at the DIY crowd. “We’ve talked at some length about whether that
would be a socially responsible thing for clinicians to do.” They still haven’t
decided.
Before I leave
Atlanta I visit James Fugedy, a physician who offers brain stimulation treatment
at his small office. Fugedy is 65, with salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache, and
glasses that give him a slightly owlish appearance. He electrifies his own
brain several times a week and says he appreciates the boost it has given
his memory.
Fugedy
may be the only doctor in the country who trains people to stimulate their own
brains and sends them home with a kit. In a way, he represents a narrow middle
ground between the scientific establishment and the DIY community. Patients
willing to pony up $2,400 get a four-hour consultation in his office,
medical-grade equipment, and follow-ups by Fugedy, usually via Skype.
The
day I visit, he has arranged for two of his patients to stop by. Hellen Owens
has been coming to Fugedy for nine years, driving an hour and a half from her
home in rural Bremen, Georgia. Dressed head to toe in burgundy velour, she
rocks slowly back and forth on Fugedy’s examination table as we talk, gently
massaging one hand with the other. At 57, she has suffered chronic pain that
she attributes to fibromyalgia. Her previous doctor gave her epidural
injections that helped for 20 minutes or so before the agony returned. “It was
like my bones were going to explode,” she says. Brain stimulation hasn’t
cured her, not nearly. But she’s convinced she’d be bedridden without it.
The
other patient, Deborah Ellis, says brain stimulation has relieved her
chronic pain—doctors also diagnosed her with fibromyalgia—and the depression
that came with it. “I no longer spend every day thinking I don’t want to live,”
she says.
It’s
impossible not to sympathize with them. It’s also impossible to know what’s
really going on. Placebo effects can be strong for depression and pain
conditions, but Fugedy says it’s not in his patients’ minds. He has treated
more than 300 people with overwhelmingly positive results, though he
acknowledges that those results are just anecdotal. It’s the research that’s
made him a believer.
It
was basically the same thing I’d heard from the Williamses and their friends.
They all trusted the scientific data, even if the scientists weren’t entirely
convinced by it themselves. They felt it worked for them, and they’ve seen it work
for their friends. They’re convinced it would work for others if they would
only give it a try.
When
I’d visited Brent Williams the day before, he told me he’d recently gotten an
email from a psychiatrist in Los Angeles who was interested in trying brain
stimulation with some of his patients. Williams was fantasizing a bit about the
possibility that some Hollywood celebrity might use it and talk to Oprah or do
an interview with People magazine and tell the world about it. That, he says,
would be awesome.
As he was talking he plucked several sponges
from a glass of saline solution he keeps on the kitchen counter. He popped them
into his foc.us headset and put it on. He tapped a button at the back of his
head and the device buzzed to indicate it was working. I watched his face
closely. He didn’t twitch or blink or even stop talking for a second, but the
current was flowing through his brain.
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