Brain stimulation at home is gaining momentum (2023)

When Nathan Whitmore first tapped on his brain, he had a college friend with him who was willing to pull the cord if he had a seizure. That didn't happen. Instead, Whitmore began to experiment with power surges and liked the effects. Since that first cautious attempt, he has become a frequent user and advocate of home brain stimulators.

Depending on where he placed the electrodes, Whitmore says it expanded his memory, improved his math skills, and solved previously difficult problems. The 22-year-old, a researcher in a neuroscience lab at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, writes computer programs in his spare time. When he places an electrode at a point on his forehead, his brain goes into a "flux state," he says, where complicated coding solutions seem easy. "It's like the programming of the computer itself."

Whitmore no longer asks a friend to tag along while in the pocket, but he's far from alone. The movement to use electricity to alter the brain, while still relatively small, appears to be growing, as evidenced by a steady increase in active participants in an online brain hacking message board moderated by Whitmore. This do-it-yourself community, some of whom make their own devices, includes people who want to score better on tests or crush the competition in video games, as well as people who struggle with depression and chronic pain, Whitmore says. .

As reckless as it sounds to squeeze a brain at home with a 9-volt battery and $40 worth of spare parts, the buzz around this technology is based on real science. Small laboratory studies suggest that carefully controlled brain stimulation can improve a person's memory and math skills, sharpen attention, and accelerate learning. The US military is interested and is funding studies to test brain stimulation to increase alertness and alertness in soldiers. The technique may even be a viable treatment for damaging mental disorders such as major depression, according to other laboratory studies.

However, many leading scientists insist that this simple, relatively safe and cheap technology is not suitable for home use. The research is too preliminary, and such stimulation may prove ineffective at best or dangerous at worst, some say. Certain types of stimulation can cause unwanted damage; Brain stimulation is not as foolproof as many people would like to believe.

Still, "people have been messing with their brains for a long time," says neuroscientist Vincent Clark of the University of New Mexico and the Mind Research Network, a nonprofit neuroscience research institute in Albuquerque. And protests by scientists are unlikely to change that. Scientists, politicians and DIYers are currently debating whether and how technology should be regulated.

Ethical constraints, as well as questions about efficacy and safety, call for restraint. But the lawsuit, fueled by tantalizing news from promising studies, has largely drowned out those warning calls. "We are in a fog of ignorance," says Hank Greely, a neuroethicist at Stanford Law School who studies how brain research intersects with society. "We really need to know more about how this works."

The promise

The brain deals with electricity. Small bursts of electricity create the signals that allow humans to think, remember and feel, so it makes perfect sense that external electricity could affect how the brain works.

This realization is not new. A physician to the Roman Emperor Claudius relieved headaches by projecting a live electric torpedo beam (similar to a stingray) onto the heads of sick patients. In the 11th century, the electric catfish was proposed to treat epilepsy. In the 19th century, the nephew of the Italian bioelectric pioneer Luigi Galvani, who used lightning to blow up the legs of dead frogs, used electrical stimulation to treat people's melancholy.

Today's burgeoning field of "electroceuticals" takes advantage of the same principle. Doctors use a variety of delivery methods, both external and implanted, to convert the electrical activity of the brain. For some people, electroconvulsive therapy can relieve severe depression or mania that medications don't fix. This surge of electricity triggers a brief seizure that is believed to reset the brain and alleviate symptoms. Some people with Parkinson's disease have also found relief from electricity: rhythmic discharges from electrodes implanted deep in the brain can reduce tremors and stiffness.

These methods are different from those that have caught the attention of the DIY crowd. Transcranial direct current stimulation, known as tDCS, sends small amounts of constant electrical current to the scalp. Although the details are still hazy, tDCS is thought to work by making neurons more or less active, depending on whether the device's anode or cathode is placed on the neurons. Electricity does not force neurons to fire messages or remain silent; Instead, it gently tips the scales toward action or inaction, studies have found.

Depending on which part of the brain is activated, tDCS can affect things like attention, working memory, visual skills, and math skills. For example, stimulation of the upper part of the brain resulted in 15 healthy people learning an invented number system better than healthy people who received no stimulation, and the benefits lasted for months after the stimulation ceased, according to neuroscientist Roi Cohen. Kadosh of Oxford University and colleagues.reportedcurrent biologyin 2010.

tDCS may also alleviate symptoms of depression, other small studies suggest. In a randomized study of 120 people with moderate to severe depression, tDCS with positive (anode) stimulation on the left hemisphere and negative (cathode) stimulation on the right brain enhanced the effects of the drug sertraline or Zoloft.scientists reporteda 2013 oneJAMA Psychiatry. Over a six-week period, people who received tDCS and sertraline scored an average of 11.5 points better on a depression rating scale than people who received placebos. (A decrease of three points was considered clinically relevant.) tDCS alone caused a smaller decrease (5.6 points) compared to sham, and sertraline alone caused an even smaller decrease: 2.9 points, less than placebo.

The technique could affect depression, as well as other brain processes, by increasing the brain's ability to respond flexibly to new situations or problems, a trait known as plasticity. Electricity can increase plasticity by triggering a series of events that ultimately change the way neurons communicate with each other. Researchers have observed tDCS-induced changes in certain molecules that help send and receive messages between neurons. These molecules, including NMDA, GABA, and glutamate receptors, have been linked to depression and other brain disorders in numerous studies.

Other, more far-reaching effects of electricity may be involved. tDCS appears to affect the behavior of large cohorts of neurons. More generally, electricity can affect blood flow in the brain, inflammation, and probably a host of other processes.

Despite an incomplete understanding of the technology, clinicians have already taken note of the results, particularly the antidepressant effects of tDCS. Various clinics offer tDCS therapy to patients, often outside of research studies.

However, some people don't want to go through the hassle of seeing a doctor or signing up for a lab study to experience tDCS. Pre-built tDCS machines can be purchased online for a few hundred dollars or less. DIY plans for building a tDCS system are available to anyone with an internet connection. So people make their own.

"I have a PhD student with a background in philosophy who could build one in an afternoon for less than $50," says neuroscientist and ethicist Peter Reiner of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "The device is surprisingly simple and therefore a bit scary."

Enter home improvement

No one really knows how many people are using this technology at home, Greely says. Her Stanford colleague, Anita Jwa, sent out a questionnaire to participants in the online tDCS chat groups and received responses from around 120 respondents. The survey is far from complete, but it is the first attempt to examine the home improvement community, which Jwa says is predominantly male and not necessarily young. About 23 percent of those surveyed were 40 or older, the survey found. "It's not just the pimply kid in the basement playing a great online role-playing game," says Greely.

In fact, many of the people who use tDCS have a condition that hasn't been successfully treated and are trying it out of desperation, says Brent Williams, who maintains a tDCS website. With an engineering background, Williams had no problem building a unit for himself and his wife. They use it, among other things, to increase their creativity and memory.

Williams, who directs an educational program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, believed that technology could transform lives. She started promoting it on his website. "I get emails every day from people doing tDCS stuff," she says. "A lot of these emails are coming from frankly pretty desperate people who live in countries or regions where they don't have access to the doctors that we have access to. They really want tDCS for depression or chronic pain or whatever," she says.

This idea, that people turn to tDCS instead of working with a doctor or using tDCS regularly for performance enhancement, worries some scientists and doctors. In particular, most scientists who regularly touch the brains of subjects in their labs are unlikely to apply the technology to their own brains, according to apublished studyin july-augustbrain stimulation. Of 287 researchers who looked at non-invasive brain stimulation (including, but not limited to, tDCS), only 8 percent said it squeezed. Common reasons for abstention were the assumption that the benefit was too small and safety concerns.

The dangers

And those 8 percent of researchers were probably using machines proven enough to deliver an adequate dose of electricity. Home use is only as good as who builds and runs the system. Just ask people who have posted photos of scalp burns from inadequate electricity online.

Burns and even more serious reactions, such as reports of manic episodes and even temporary paralysis from brain stimulation, appear to be rare. "It's not like people drop dead or have their teeth knocked out," says Greely.

Other than trouble sleeping in the hours after using her tDCS system, Whitmore says she's never experienced any ill effects from tDCS. However, some effects can be subtle.

Ama 2013 workin themneuroscience journal, Cohen Kadosh, and a colleague reported that the math gains people experienced with experimental stimulation weakened another math ability. "We can improve one feature, but it comes at the expense of another feature," he says. It is quite possible that other deficiencies caused by tDCS have remained hidden because not many people have looked for them.

Assuming safety isn't an issue, there are many reasons why a person at home might not get the same results as participants in a carefully conducted laboratory study, says Cohen Kadosh. The best location in the brain to stimulate is probably different for everyone. Depending on culture, experience, and age, people rely on different parts of their brain for things like arithmetic. Also, brain regions can be found at slightly different physical coordinates from person to person.

The question of dosage has also not been clarified. Many studios use 1 to 2 milliamps of current for about 20 minutes at a time. But the effect of this dose can vary greatly from person to person. Antidepressants can alter the basic excitability of the brain, just like other drugs, both legal and illegal. Age, gender, and smoking have been linked to differences in brain behavior. And the movement of electrical current can be affected by the folds of the brain, the thickness of the skull, and the shape of the head. These individual quirks push the finish line, making it nearly impossible for anyone at home to know exactly where and for how long to apply stimulation.

For years, Cohen Kadosh has meticulously researched the best way to safely and effectively deliver electricity to the brain. But even he has reservations about using tDCS. “People are adults. They can do whatever they want," he says. "But I wouldn't do it myself."

¿Regular o no?

The fact that the desire for this technology precedes proper safety and efficacy studies became abundantly clear to Cohen Kadosh during his research with tDCS. "I've been approached by parents in the past who wanted to improve their child's performance to get into a great university or do better in school," he says.

Philosophically, external brain stimulation is no different than taking a child to piano lessons, Greely says, as long as the technique has been shown to be safe and effective. And that is a big limitation. "I know enough about brains to know that they are really complicated," she says. Without a deep understanding of how the brain works, Greely is reluctant to pry into hers. "Right now, I wouldn't encourage my kids to do that," she says.

At the moment it is perfectly legal to build or buy a tDCS system. The $249 tDCS headset, dubbed foc.us, is advertised as a tool to "excite the prefrontal cortex and gain an edge in online gaming." And Thync, a company developing a "mood-altering" headset, claims it will allow users to adjust their mood and create experiences that are energized, relaxed or focused.

The independent, nonprofit Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., will host a workshop early next year to explore the role of external brain stimulation in society. Discussions sponsored by a variety of federal agencies, patient groups, industry, and non-profit organizations will cover the potential benefits and risks of the technology, regulatory issues, and ethical dilemmas such as: B. whether it is acceptable to use the technology for enhancement cognitive function in healthy people and the effects of involuntary or forced use.

For his part, Williams, the Georgia home handyman, has written about using tDCS safely and ethically and has even proposed a code of safety standards for other home workers. Its rules include seeing a doctor for advice, treatment and follow-up, never using tDCS alone, and never using the technology on children or animals.

It's unclear if tDCS will really take off and become the next breakthrough app, says Greely. But as science continues to hum, it's likely that people will continue to push the limits of technology. That means the cautious "don't try this at home" from scientists will continue to fall on deaf ears and tingle scalps.

This story appears in the November 15, 2014 issue under the headline "Brain Hack: Consumers Take Control of Their Neurons."