Interesting to note that Michael Weisend is now associated with San Francisco based company Rio Grande Neurosciences.
The current was set to 2 milliamps, about 1,000 times less than the electrical current that flows through a typical iPad charger. But only about 1/50th of that current makes it through the skull to the brain, Weisend said. The stimulation, which lasted for 10 minutes, was aimed at my right inferior frontal cortex and the right anterior temporal lobe, which are brain areas thought to be important for learning. If this were a real experiment, Weisend would have scanned my brain first to determine the optimal placement for the electrode, but in my case, he made an approximation.
I turned the electricity on myself, and the first thing I noticed was the mild stinging where the electrode attached to my head. Weisend assured me this was normal, but said if the sensation continued, he would turn it off and try to get a better connection. Next I noticed a slight taste of metal in my mouth, a common side effect of tDCS, according to Weisend.
OPENING CREATED BY: Blanca Li
DATE: Wednesday, May 27, 2015
TIME: 8:00 PM-9:30 PM
VENUE: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
How far would you go to improve your focus, memory, or even learning ability? Would you be willing to strap on headgear that delivers electrical shocks to targeted areas of your brain? You may soon have that option. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation, and while variations of the technique are already known to help depression patients, it’s currently being tested on soldiers, and used by gamers, students, and others looking for a cognitive edge. Does it work? Can carefully directed electrical stimulation improve cognitive function? What are potential long-term effects? And how should it be regulated?
tDCS modified moral behavior! By ‘utilitarian’ I believe the researchers mean that the subject was less likely to ‘save the many’ by (actively participating in) sacrificing the few.
Accordingly, during anodal stimulation of the left DLPFC participants rated the utilitarian actions as more inappropriate than they did during sham and cathodal stimulation. Thus, anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC resulted in a shift of preference from an utilitarian, active decisions (i.e. to actively hazard another person’s life to rescue the lives of several people) to non-utilitarian, passive decisions (i.e. to avoid harming another person, but in consequence to accept the harm to several people.
For context, you might want to examine The Trolley Problem!
** PANEL **
Hank Greely, JD, Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Jamie Tyler, PhD, the CSO at Thync, a company that manufactures noninvasive brain stimulation technologies for a consumer market.
What a couple of days. First the New Yorker, now PBS tv! If you’re new to tDCS I’d caution you to note that Marom Bikson, one of the leading tDCS researchers in the world, is quoted below as saying ‘perhaps’, as in perhaps it improves brain function. Also, in the section where Andy McKinley is able to dramatically increase reporter Miles O’Brien’s performance of a vigilance task, ask yourself if you really have a need to improve your ‘Where’s Waldo’ score. Unfortunately, the piece doesn’t go into the use of tDCS as a tool to fight depression, which in my opinion, has come closest so far to a verifiable effect borne out by much clinical research. My point is simply that it’s early. We don’t have our tDCS ‘killer app’ yet. Stay tuned!
MILES O’BRIEN: But step aside, grande latte. There’s a new kid on the block.
MAROM BIKSON: So, current is going to come out of the device to the electrodes on your forehead and it’s going to flow through your head.
MILES O’BRIEN: Biomedical engineer Marom Bikson at the City College of New York is prepping me for a dose of transcranial direct current stimulation, or TDCS, a jump-start for my brain.
MAROM BIKSON: It can make the brain perhaps function information more effectively and therefore make you, let’s say, better at things. Or it can make the brain more likely to undergo plasticity, more malleable, more able to learn.
MILES O’BRIEN: A human brain has 100 billion nerve cells or neurons. Neurons are networkers. They make multiple connections with each other via synapses. We have about 100 trillion of them. All of this runs on electricity that we generate ourselves.
MAROM BIKSON: Now, this was the montage that we tried on you.
MILES O’BRIEN: It turns out each of our neurons is a microscopic battery with a-tenth of a volt of electricity. When we’re using them to remember things or do math or write this story, they fire electrical spikes.
MAROM BIKSON: When we’re adding electricity to the brain with TDCS, instead of a tenth of a volt, we’re producing a 1,000th-of-a-volt change, so it’s not enough to trigger a spike. It’s not enough to generate a spike, but it’s enough to modulate the spikes, to maybe get more spikes or to get less spikes.
“The research so far shows that when we use tDCS you can, in some cases, improve performance,” he told this week’s edition of Swipe.
“It depends on several parameters like the type of the current that you deliver, where you put the electrodes on your head and the timing of the stimulation.”
It is thought the technology could also be used to help people with ADHD and potentially treat depression or conditions like Parkinson’s disease.
Dr Kadosh said the research so far showed that tDCS is risk free.
There’s a 12 minute video at the original article link below. Including demonstrations of the montage (around 8 minute mark) used in the research.
The procedure demonstrates how performance (accuracy, verbal response latency and variability) could be selectively improved after cathodal stimulation, but only during tasks that the participants rated as difficult, and not easy. Performance was unchanged by anodal or sham stimulation. These findings demonstrate a role for the cerebellum in cognition, whereby activity in the left prefrontal cortex is likely dis-inhibited by cathodal tDCS over the right cerebellar cortex. Transcranial brain stimulation is growing in popularity in various labs and clinics. However, the after-effects of tDCS are inconsistent between individuals and not always polarity-specific, and may even be task- or load-specific, all of which requires further study. Future efforts might also be guided towards neuro-enhancement in cerebellar patients presenting with cognitive impairment once a better understanding of brain stimulation mechanisms has emerged.
In our work, we study how short-term memory and long-term memory work together. We use laboratory tasks that ask people to look for a certain object. This task is like looking for your lost keys in your house. We have people look for a specific object in array after array of objects. As you would expect, people get better as this task each time they do it. What our measures of brain activity allow us to do is see how short-term memory and long-term memory simultaneously contribute to the performance of this task. What our studies have been showing is that both of those types of memory storage contribute to how we process information at the same time. Our more recent experiments have looked at how brain stimulation improves task performance and accelerates learning. What our simultaneous measurements of brain activity show is that long-term memory appears to be the source of this accelerated learning, even though it is unfolding across just a matter of seconds to minutes.
Dr. Weisend also uses the title: Biasing the competitive, winner-take-all networks in the brain to optimize performance with non-invasive brains stimulation. From 2014. Don’t know how this got by me. Thanks to Redditor delicieuxpamplemouss for the find.
To clarify the takeaway message: we weren’t actually training fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence has been shown to rely on fundamental cognitive abilities like working memory and attention, and the games were designed to train those underlying abilities. Training on fluid intelligence tasks would be like teaching to the test.
In a talk, “Can HD-tDCS Enhance Cognitive Training”, Aldis Sipolins describes a ‘wildly ambitious’ cognitive training study called the INSIGHT Project. Funded by IARPA, the study combined rigorous exercise and HD-tDCS-enhanced cognitive training in an attempt to increase ‘fluid intelligence’. 518 subjects, half of whom underwent pre and post fMRI scanning, undertook a 16 week course of combined exercise and brain training. The results? Anodal HD-tDCS improved performance on 3 of 6 brain-training video games but had no effect on transfer, i.e. the improvements did not transfer to general intelligence. As a result tDCS will not be a part of the study moving forward.
Partnered with Aptima to create a suite of six brain-training games. Games were ‘adaptive’, i.e they increased in difficulty as the subject’s performance improved.
Montage used was 2 x 2 (4 electrodes) designed by Soterix to affect DLPFC (dorsalateral prefrontal cortex). Dosage was 2mA for 30 minutes. Training started once current ramped up.
BOMAT (bochumer matrices) test was used to determine whether enhanced game performance transferred to fluid intelligence.
A future study on the INSIGHT Project will include a Mindfulness meditation segment and include nutritional supplements (brain shake).
In a recent Reddit thread when asked what he’d do differently, Aldis Sipolins said:
1) Include a cathodal group, with the hope that it impairs performance. Vince Clark suggested that impairing performance during cognitive training may have led to greater transfer. Kind of like how strapping weights to your body when you train makes it easier to move once you take them off.
2) Include a tDCS group that doesn’t complete the exercise intervention. It’s possible that exercise masked the effects of tDCS.
I would personally like to thank Aldis Sipolins, Art Kramer, and everyone at the Lifelong Brain and Cognition lab for some excellent science!
The NeuroCircuit lab at Stanford is using non-invasive brain stimulation towards understanding mental health issues.
A major hurdle that has prevented our understanding of cause and effect in the brain is the inability to directly manipulate brain activity and connections in a precise and flexible manner throughout the brain. We thus propose a series of radical innovations in the theoretical and practical basis for non- invasive neurostimulation. Using brain stimulation tools with unprecedented power and precision, we will achieve a mechanistic understanding of how human brain circuits generate behavior. This will enable us to design and test a broad range of new treatments for psychiatric disorders, matching our ability to observe circuitry with brain imaging.
