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Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

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Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#21

Post by louprado »

RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance sharp-shooting ability.

At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of loss when the tCDS system was no longer available to her. She sounded like a drug addict that pines for that feeling of their first high and then risks spending their life in vain trying to recover that feeling.

If your life literally depends on a skill and supervised tCDS can improve it, then the reward may outweigh the unknown risks. But for other tasks/skills, it is difficult to justify.

Edit: typos, clarity

http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#23

Post by nabla9 »

reachtarunhere wrote: post #12
nabla9 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insanity of proponents of pseudoscience has no boundaries.

Too early to say if it pseudoscience. They don't know the effects yet. It is just risky tinkering.

>Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to the scientific method. A field, practice, or body of knowledge can reasonably be called pseudoscientific when it is presented as consistent with the norms of scientific research, but it demonstrably fails to meet these norms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

Science is not "if it works. It's science." You can be correct by change or by having right intuition. Science is systematic way to organize and build knowledge.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#24

Post by Karunamon »

BlanketLogic wrote: post #16
reachtarunhere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too early to say if it pseudoscience. They don't know the effects yet. It is just risky tinkering.

> They don't know the effects yet. That's what makes it 'pseudo'.

So by that definition, any new and untested-en-masse "thing" is "pseudoscience", with all the implied quackery baggage that term applies.

That is not a useful definition.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#25

Post by ricksplat »

nabla9 wrote: post #23
reachtarunhere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too early to say if it pseudoscience. They don't know the effects yet. It is just risky tinkering.

>Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to the scientific method. A field, practice, or body of knowledge can reasonably be called pseudoscientific when it is presented as consistent with the norms of scientific research, but it demonstrably fails to meet these norms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience Science is not "if it works. It's science." You ca…

Replicable Falsifiable Precise Parsimonious

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#26

Post by ams6110 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #4
lawless123 wrote: post #2

""Some people were administering it to their kids," he says. " WTF , fair enough if you want to risk it on yourself but not your children with still developing brains.

The whole thing just reminds me about the radium water craze years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor https://67.media.tumblr.com/1899ba50f59df9c88dace35c13c2c1a7...

I once lived in a area that had naturally elevated levels of radium in the city water supply. Nice that each water bill had a warning about possible bone cancer risk in drinking the water.

Needless to say we had a delivery service for our drinking water.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#27

Post by ricksplat »

Karunamon wrote: post #24
BlanketLogic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't know the effects yet. That's what makes it 'pseudo'.

So by that definition, any new and untested-en-masse "thing" is "pseudoscience", with all the implied quackery baggage that term applies. That is not a useful definition.

It's pseudoscience if it's presented as "scientific fact"; science is the process by which such facts are established. Otherwise you're talking about a hypothesis.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#28

Post by spdustin »

louprado wrote: post #21

RadioLab's 9-Volt Nirvana episode discussed how DARPA uses tCDS to enhance sharp-shooting ability. At the end of the episode, the reporter conveyed a sense of loss when the tCDS system was no longer available to her. She sounded like a drug addict that pines for that feeling of their first high and then risks spending their life in vain trying to recover that feeling. If your life literally depends on a skill and sup…

A quote from the reporter's blog [0]: "When the nice neuroscientists put the electrodes on me, the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut the fuck up."

I'll be honest, that is a pretty compelling testimonial for many folks.

[0]: http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/02/09/better-living-th...

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#29

Post by Karunamon »

ricksplat wrote: post #27
Karunamon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by that definition, any new and untested-en-masse "thing" is "pseudoscience", with all the implied quackery baggage that term applies. That is not a useful definition.

It's pseudoscience if it's presented as "scientific fact"; science is the process by which such facts are established. Otherwise you're talking about a hypothesis.

http://jjodx.weebly.com/home/seven-papers-about-tdcs

Sounds like scientific fact to me. We know it works, it's just a matter of establishing effects on specific tasks.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#30

Post by stared »

Forgive my votum separatum, but:

> The biggest risk is that we just don't know what all the risks are. I think that's the biggest risk.

I would call it "an opportunity". And as far as it is being done voluntarily, and there is a non-zero entry barrier, I am indebted to all those who (maybe) risk their health and lives for possible progress of science, medicine and technology.

Compare it to extreme sports, where there is risk, but often with little or no long-term benefit for the rest of society.

If we restrict ourselves only to "safe", "regulated" and "within the sacred walls of academia" experiments, we will miss (or seriously delay) a lot of things. Especially:

> I don't know that any hospital review board would actually let us do that experiment, so we might never know what that does to brain activity.

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