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Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

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Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#61

Post by quietkatalyst »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #58
graeme wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, interesting. I checked with my friend, and it turns out they had gotten mixed up. They were prescribed benzos, not beta blockers. What made you stop taking them? My friend has been making good progress without them, but still gets some rough days. And what supplements/medicines do you use, apart from phenibut? (To be clear, they've already spoken with a doctor, psychologist, consulted drugs.com listing of side ef…

I stopped taking them for two reasons. 1. I have an absurdly high tolerance to them (and almost all GABAergics, for that matter.) I always have, and also have an absurd alcohol tolerance. So, while clonazepam worked for me, I was taking roughly the maximum dosage designated for severe seizure disorders (I was taking 18mg/day, which if anyone is familiar with clonazepam, they'll know how absurd that is.) 2. I was star…

How much Vitamin D are you taking? I have been supplementing with it, but it did not put much of a dent in my winter depression. And what is considered to be a loading dose?

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#62

Post by AnkhMorporkian »

quietkatalyst wrote: post #61
AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped taking them for two reasons. 1. I have an absurdly high tolerance to them (and almost all GABAergics, for that matter.) I always have, and also have an absurd alcohol tolerance. So, while clonazepam worked for me, I was taking roughly the maximum dosage designated for severe seizure disorders (I was taking 18mg/day, which if anyone is familiar with clonazepam, they'll know how absurd that is.) 2. I was star…

How much Vitamin D are you taking? I have been supplementing with it, but it did not put much of a dent in my winter depression. And what is considered to be a loading dose?

10,000 IU per day. A loading dose is in the range of 100,000IU to 1,000,000IU, depending on age and body weight. Hypervitaminosis D only occurs when you take a loading dose level for months or years; it's not possible to acutely overdose on vitamin D.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#63

Post by onetwotree »

spdustin wrote: post #28
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...

That's exactly how many addicts describe their first experience with drugs and/or alcohol.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#64

Post by praptak »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #48
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…

Larry Niven arguably predicted the existence of wireheads, although his wires ran directly to the brain's pleasure center.

Suppose you can achieve happiness with a wire to the brain. Is there a good argument against doing this?

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#66

Post by ihaveahadron »

DasIch wrote: post #14
VLM wrote: post #10

So the TLDR is its basically like exercise where you can quite easily hurt yourself if you have no idea what you're doing, and you probably do not especially if you're a broscience devotee, and most people make pretty dumb decisions about appropriate levels of repetition, effort, and pain. Another way of putting it is people with poor judgment can now at some effort and money, destroy their brains, not just their kne…

With exercise there are at least people who do know what they're doing you can ask. In this case there isn't anybody who really knows what they're doing, at least not to the point that they can get any benefits out of it.

I think the real "only" way to improve your brain is to improve the sophistication of the "software" that makes up the wiring of your brain. I'm pretty sure from a logical standpoint that electricity alone doesn't do this.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#67

Post by samatman »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #48
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…

Larry Niven arguably predicted the existence of wireheads, although his wires ran directly to the brain's pleasure center.

Although the most famous wirehead (spoiler alert) got a wire installed when he was walking through the park, feeling depressed, and someone shot him with a "tasp", which is a device that stimulates the pleasure centers without wires.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#68

Post by chrischen »

praptak wrote: post #64
pavel_lishin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Niven arguably predicted the existence of wireheads, although his wires ran directly to the brain's pleasure center.

Suppose you can achieve happiness with a wire to the brain. Is there a good argument against doing this?

It would short circuit your normal reward-action feedback loop. We don't live to trigger the reward, we are rewarded to live.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#69

Post by kbenson »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #57
kbenson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that blog post: And then, finally, the main question: what role does doubt and fear play in our lives if its eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we’re freed from them? If we all wore these caps, would the world be a better place? That's a really interesting thought. Not so much "would the world be better", as…

It's a leap to say that suppressing doubt and fear makes people more rational. It could just as well make people more impulsive.

I'm not sure it is that much of a leap. That's not to say that a person will be rational by suppressing those emotions, but as long as the emotions are suppressed, but not the information about any situations that led to those emotions, the person may be able to more objectively assess a situation.

That is, there are assumptions involved, but I think a case could be made that emotions are a way to bypass rational thought when it's less efficient, useful (too slow for the situation) or lack of information (or lack of our own capability) causes us to fall into local maxima thinking (e.g. love, distrust of the different, etc).

If tDCS helps test this in some manner, that would also be good. We of course need a lot more information on what tDCS actually does first though. It's entirely possible that the described effects are not what is happening at all, just what it feels like. Measuring the state of the mind is weird.

Re: Neuroscientists' Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers

#70

Post by gherkin0 »

AnkhMorporkian wrote: post #62
quietkatalyst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much Vitamin D are you taking? I have been supplementing with it, but it did not put much of a dent in my winter depression. And what is considered to be a loading dose?

10,000 IU per day. A loading dose is in the range of 100,000IU to 1,000,000IU, depending on age and body weight. Hypervitaminosis D only occurs when you take a loading dose level for months or years; it's not possible to acutely overdose on vitamin D.

That's a lot. Vitamin D tests are easy to get, so I just took a few over a few months to find a dose that would keep me at ~50ng/ml. Previous to that, I had taken 5000+ IU/day for some time and the test showed my levels were very high.

It looks like this site has a nice chart: https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/further-topics/i-tested-my-v...

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