Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm both a tCDS user and a Modafinil user. I'm 30, and don't mind trading life expectancy for higher cognitive function.
do you think you can develop (stronger) synesthesia?
That's the plan.
Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
101–110 of 123 posts
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm not convinced. the "high" of alcohol and benzodiazepenes is caused by GABA receptor agonism. the "high" of MDMA is caused by serotonin reuptake inhibition and dopamine release. the "high" of Ketamine is caused by NMDA receptor antagonism. the "high" of psychedelics like LSD or DMT are caused by a unique cocktail of selective agonism of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenergic receptor subtypes, and so on. the one comm…
It is true you cannot bind to a neurotransmitter from a headband. The research that these efforts are based on involved direct activation of the neuron ganglia by inducing currents in them through the absorption of electromagnetic energy (in the case of DBS) and by increasing electron flow in the case of tDCS). Hiker and Voger's work [1] (and a bunch of others, just look for DBS and dopamine) which looks at Dopamine…
hmm. tDCS and DBS are certainly really interesting technologies, but i still don't see them having any recreational mechanism. in the case that they can act as monoamine releasing agents, the absolute best case is that you can make a meth-band.
the second study is completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make. not trying to be mean but i just don't understand how a study about the efficacy of tDCS in studies is related to possible recreational effects from tDCS/DBS.
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is true you cannot bind to a neurotransmitter from a headband. The research that these efforts are based on involved direct activation of the neuron ganglia by inducing currents in them through the absorption of electromagnetic energy (in the case of DBS) and by increasing electron flow in the case of tDCS). Hiker and Voger's work [1] (and a bunch of others, just look for DBS and dopamine) which looks at Dopamine…
hmm. tDCS and DBS are certainly really interesting technologies, but i still don't see them having any recreational mechanism. in the case that they can act as monoamine releasing agents, the absolute best case is that you can make a meth-band. the second study is completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make. not trying to be mean but i just don't understand how a study about the efficacy of tDCS in stu…
What is the difference if you find a way to switch on the neurons that make you believe your neurochemistry has changed?
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where cocaine was legal, people used the cocoa leaf to make a tea they drank all the time, the way we drink coffee or caffeinated soda. When heroin was legal (from the Bayer company!), addicts took it in pill form and it caused no particular social or financial or health problems - the primary negative effect of long-term heroin use is constipation. The vast majority of the harm illegal drugs do to people is due to t…
That's very interesting. I haven't yet gone through the book you linked, but it appears from a quick glance at wikipedia that chronic cocaine usage does bring with it some fairly bad physical side-effects. Are you saying that chronic usage will be rare if cocaine were legal? You seem right however about heroin: "Like most opioids, unadulterated heroin does not cause many long-term complications other than dependence…
If cocaine were legal, most people would tend to use it in milder forms, as they have done in the past. (eg, the recipe for coca-cola used to include cocaine).
With heroin, the physical harm is almost ENTIRELY due to illegality - when a heroin addict can get the drug cheaply and in a known dosage and use it safely, they don't really have a problem. Our moral puritanism says being addicted is JUST BAD so we pass laws that CAUSE most of the harm we attribute to the drug.
Cocaine isn't quite like that. If you take a lot of cocaine it can cause nasty psychological symptoms - paranoia during use, depression between uses. On the other hand, cocaine is quite a lot like caffeine (and other stimulants) in this regard. Too much of any psychoactive drug is bad, but in moderation it's safe enough and has often been used by truck drivers who need to stay awake. Or people who need to be extra creative (eg: Robin Williams)
Even for this drug, the net harm of illegality almost certainly exceeds the net benefit. One could imagine a world in which making cocaine illegal stopped anyone from doing cocaine, but that's not the world we actually live in. The world we actually live in, it's generally accepted that our last two presidents used cocaine in school - it's not really fair to throw people in jail and take away their kids and their stuff because they were poor and used cocaine while people who are rich and use cocaine just get away with it. Which is what the current regime seems to amount to.
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#105> Mr. Siever treats himself for chronic depression, reporting equally striking results. I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Siever is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the tCDS doing anything or not.
You don't actually need a controlled double-blind study to notice a medical effect, IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent. Traditional "controlled double-blind studies" are nice to have, but are much too likely to accidentally reject good medicines and medical treatments of the sort that might be discovered and confirmed via this sort of personal experimentation. (Yes, false positives are bad, but false…
UPDATE: I'm getting downvoted, most likely from people who don't know what I'm referring to. So let me clarify: The platonic ideal of a traditional drug or medical treatment is something that works the same way on EVERYBODY. When you do a controlled double-blind study, you specify one specific treatment regimen - use dose X as a function of unit mass or of condition severity - and test whether that (a) has a statistically significant effect which (b) beats the control.
Now imagine a drug which has this effect: half the time it makes people better (often quite a bit better). 30% of the time it has no effect, and 20% of the time it has a NEGATIVE effect - it makes people WORSE along the metric being measured.
(one example of a treatment that has this sort of outcome pattern: exercise. If you measure blood pressure or cholesterol levels, it helps many but hurts some (about 12%) and has no effect on others(about 20%))
A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders.
In contrast, a "quantified self" personal science study where somebody carefully tracks their statistic and tries out an intervention while doing some A/B comparisons, is likely to discover whether they ARE or ARE NOT a positive responder. If they ARE, further experimentation can help find the best dose regimen for their particular situation.
(of course, if we knew and could measure exactly which factors make some people positive responders and others negative responders, then we could test in the traditional way. But until we DO know that, studying at the individual level is often the best or even the only available way to figure out how to help individuals.)
As for my "IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent" bit, I'll just note that big controlled studies are sometimes abandoned when an intervention is SO successful it is deemed unethical to deny the treatment to the control group.
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#106I am convinced that at some point some smart sod will figure out how to create a 'high' by using something along the lines of this. Put on a headband, flick the switch, and blam! high as a kite. Turn the switch off, and back to being sober. When that happens, the world will change in a very unpredictable way. Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that are part of the drug trade will suddenly have no where to go. All…
i'm not convinced. the "high" of alcohol and benzodiazepenes is caused by GABA receptor agonism. the "high" of MDMA is caused by serotonin reuptake inhibition and dopamine release. the "high" of Ketamine is caused by NMDA receptor antagonism. the "high" of psychedelics like LSD or DMT are caused by a unique cocktail of selective agonism of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenergic receptor subtypes, and so on. the one comm…
>psychedelics like LSD or DMT are caused by a unique cocktail of selective agonism of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenergic receptor subtypes, and so on.
LSD breaks down almost instantly in the body yet the effects continue on for 10-12 hours. Receptor binding might be a trigger for these states but it's a stretch to say it's central to the bio-molecular cascade that then produces these states.
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
it has been tried on humans only twice AFAIK
Details/cite?
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already have wireheading, but the surgery is too invasive for it to be anything but an obscure curiosity.
There is a lot of ambiguity about whether we are able to activate pleasure or merely activate wanting.
I'm not sure there's any real practical difference as far as utility or the negative effects go.
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't actually need a controlled double-blind study to notice a medical effect, IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent. Traditional "controlled double-blind studies" are nice to have, but are much too likely to accidentally reject good medicines and medical treatments of the sort that might be discovered and confirmed via this sort of personal experimentation. (Yes, false positives are bad, but false…
UPDATE: I'm getting downvoted, most likely from people who don't know what I'm referring to. So let me clarify: The platonic ideal of a traditional drug or medical treatment is something that works the same way on EVERYBODY. When you do a controlled double-blind study, you specify one specific treatment regimen - use dose X as a function of unit mass or of condition severity - and test whether that (a) has a statisti…
> A double-blind study of THAT sort of intervention will find a low AVERAGE effect because the AVERAGE includes the nonresponders and the negative responders.
It'd also find a higher standard deviation in the experimental group, which, especially if the data had been graphically plotted, would trigger an f-test to check for increased variance. Finding the increase would then become the main result and one could start looking for predictive variables. (F-tests might not be statistics 101, perhaps, but it's 102.)
> As for my "IF the effect is sufficiently strong and consistent" bit, I'll just note that big controlled studies are sometimes abandoned when an intervention is SO successful it is deemed unethical to deny the treatment to the control group.
Usually after checking that the interim data is statistically-significant enough, assuming this wasn't built into the study design from the start as an adaptive experimental design...
Re: Do It Yourself Brain Stimulation has Scientists Worried
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there literally no potential for artificial selection to outpace natural selection? Of course there's potential and loopholes but the basic observation (dubbed 'Algernon's law' by some; I've written an entire essay on the topic: http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics ) seems sound for tDCS: it's such a trivial intervention that it shouldn't work, which suggests there must be some catch. The catch may well be tri…
Or, the catch could be such that, with such enhancements, everyone realizes the meaninglessness of existence and kills themselves in a fit of existential rage.
That would have been noticed already.