Augmenting the Brain, Part Two: Tech

I were smarter than I am. Usually every time we're doing research about something like, uh, you know, the inner workings of the brain or particle physics. That's what I'm like, Oh man, that would be that would be great. Wish. Yeah, I wish both of you were smarter too, Thanks Joe. No, I also wish that I was smarter. It would be wonderful to understand all those things that can be so difficult. But one of the funny things about intelligence is there

are a lot of different aspects to it, right. Yes, it's not just one thing. So you have like a memory retention or different types of information processing, spatial reasoning, verbal memorization. Just memory memory, and then there's verbal memory. There's there's linguistic processing. There's all this kind of stuff that is, uh, you know, the domain of the brain. And it's not like one tiny section of the brain

is in control of all of it. This is spread across multiple regions of our brains depending upon what sort of processing you're talking about, and many of these things are very interconnected. It's not like, for just verbal reasoning, there's one section of the brain that operates completely independently of everything, right, Right, But so all I'm saying is I'd settle for improving just one part of my brain.

If I could just improve my memory or just improve my spatial reasoning or anything like that, that that would also be great. I wouldn't even have to be the whole picture. But it's hard to do that, isn't it. Like how do you go about powering up your brain? As if you you just like ate a berry in a video game and and now you're larger or have wings, or you throw fire leveled up somehow you got a little ding and suddenly you can add a point to intelligence. Yeah.

We talked about this a little bit in our last episode, where we were chatting about the various types of neuro enhancing chemicals. Some of them being like dietary supplements or or just stuff you would get if you're eating a nice, healthy diet. Some of them being things like medications used for one purpose being repurposed to be a neuro enhancement drug. Um. But that's not the only way that some people are looking at trying to boost how the brain works. No,

not at all. So the reasoning is that the brain is an electrochemical machine. And in the last podcast we talked about how, well, if it's an electrochemical machine, surely there must be some sort of chemical ways to make it work a little bit better. Now we want to look at the other half of the equation. Are their devices sort of a electrical or electromagnetic pieces of technology that might actually improve your brain function, make it more efficient,

more powerful in one way or another. Right, whether that is something that you use to to alter your brain in some way and therefore you from that point forward are super smart, or it's something that you are apparently wearing, either on a regular basis or maybe even permanently to

enhance your brain's function. So, if you think of it from superhero terms, we're moving from say a a an altered human like Spider Man to perhaps a human that is using technology to boost their abilities, like Tony Stark an iron Man. So we're going from the the chemical changes to the technologically boosted type human basically like, can you put on a helmet that makes you a genius? Yes,

that's what we're looking at today. So, uh, what's interesting is that that seems like a silly question to most people like you, Like you're literally putting on a thinking cap. You really are being able to boost your intelligence some of these examples, Yeah, a little bit in a possible future way. Yeah. The the downer is, folks, the brain, as we said in our last episode. Despite the fact that it's been a couple of days since we recorded

that last episode, there's a peak behind the curtain. It has actually been a couple of days since we recorded augmenting the brain with chemicals. In that time, we have not learned significantly more about how the human brain works. So, yeah, we as a species now it's still more or less

a mystery to us. We regret to inform you. Yes, So that means, of course that any sort of boost we see is something that's based upon just a limited understanding, and it may not mean you know, that doesn't necessarily mean there's not an effect there. It just means that we don't know how great that effect is. We don't know if we are producing the best effect, We don't know what the long term effects of it, be sure, and it also unfortunately opens the door to a certain

amount of quackery and scam artists. Kennery, Well, we should always start with scams whenever possible. You have you found any or there any anybody out there selling like genius helmets there? Well, I'm sure there's some novelty ones out there, but there are also some that some devices that are being marketed as things that can make your brain work better, and most of them are based on no scientific rounding whatsoever.

I've pulled one example, just out of all the different ones that you could find if you really wanted to do some searching, one is the ch Generator, which is a device that supposedly can and I quote here charge food drinks and supplements with trend characteristics. So what does

that mean? I don't know, And there's no explanation. I mean, it's if you look at the web page, it's all meaningless babble that's meant to suggest that this little device that looks like a key chain fall when you pointed at stuff, shoots it with smart beams that then will make it turn into smart stuff when you consume it.

Sounds ye, it's it's mostly based upon the concept, the cultural concept of qi, you know, the this idea of energy that flows through the body that has very strong significance in certain cultures but does not have any support in the world of science. So, you know, I don't mean to suggest that people who who follow that philosophy are doing so in some way that is, you know,

is bad. I don't mean that there's just not science supported well, and I do believe that some research has supported a certain amount of placebo effect if nothing else absolutely related to so sure, Well, there's a difference between something having a legitimate cultural significance or a meaning for

a person and being a physical substance. Right. Also, the term trend characteristics makes me think that they're doing something with I don't know, like Twitter and search search engine optimization, hashtag quackery. Um no, it's at any rate, there are things out there, There are devices out there that aim to make people believe that they would help increase cognitive function. In some way. Usually it's you know, the very vague

terms like focus and memory. But those are the same vague terms that we have to use for the things that are are actually supported by science, because, as we just said, the brain is very mysterious and to be able to zero in on a very specific function is beyond our capabilities as of right now. But we might be getting there. Yeah, we're certainly working on it, I

mean legitimately working on it. Yes, and then then you know, beyond the the outright kind of you know, this almost feels like a, like I said, a novelty item in a way, there's a the idea of brain entrainment. Now have you this before? I saw your note and I was very intrigued. Right, So, have you ever heard of uh, binaural beats? Have you ever heard that term? Binaral beats?

It tends to be this stuff that it's supposedly targets your brain in very specific ways to get a specific result, such as being able to boost confidence or boost your your ability to process things that you had learned that day. Wait a minute, but what are they? Okay? So binoral beats, it's generally speaking, it's when you have a certain tone of a certain frequency played within one ear, and a

different tone with a different frequency. I mean those are that's kind of I'm being redundant, I guess being played in the other ear. It sounds so it sounds. Yeah, you're actually listening to these and that's where the oral comes from. It's binaural. You can also get monaural, which are single tones in both ears. But the idea is that these these different tones are supposed to create a

resonance in your brain waves. And that sounds pretty on of you know, uh, like pseudoscience, but that actually is based on reality. Are are We do have brain waves. Uh, they do transmit in frequencies, but usually they're transmitting in little bursts. Like when I say a little burst, I'm talking about millions of neurons at once. But we have like eighty billion of these in our heads, so millions is a small amount over the grand scheme of things.

But uh, they generally you don't have them kind of resonating in in a frequency over and over unless you're going to sleep, because your brain actually does the activity changes during the different phases of alertness. Right, this is

all based on science. So when neurons fired, they give up these little electric and magnetic fields which are usually too weak to detect individually, like a single neurons electric or magnetic field is so is so insignificant that you if you actually in the face of all of the other stuff that's going on in there, right if you if you had an electrode attached to your scalp and you're trying to pick up the activity of a single neuron, that's pretty hopeless. But when they are firing together, you

can obviously detect that sort of thing. Um, So the effect is real, this effect of being able to make the brain resonate and and fire in frequency. This is why if you have ever played a video game that has that warning ahead of it saying warning there are a lot of flashing lights. Yeah, yeah, gone into a into a show or a ride an amusement park. Yeah, a lot of these will say you know, there there may be flashing lights. So anyone who is prone to

epileptic seizures might want to avoid. And that's because the those lights can create what's called photic driving, which is a rapid stimulation of the light affecting a part of the brain that the visual processing center of the brain, which then can trigger this abnormal neural impulse, uh fit

an epileptic seizure. It's a it's sort of an overstimulation. Yeah, it's it's kind of like, you know, your whole brain just starts firing uncontrollably and that then you see the various results, and you know, epileptic seizures manifest in different ways. The one that we tend to think of as the one where someone has lost motor control and falls over, and it's it's incredibly stressful if you've ever witnessed one, um or or if you've ever had one, I mean,

it's very a very stressful thing. But uh, that is also something that we can induce like a brain resonance. Not not an epileptic seizure necessarily, but this this resonating frequency in the brain, and its by purposeful exposure to light pattern light pattern or or sound patterns. So the

binaural beats. While you know, they're suggesting that they can do things like increase your abilities in some either vague way or sometimes they'll claim a specific way, what they're really doing is they might allow your brain to again sort of sort of move in this this frequency, the neural activity will kind of flow with this frequency, but it doesn't change the activity itself. It does doesn't change

the function of the brain. So it's kind of like you get Imagine that you have like a large body of water and you see like all the little waves that are on the water. Imagine that you were able to get them to move in a perfect frequency. Well, the water is still moving the water, the activity is still going, but it's not like it's suddenly better at moving water than it was before. And when you turn the machine off, then it stops moving the water. Yeah,

and your brain and it turns back to normal. It's normal thing. Yeah. So the thing is that the science is there to suggest that that there are these times when our brains will fire in these kind of resonating frequencies. Like I said, they offer rhythm. That's when you're awake.

That's the least likely for it to be really kind of resonating, but that's when your brain is the brainways are moving at a frequency between eight to twelve hurts uh theda rhythm is when you're kind of getting drowsy, that's a frequency around six to seven hurts, and deep

sleep is the delta range. That's when you're talking about four to five hurts and by neural beats kind of try to get your brain to fire in these frequencies that are similar to usually the fada or delta stages and so um, yeah, it's it's one of those things that it is an actual effect. The entrainment really does happen,

but it doesn't it doesn't result in increased cognitive functions. Yeah, there's it just it just is a thing like and you can it might be something that's useful for you to relax, to get into kind of a meditative state which might help you deal with stress or anxiety. It's not that there aren't any viable uses for this. There are.

It's just a question of is the is the the advertised effect of getting some gained cognitive ability actually scientifically grounded, and that so far is not the case as Yeah, pending further research. I'm sure if you, I don't know, reverse the polarity or something like that exactly, but well, I'd like to transition to a different topic, something that actually does have some science behind it, albeit limited science, but there have been actual results around something called transcranial

direct current stimulation. Now Joe are you about to suggest that a person could maybe put a couple of electrodes against their head and zapp some current through their skull and actually change the way their brain is functioning. You know, I don't know, but there are some preliminary scientific results that suggest that might be the case, and it's something that we need to learn a lot more about. But yes,

that is essentially what is being suggested. Put direct external application of electric current to the scalp and that that affects the way the brain works positively is the allegation the goal. You don't, we don't. We're not talking about some sort Jack Bauer torture device from twenty four where, you know, flip the switch, make them talk. It's not

quite like no, no, no, no no, okay. So, transcranial direct current stimulation or t DCS is the technique of stimulating the brain with small amounts and we want to emphasize small amount of electrical current applied directly to the scalp, to the skin on your head. And it's possible that this could treat certain diseases or disorders in the future, but right now it is not FDA approved for these purposes.

There's an FDA approved method that's similar to this they'll talk about in a little bit, but this particular case not yet approved by the FDA, but it is being used in experimental cases in various researches. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But why would this work, I mean, why would it actually even have an effect on the brain to apply a little bit of electrical current to the skin on your head. Well, in general,

we we do run on electrical current. Yeah, our our neurons are communicating with each other or through these electrochemical reactions. And we covered the chemical side. It turns out the electric electric side also plays a part. If you bus any part of your body, it's going to have an effect on your not a system, yes, yeah, I have Usually it's a negative effect in my case, So please do not buzz any part of my body. I would appreciate that. This is just a note for everybody, including

the people in this room. Okay, but what's going on here specifically, Jonathan, Well, specifically, we're talking about stimulating the activity that's already going on in the brain by kind of boosting the current. Now, the general ideas that if you have a like a microprocessor, one of the ways you can make the microprocessor work faster is by pouring more juice into it than it normally would have. Mean electricity, not literal juice, orange, just particularly affective UH antioxidants. Aside,

we're talking about electricity here. Yeah, electricity is specifically what I'm referring to. But as we need to stress multiple times, I'm sure this small amount of current is what's important because if you if you were to overload your brain, you could do severe damage. You could injure yourself, you could kill yourself. Um, I mean that's electrocution is a real thing. So it's very, very vital that anyone working in this kind of arena would practice lots of caution.

And the reason we say that is because while we're gonna be talking a lot about some of the research that's gone around this particular field, there are a lot of people out there who are just charging ahead with d I o Y projects to create these do it yourself electrodes attached to their heads so that they can try and get a boost from electrical stimulation. And if you don't do that correctly, you could really really hurt yourself. Yeah, we do not personally recommend trying this at home, even

if you do do it correctly. I think we're not entirely sure what the long term of facts with doing this over time might be. Either. We have no clue if there are any long term effects that could end up being detrimental. We know that in the short term. Uh, we've seen what can happen, and and the results are pretty interesting. Yeah, under very specific conditions. The Air Force was doing some research into this. Yeah right, yeah, so the Air Force was using t dcs to help train

drone pilots. So what were the effects. Well. Scientific American covered this story in November two thousand eleven after scientists from the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base reported their findings at a meeting of neuroscientists earlier that month in November two thousand eleven, And what they found was they tested t dcs on drone pilots who were learning to pick out potential targets from radar feedback.

The pilots practiced this on video simulations kind of like you know, like a video game. When the pilots just their skills, they received small amounts of electrical current from patches placed on the scalp and they said it was two milliampiars of continuous DC current for half an hour thirty minutes. And the study found that tDCS could potentially cut training time in half. That's doubling the speed of

learning really significant, which is quite significant. Yeah, on the other hand, it's not a done deal because I mean, could the placebo effect be partially or wholly responsible. One of the things about this is when it's happening, you feel a tingling, you know it's going on. So it's hard in this case to give somebody a placebo pill basically too to cover the you know. So it's like if you if you hooked up patches to somebody's head and didn't give them the current, they would know because

they didn't feel it. Actually, there is another study where they did try to control for that to replicate the tingling sensation without actually running an electrical current through the uh the electrodes, so that the subjects would not know whether or not they were uh having me any current passed through their brain. Uh. It was a Vanderbilt University study and they used a a sham condition that replicated the physical tingling sensation under the electrodes without affecting the brain.

I don't know exactly what that was like. I don't know how they achieved this, but what they did was they took subjects and they attached these electrodes to their to their scalp, and in some cases they ran the occurrence and the control they did not, and the subjects were told to play a game essentially where there was a color shown on a screen and they were to hit a certain button on a video game controller that was going to correspond with that color, and then occasionally

they would get a message saying not to push any button at all. And it was done at about a second per image. And it was one of those things where it was just complicated enough where most people, you know, there's a there's a learning curve you have to figure out. Oh wait, no, no, no, no, not exactly. So it was one of those things where there were a lot

of potential ways to get something wrong. And they found that when they ran the current UH, they were actually able to boost people's ability to learn from their mistakes. They would learn more quickly and be able to complete the task with fewer errors in the long run because they picked up on things faster than the control group did.

So here you're talking about not just a continuous level of direct current, but you're talking about dynamic transcranial stimulation, right, so that it responds to what they do with different levels of current. It was meant to. Uh So, when we make a mistake and we're aware of it. When we become aware of a mistake, there's little spike of

neuronal activity that happens in our brain. And these scientists said, what happens if we amplify that spike, which to me just makes me think of Egon saying, let's see what happens when we take the puppy A yeah, but they want the goal. Remember when you tried to shock your brain. Actually I was trying to drill a hole in your head. No current topic. That's current topic. Very good, So you

brought it onto yourself, all right? At any rate, that what they found was that by by boosting the signal that was going through the head, whenever someone realized they made a mistake, it didn't make the person feel bad. They didn't. All they would feel was a little light tingling from the electrodes. Okay, so you're not talking about

like negative reinforcement with like shocking you painfully. This was literally a type of activity in the brain that we are unaware of consciously, but it does guide us in learning through our mistakes, and that they found that by boosting it, people learned faster, which is kind of cool. Yeah. I like that. If it means that I will learn more quickly, but I won't be feeling like super stupid

for making mistakes. I'm all in favor. If, however, it just makes me learn so that I haven't because I have an aversion to feeling dumb, that's not so good. That would be rough. I mean I I guess it would be, you know, feeling intensely dumb for half the time. Of course, the thing they're like, if you're going to try to create a genius helmet out of that, that

seems like it it would be harder to do. Like if you're just boosting your general brain power with continuous direct current and see, okay, you've got a helmet, you put it on while you're researching for the podcast or studying for test, whatever it is, and and you've learned things faster, you retain more. How if you're trying to do this other thing where it lets you reinforce learning from mistakes.

How does the helmet know when you've made a mistake, Well, it would have to be hooked up to the system. So what would happen is you have to be some kind of like error detecting program. Well, essentially what you have is you think of it as a video game and you just have the helmet hooked up to the video game. And when you didn't press jump when you needed to press jump, that's when the helmet just goes ahead and boost the signal because it knows that you

didn't do what you need is to do well. But if you don't pronounce anaphylactic correctly, how does the helmet I mean, I mean that's there's some serious That's the thing is that it all depends upon the implementation of what you're using to learn. See, in this case, it was specifically seeing if this stimulation would help with learning a specific task. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily translatable

into any task you totally. That's what I'm saying is if we're imagining this is like you know, down the road in the future, Okay, we've decided this is safe and you want it for your home technology, This would put it all on schools and kids in school coming and they put these big electrode things on that. It seems like this kind of thing would be more useful for like controlled learning situations where there's some kind of

system for detecting errors. But I don't know. Yeah, when it comes down to it, it won't turn you into a super genius. No, it doesn't. It doesn't suddenly mean that, you know, you zap your head and you can start rattling off, you know, complex quantum equations and you totally understand it. It just means that a lot of the processes that you would go through have kind of become streamlined because you've got a little more electricity running through

your brain. But that's kind of what these people creating these d I Y kids are going for, right, the super genius thing. Yeah, it's at least they're looking to looking to boost their ability, their their cognitive abilities. And again, just like we were talking with the the resonance, if you turn the machine off, you lose that that boost because, uh, it's no longer supplying that extra electricity to your brain

for those processes. It's fine when you're if you're learning something by memorization, then you're going to retain that information. And so if you were, like I don't know, an actor studying for a part and you wanted to learn your lines and half the time it normally took you, that might end up being a really effective way of doing it. But if you're trying to understand a concept, it may not be as useful to you. Yeah, part of the problem is despite the fact that we have

some research on this, there's still a lot we don't know. Uh, they're just we just need to do a lot more research on this before we know how big the actual effect is, if there is one there. I think there probably is some effect that's real and not just placebo, but we don't know for sure. We want to find out if that is real, how big is the effect, what's the best way to use it, Are there long term side effects, the reasons you shouldn't do it too,

what's the actual mechanism. I mean, we don't understand the full mechanism in the brain yet. So this is this is like saying we found this thing that makes us do something a little better than what we could do before. We don't understand how we're able to do that. Thing in the first place, and we don't know why this thing makes it easier for us to accomplish this task. So without knowing those basics, is it really safe to go down this road? I mean it maybe, but we

don't know whether or not. We know a lot of people are into this idea. They're so. In May, Wired ran a story covering the d I Y movement in transcranial direct current stimulation. People who are just making kits, or some people are selling kits online that you can order. Some people make them themselves out of a nine vault battery and some wet sponges. I'm I've thought about doing this. I've actually I'm a little bit tempted. But I know, I know we should reserve, we should be cautious. I

know that. I know that for me, I'd be able to get a really good seal against the scalp because there ain't nothing there to impede it. Yeah, electric electric shock or electric convulsive therapy is one of my actual like squicks in this universe. So that's not that's not where but at any rate, Well, anyway, I just wanted to talk about the public interest in this. In that Wired article, I mentioned they said at the time, this

was May of this year. Uh, they mentioned that there's a subreddit did did to the practice, because of course there is with four thousand subscribers. I was like, I wonder what that number is today. I went back and checked it. It has grown. There are now five thousand, eight hundred and forty five subscribers as of today to this d I y T DCS subreddit. So people are are thinking about doing it, some people are actually doing it. It's out there and and I wonder are we losing

our edge? I mean, are these other Are these guys on Reddit getting smarter than people? I hear that this American Life does their podcast while doing this transcribing current. That's what I'm just saying that if we just want to stay competitive, guys, we have to you know, we have to consider this. Um, if you are actually using the the one to two milla amps of current, which

is the way typically these these devices, that's the typical output. Uh, that's not enough for you to cause a neuron to fire off on a zone, but you do facilitate the connections, the neuronal connections between neurons. So, but that's really important to note that that's within that one to two milliamps of current, and do you think anything over that? And you really that's dangerous stuff. It's not necessarily safe just with the one to too. Like Joe was saying before,

we don't know what the long term effects are. So while I am certainly curious about this, I don't know that I would ever actually put on the stuff and snap a battery in place and see if that actually works for me, because I kind of value my brain and I don't want to find out that. Because I did that twenty years down the road, I can't think of anything other than old episodes of happy Days or something. I knew you were going to say, happy Days. I really did you were going to say. I rejected two

others before I said that one in my brain. It must be because we've got these wires going from skull to skull. Why we have these we just woke up that way. Don't worry about it. This American life like and all of their hosts connected directly cranulator. Uh well, at any rate, there's another there's another technique that is uh non invasive, that's very similar to this. In fact,

it proceeds direct current stimulation. Transcranial magnetic stimulation. Now, we mentioned that when neurons fire, they give off a little electronic electric field and a little magnetic field. That's because of the the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Right, there's there's we know very much a lot about this, this relationship. Well, it's similar, but it uses electro magnets instead of electrodes to stimulate the brain. And usually it's used for people

who are suffering from depression. It's one of the potential treatments for people with depression, and it may or may not work on people who are actually suffering from depression. It's not it's not a cure. It's not some magic that takes the depression away. But it can be an effective treatment for some people. Whether or not it's effective because of the actual mechanism or because of the placebo

effect is also really complicated. The brain, like we said, is a big mystery, and sometimes if you think something works, it has the effect of working even though there's no actual mechanism going on. So too complicated for us to say. However, it is a treatment that's been approved by the FDA.

I think it got approval back in two thousand eight actually for the treatment of depression, because again it's non invasive, it's using electromagnets, it's not harmful in any way, and it's meant to stimulate activity in certain parts of the brain particularly either stimulate or to impede activity, depending upon how you're targeting it. But like the area of the brain that is involved with directing moods would be what would be targeted in UH in a treatment for depression.

And how effective it actually is in this method hasn't been completely supported by science yet. There's been a lot of stays that have had some efficacy shown, but you know that again could be within the realm of error. UM. There's disagreement in the field about whether or not it's actually an effective treatment. Meanwhile, UM people have actually thought about using it as a means of trying to make themselves smarter, just like the d I Y transcranial direct

current stimulation. People have tried to use the magnetic stimulation as well UH. And there is one researcher by the name of Alan Snyder who claims that it has an effect on creativity different from what we've been saying earlier. He said that it's a different, different, form of intelligence entirely. Yeah.

He talked about using UH sessions, using this transcranial magnetic stimulation and finding that the subjects were able of subjects were able to express things artistically that apparently they had limited or no ability to do before, which to me seems pretty bold. That's a pretty subjective sounding statement, but I haven't read the research. Maybe it's a little Yeah.

And they also said that the effects were off after like an a half, so it's not something like you you wear this cap, you turn on the switch and you become the next Picasso. Uh. Your ability to express yourself creatively may suddenly be boosted, and it maybe because you have this boosted activity in that part of your brain, but that is all due to the stimulation, and once the stimulation is removed, you go back to your normal

state of being. So it's entirely possible that it could have a very similar effect to the direct current stimulation, but it may just be this temporary boost temporary and in a slightly slightly skewed different different way there. Yeah, I did want to put in that this electromagnetic therapy is an alternative to electric convulsive therapy electric shock therapy,

which we just mentioned a moment ago. Uh. And in in contrast to you know, popular media portrayals, today, electrochock therapy is considered pretty safe and effective in treating severe depression where medication has failed to help. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't even realize this. They think

of it as some kind of barbaric, outdated thing. Yeah, thing that happened in the sixties, or just to Ellen Burston and requien for a dream or something like that, Dorothy and return to Oz main character and sucker punch. That's that. That whole Dorothy and returned to Oz thing is why I have a problem with electric shocks, why I have I mean, but this is a this is a treatment that actually seems to work for a lot

of people, and people requested. It's not like, oh yeah, yeah, it's it's only given to I think the last number that I saw was a hundred thousand patients out of every you know, multiple million who suffer from depression. But but at any rate, well, I mean, and also, your your doctor puts you under general anesthesia and gives you muscle relaxers so that you're not literally convulsive. That's it's

good times relatively for everyone. But it's the The way that it works is it's a purposeful induction of a seizure via electrical stimulation, similar to what we were talking about the transcranial one before, but but more intense. And theories for why it works on depression range from it changing the blood flow or or the brain's metabolism, to changing chemical release or reuptake, to stimulation of nerve cell and pathway growth. Um. But it is definitely not a

memory aid. Side effects include and as many as like a quarter to two thirds of the patients who undergo the procedure problems in forming memories after the treatment or recalling memories from before the treatment. It sounds like it has an effect on the hippocampus. Then that's from my completely amateur armchair neurologist perspective. You know, it's it's it's another treatment that we're not sure why it works, but

um but it does. They they have they they've done placebo studies with it where they have put some patients under the anesthesia and under the muscle relaxers and told them that they had delivered the treatment but they had not and it um it did not work. So interesting. So so there is a there is an effect here, we just don't fully understand it. This is the way a law of uh not a lot, but this is the way that some medical science goes. And it's it's both.

It's it's the most dangerous in a sense in that when we start to see an effect, our hopes really get pinned on that. But until we fully understand the whole mechanism, we can't be entirely certain that this is the right path to go down. So if all things turn out great, we end up with a treatment that genuinely helps people and doesn't have any any severe negative side effects or long term effects. Uh, that's that's the best case scenario. But that's the thing is that we

just don't know. So this is this is the pioneering science and medicine is fascinating, and I don't I find it um frightening in some senses. Yeah, And and that's also why you know this kind of treatment isn't I don't think anyone's doing d I Y electroshock therapy fingers crossed. Yeah, it's it's really only being used for patients with severe

enough depressive disorders that nothing else is working. Maybe maybe the John Lithgl's character from Buck Rubon's I he he did a little do it yourself electroshock that I don't think that anyone should really follow John Let's character from Bucky Bond's Eyes anyway, lose a laughing now, monkey boy. So we've talked about external stuff as the magnetic stimulation, the transcranial direct current stimulation that's just patches on the skin might have an effect. But let's talk about something

that definitely has some serious effects. Intracranial. Yeah, that's when you're actually talking about brain implants. You have to open up the skull and put a probe into a person's brain. Um. It's a surgical procedure, serious stuff, very invasive, certainly, Um, But the amount of electricity that you can deliver at that point is way less invasive then it would be if you had to put it through the skull. Yeah.

And you could also you could also target very specific regions of the brain this way, because you know, if you look at the is the transcranial generally speaking, you see someone who has a a like a sponge right above one eyebrow and a sponge at a temple, and that's the best you can do to try and target the brain. There's a lot of the brain and it's it's a lot of pin the tail on the donkey

at that point in the tail on the brain part. Yeah, exactly, the electric current on the brain, the cerebellum on the never mind. Um. Yeah, so this is this is much more precise in that sense, and you can target things like the hippocampus, right, which we're pretty sure sifts and files information from other parts of our brain. It's we think it's the part that forms our memories. Um. Direct stimulation to the hippocampus, though, has been shown to interfere

with new memory formation. So what right, Yeah, it's it's like, hey, don't do that, um, but what else can we zap? Then we have tried what's you know, just don't don't touch that. You never know what's connected to Oh we we tried a few different areas and this this kind of treatment, these implants, um and even if they're not implants, just a just a temporary threaded electrode through the skull, has been used in management of Parkinson's depression and stuff

like obsessive compulsive disorder. And we don't entirely understand Again, how it changes the brain, but it indeed does um and for some memory specific disorders. Some researchers are starting to single out areas that interact with the hippocampus. Yeah, so this is shown to be an effective treatment for a lot of different neurological conditions and it can provide relief if you might have epilepsy or Parkinson's or something

like that. But can intracranial stimulation electricity inside the brain provide brain boosting powers? H Yeah. There was a paper published by researchers from u c l A called Memory Enhancement and Deep Brain Stimulation of the interginal Area, and these researchers were working with a group of seven epilepsy patients who were already being fit within brain electrodes in an attempt to figure out where their seizures were coming

from in order to isolate those areas for potential surgery. Okay, so so it's not like they were just cutting people skulls open, willy nilly. There there was a predetermined purpose for doing this, and they were like, well, while we're in there, hey, guys, since you already have these electrodes implanted in your brains, why don't you let us do

this other thing that we think would be pretty neat. Uh. Yeah. So, so they used these electrodes to deliver electrical stimulation to this enter rhinal area, which is a brain bit that's been pinpointed as the first place that signs of Alzheimer's damage appears. Um. We think it's the primary gate of

information about real time happenings into the hippocampus for further processing. Um. So. So the stimulation was given while the patients were playing a video game in which they had to navigate an unfamiliar city, and that stimulation actually seem to enhance their ability to have spatial learning, like improve their spatial learning. They were able to navigate the city more effectively than they would have otherwise, and in one case, it seemed

to actually boost memory performance as well. Uh. They were very quick to say they can't be sure that methodology would work for everyone. These are this is a specific case. These are epilepsy patients, small sample as well. Um And so it's interesting, but nothing that you can draw any any firm conclusions about. It's just one of those things where you say, this is something we should look into further.

If we have the opportunity to do so absolutely and not so much to bring this kind of technology into you know, your dorm room or our podcast research. Oh yeah, I don't really want to go through any kind of neurosurgery in order to make a better podcast guys. But if this American life got an implants, well, I'm still putting all of my chips in the transcredial direct card

stimulation camp. Uh No. Researchers are hoping to use this specifically for for eventually perhaps to you know, get a small implanted device in cases of patients with severe dementia to perhaps help them, you know, remember simple things like how to navigate their immediate environments, which I mean sounds very small, but for for those people is a very huge problem and would be a terrific relief, right, And we mentioned this in our last podcast, but we should

mention it again. As exciting as these results are for possible future applications of making you know, typical or healthy people able to improve their performance, it's even more important when talking about the ability to offset damage what's happened to the brain through injury or disease, And that's the real life changing kind of thing. I mean, it would be very cool if we could all become a little bit smarter. But if you can help somebody who's lost

cognitive function regain it, that's a really big deal. Absolutely. But Joe, I have a question for you. Yea, why would you ever put a monkey on cocaine? Because it's excellent? Would you would you prefer would you like to perhaps elaborate, Joe, or do you want to just leave it at that and we can conclude the episode. No, we want to talk about one more study that's also about internal stimulation brain implants. Yeah, that cocaine thing was not as much

of a non sequitor as it sounded like. No, this this will bear on the study we're about to mention. So a team led by researchers at Wake Forest and the University of Southern California published a paper in two thousand twelve and the Journal of Neural Engineering, and it was called Facilitation and Restoration of cognitive function in Primate prefrontal cortex by a neuropros thesis that utilizes mini columns specific neural firing. So that's a long title. Is break

that down for I listened to it on audio. That's what I took out the audiobook version of this paper. Yeah, so here's what they did. The researchers took five Reesis Macoque monkeys and trained them to play a picture matching game, like over the course of two years. Yeah. So the monkeys were shown an image. I don't know what the images were imagined. It's a picture of a carrot. I think it was like people in mountains and stuff. I don't know. Yeah, oh, okay, So people imagine it is

a picture of Wayne Knight. Okay, okay, right, and then they're shown the picture for a second, and then Wayne Knight goes away, not on the screen anymore. It's obviously going to cause trauma. And he's an amazing you g a graduate went to the Governor's Honors program. Nice guy,

as it turns out. Anyway, you're saying. Okay, Then the researchers would present the monkeys with a group of images, and the monkeys would have to select the image they had just seen previously from the group that appeared on the screen. So, after two years of training at the game, the monkeys got pretty good at it. They could pick the right image about three quarters of the time. About the time, so once the researchers got the monkeys to

this point. They then implanted electrides into the monkey's brains with end points in two layers of the cerebral cortex that communicate with each other during the play of this sort of game. They recorded the monkey's brain waves during play, including the little electric buzzes that would happen during correct picks, sort of like Jonathan was talking about earlier with with that memory. Yeah, with the color game, right where they were in that case, they were hitting the spike whenever

you hit whenever you made a mistake. This is slightly the other way, right, right, Yeah, they would they figured out what it looked like when a monkey made a correct choice and then would replay those buzzes while the monkeys were in the midst of trying to make a decision, and it improved their performance some like okay, yeah, so they were getting electrical stimulation that mirrored what had happened when they had gotten the right answer before. Then let's

give the monkeys cocaine. Yeah, because if you dope a monkey with coke, its performance on games like this decreases, like from baseline, and they're going like, no, it's totally making me better, but it's not yet is hurting their performance as one would expect. Yeah, but also a coked up monkey with the electrical stimulation returns to baseline and

can even do a little bit better than baseline. So the stimulation, the electrical stimulation seems to counteract the effects that the monkey would otherwise be experiencing under the influence of cocaine. Right, It counteracts the effects and then a little bit more, a little bit better. Yeah, So this again figures in on what we were just talking about.

This is a really cool discovery for the idea of maybe being able to power up our brains in the future, but even more important for being able to replace lost cognitive ability in people with neurodegenerative diseases or with brain damage. Right, because in this case, it wasn't just you know, this kind of weird mad science let's give the monkeys cocaine thing. As much as I kind dismissed it early on, that's

not how I really feel. The cocaine is kind of representing the sort of neurological damage one might have through any number of conditions or diseases, and this could potentially have a level of treatment to help people regain some function that they may have lost. Well, I think it's

a fascinating finding. So at the end of this podcast, now, I think this is one of the weird cases where we're gonna have to say, Yeah, this crazy sounding thing improving our brains with technology, this is actually very within the realm of possibilities, super valid. I mean today years right today, we we don't want to encourage everybody to rush off and get you know, direct current stimulation kids and stuff like that. I'd say exercise caution in the

early years of this research. We should hold back and wait to find out more about these processes before we just submit our brains to the vicissitudes of electricity and magnets and all the crazy stuff smart people want to do to you. Yes, let's let's check in with those monkeys in another five years and see how they're doing. Yeah. I wanted to kind of conclude this with a statement that the Dr Stephen Novella made. I'm a big fan

of Dr Novella. He's a neurologist and he's also one of the hosts to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, which is a great show if you've never checked it out. It's it's really cool. They look at critical thinking and science and it's very entertaining show. But Dr Novella had this to say about boosting brain power, which was, beware simple answers to complex problems or easy methods for accomplishing

difficult goals. But you know, essentially again another way of saying, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Or maybe we just don't know enough about it for us to say this is in fact absolutely true and it will work for you. That's just it's a that's a statement that we cannot make with confidence. It may turn out to be true, but we can't confidently state that because we just don't know enough yet. But the

cool thing is will continue to learn. I mean, we're going to be as a as a species constantly investigating and learning more and finding out what things might help people who otherwise are in really tough, tough positions due to some sort of condition or disease they might have. Or we might even see a future where our kids go to school and they put on their little trends cranial thinking caps and they study and they're more effective at doing it. We don't know yet, or I mean

not to be flipped. They actually get a few surgeries and have some brain implants that really make a significant difference in their lives. I mean, people might actually go down that path. I wouldn't rule it out. Yeah, it's that's certainly a future that is quite a ways off

if it does in fact ever come to fruition. But uh, I hope to be around to see how this develops over the next few years, and maybe I'll be having my brain so that I can bring even better podcasts in the future, and we'll be trying to talk him out of it or or egging me on. Come on, guys, you know you'd be like, I want to see what

happens when you pushes a button. Uh So, anyway, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, maybe there's something about the future you've always been curious about, and you would love us to really take a deep look in it and and report back what we find. You should let us know. Send us a message on Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus or handle it. All three is FW thinking. We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon. For more

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