>“I don’t think any of us are going to be signing up for voluntary brain surgery anytime soon,” Sanchez says. “Only when these technologies become less invasive, or noninvasive, will they become widespread.”
Are you kidding? 15-37% improvement in memory formation/recall? Where do I sign?
The surgery needed to install the chip is itself detrimental to your IQ. The brain was not made to be exposed to air. You don’t get your skull opened up unless there’s no other option — these are patients who were already forced into this circumstance.
Could you not e.g. operate in an artificial vacuum using oxygen masks? If open skull surgery is so detrimental to IQ, why is this not done? I understand there's a cost factor but given the scale of medical expenses, it seems within the realm of possibility?
Because brain and other body tissues normally have internal pressure of 1 atmosphere, so if you put it into vacuum, it will explode and blood and other liquids will boil.
Could use argon in a vat shaped system and continuously push in more to wash out any oxygen following the tools. Could probably be done with very little oxygen touching the brain if we really want to build the tools.
"Your zuppa-memory license has expired. Please kindly give us one million dollars to upgrade, or your memory cloud contract will be terminated in four days and downgraded to our Finding Dory's free account". Please note also that, unless human brain, a ten years old chip is obsolete technology and could fail anytime.
You can do similar things with tdcs devices bought off amazon. There’s a lot of evidence that electric stimulation can affect many different parts of your brain depending on the electrode placement: working memory, long-term memory, depression, etc.
tDCS devices work in a similar fashion to how Strength-Shoes work (strength-shoes.com): a person is very interested in improving X -- they see an ad from a company selling product 'Y' claiming they have mountains of evidence and testimonies that Y really does help to improve X -- the person buys Y, convinced that it will help, and uses it every day while practicing X harder than ever -- after a few months the person shows decent improvement at X -- the person thinks, "wow, Y really worked" and shares this testimonial with the world.
Yeah I'm aware. 100% garbage science IMO. I'm not going formulate a long-form takedown of the entirety of tDCS literature, here in the comment section of a hn post. And so just take this fwiw-
About a year ago I was quite surprised to find out that a colleague, dear friend, and brilliant neuroscientist took a job as research director of haloneuro.com
I was not surprised at all when he told me a few weeks ago that he had resigned, and that tDCS was total BS. The CEO of the company had him running dozens of clinical tests in parallel; they would publish the few that supported tdcs and would file drawer the rest.
But by all means, feel free to run an electric current through your brain if you think it will help X.
Unless you are an expert in the field, I'm not sure why I should believe you. Of course companies are going to publish only results that look good. But a lot of scientists are going the pre-registered route, and claiming that hundreds of studies are wrong seems like it would require extrordinary evidence.
I just talked to my wife about this, she was doing some research tdcs research as part of her PhD 3-4 years ago. She say's that extremely precise electrode placement is necessary for P < 0.05 effects, so that might support your position that retail tdcs devices are largely bullshit. But the research isn't about commercial devices (largely), it's on lab subjects who have properly placed electrodes.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert in tdcs. My experience is limited to what might be considered the typical, prevailing, suite of neuro-electrophysiology methods: stimulating electrodes + glass pipettes into acutely sliced rodent hippocampus/cortex; same for organotypic slice cultures; in vivo implantation of multiunit recording electrodes + fiberoptics into rat cortex. I think these methods provide enough background in ephys to formulate an educated opinion on tdcs. Also note that I'm just as cynical, if not more, when it comes to research reports using those established methods I mentioned above. Suffice to say, it's not the methods that concern me, it's reports of some marvelous thing that happened while using such methods.
You are right though, the claims about the utility of these commercial devices (and really any non-implanted device) that are by far the most dubious.
Also, the plastic surgery and body modification industries exist without having to be non-invasive. People will risk death to just have a different shape of bum.
A consumer can still decide for himself if he has enough and the right education and set of mind.
An electronic device connected to a brain could inject thoughts without the carrier even noticing it's not the thoughts who are supposed to be saved/generated in this chip.
Now they have relative control over the majority but it's still not absolute - in my opinion that is a huge difference.
Are you kidding? 15-37% improvement in memory formation/recall? Where do I sign?