Neurosystems for National Security – MRN

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More from and about the Mind Research Network.

The goal of NS2 is to translate high spatial and temporal resolution brain imaging, fMRI, MEG, and noninvasive brain stimulation into viable solutions for training soldiers and intelligence professionals to help them with real-time decision making and actions that avert injury and trauma. Noninvasive brain stimulation, specifically transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), is being used to attempt to influence the learning process, perhaps increasing the speed of learning or improving retention. TDCS utilizes scalp electrodes to deliver low amplitude direct currents to localized areas of the cerebral cortex (the superficial part of the brain), thereby modulating the level of excitability, or, put another way, increasing or decreasing the probability that neurons will talk to each other. “Even though TDCS has been applied to humans safely for decades, we are just beginning to learn how it helps to accelerate the learning process. Within the next couple of years, I expect great progress toward this goal,” says researcher Dr. Michael Weisend.

via Neurosystems for National Security – MRN.
See Also: tDCS at MRN

Is Electricity the New Smart Drug? – Percolator – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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I called Weisend recently to see what he thought of people experimenting with tDCS. “In the DIY crowd they don’t have the neuroimaging to start the process and know where to place the electrodes,” he told me. “Their success and their safety are going to be limited.” In the laboratory, subjects go through two or three sessions of tDCS over a week. What happens long term if you do more than that? Nobody knows. And the equipment you order from some random person online may not be as reliable as what’s used in a laboratory.

That said, Weisend believes tDCS can be done safely, and he thinks it might be used to prevent memory loss in the elderly or to help patients recover from traumatic brain injuries. He’s tried tDCS on his own brain hundreds of time and hasn’t suffered any deleterious effects—with the notable exception of a few skin burns that were severe enough to leave scars. “You get attached to your work, I guess,” he says.

via Is Electricity the New Smart Drug? – Percolator – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Electrical brain stimulation improves math skills | The Santos Republic

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Not sure how accurate this statement is, but it’s a good way to think of it.
“tDCS changes the voltage across neurons and can make them more or less likely to fire.”
Interesting… use TMS to disrupt the function (for discovery) and tDCS to enhance it!

His team “short-circuited” this area using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) – a stream of magnetic pulses which temporarily disables a targeted area of the brain. The result, they found, was that people’s ability to perform numerical tasks fell. In fact, their performance resembled people with dyscalculia, who have difficulty comprehending mathematics.

Now they have done the reverse, and improved the brain’s arithmetical abilities. To do this the team applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a way of enhancing brain activity using an electric current, to the right parietal cortex while simultaneously using the opposite current to subdue activity in the left parietal cortex.

via Electrical brain stimulation improves math skills | The Santos Republic.

Brain Stimulation Makes the ‘Impossible Problem’ Solvable | The Creativity Post

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This is such an incredible opportunity for a crowd-sourced neuroscience experiment. Once we can build or buy our own devices, we’ll need a standardized set of problems to test with. If all that data collected to one place… It boggles the imagination!

They gave 28 healthy right-handed participants aged 19-63 the nine-dot problem to solve. Before brain stimulation, 0 out of 22 participants solved the problem. Then they used transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS, which is a safe, non-invasive technique that can increase or decrease cortical excitability and spontaneous neuronal firing in targeted regions. Specifically, they simultaneously decreased excitability of the left anterior temporal lobe ATL while they increased the excitability of the right anterior temporal lobe ATL.

After 10 minutes of right lateralizing tDCS, more than 40 percent of the participants got the problem correct. For contrast, they placed sponge electrodes in the same positions of 11 other participants but they turned off the electrical current after 30 seconds. Therefore, these ‘control’ participants received the exact same experience as those in the active condition but didn’t actually have their brain zapped. None 0/11 of the folks in this placebo condition solved the problem at any point during the experiment.

via Brain Stimulation Makes the ‘Impossible Problem’ Solvable | The Creativity Post.

More on Marom Bikson and Soterix

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Prof. Bikson is co-founder and CEO of Soterix Medical Inc.
Journal of Visualized Experiments has a video demonstrating the details of setting up and administering a tDCS session using the Soterix device.
Electrode Positioning and Montage in Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

The Soterix website and all that shiny new technology!
They make reference to ‘HD-tDCS‘ and diagram multi-electrode application for fine-tuning current distribution. Download their device manual (pdf).
Prof. Bikson’s lab has a YouTube page. They seem to have constructed a computer model for determining where current flows according to how electrodes are placed.

Prof. Bikson’s group uses a range of research and engineering design tools including cellular and animal studies, computer simulations, imaging, and clinical evaluation. Prof. Bikson’s research has recieved support from funding agencies including NIH (NINDS,NCI,NIGMS), The Andy Grove Foundation, The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  . Prof. Bikson is actively involved in biomedical education including outreach to underserved groups.

via Faculty – Marom Bikson – Department of Biomedical Engineering – CCNY – CUNY.

CBS News tDCS ‘Might seem shocking!’

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You can clearly see the device used, Phoresor II Auto PM850, which I found for around $1k. But I also found a similar, medical-grade device, the Trivarion ActivaDose Phoresor, available here for $250. It seems to be in a family of medical device that is used to deliver water soluble drugs via the skin. More here.
The CBS video is from 2008!

Pain Management with tDCS Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Atlanta | Atlanta Pain Doctors

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What CAN’T tDCS do? (Irony intended)

tDCS Equipment For Pain ReliefOur Atlanta pain doctors have a new technology — tDCS — to treat pain that doesn’t respond to other pain treatments. It is ideal for many patients suffering from chronic pain because it is effective, inexpensive, painless, non-invasive, non-surgical and requires only 20-minute treatments.

Our Atlanta doctors use tDCS to treat patients suffering from chronic pain, fibromyalgia pain, pain from stroke, migraine headache pain, back pain, neck pain, face pain, spinal cord pain, trigeminal neuralgia, complex regional pain syndrome, phantom-limb pain, pain of depression and neuropathic pain.

tDCS also relieves the symptoms of narcotic withdrawal and reduces craving for drugs including nicotine and alcohol.

 

via Pain Management with tDCS Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Atlanta | Atlanta Pain Doctors.

Go Flo Team’s Funfomercial

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Hmm, are these guys out of the same Michigan University that just published the tDCS paper in ‘Headache’?
Their kit will be Open Sourced. Learn more about Go Flow at http://flowstateengaged.com.
I signed up for the mailing list. If they can really build a no-solder kit for $99 I’m getting one!

This video was made to make our friends laugh. Please do not take this video as a serious attempt at promoting our kit. We sure didn’t.

University of Michigan News Service | Migraine patients find pain relief in electrical brain stimulation

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“We went beyond, ‘OK, this works,'” DaSilva said. “We also showed what possible areas of the brain are affected by the therapy.”

They did this by using a high-resolution computational model. They correctly predicted that the electric current would go where directed by the electrodes placed on the subject’s head, but the current also flowed through other critical regions of the brain associated with how we perceive and modulate pain.

“Previously, it was thought that the electric current would only go into the most superficial areas of the cortex,” DaSilva said. “We found that pain-related areas very deep in the brain could be targeted.”

via University of Michigan News Service | Migraine patients find pain relief in electrical brain stimulation.

Frontiers | Behavioral and electrophysiological effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the parietal cortex in a visuo-spatial working memory task | Frontiers in Neuropsychiatric Imaging and Stimulation

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The present study demonstrates that posterior tDCS can alter visuo-spatial WM performance by modulating the underlying neural activity. This result can be considered an important step towards a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in tDCS-induced modulations of cognitive processing. This is of particular importance for the application of electrical brain stimulation as a therapeutic treatment of neuropsychiatric deficits in clinical populations.

via Frontiers | Behavioral and electrophysiological effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the parietal cortex in a visuo-spatial working memory task | Frontiers in Neuropsychiatric Imaging and Stimulation.

PLoS ONE: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Augments Perceptual Sensitivity and 24-Hour Retention in a Complex Threat Detection Task

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On completion of training, participants in the active stimulation group had more than double the perceptual sensitivity of the control group. Furthermore, the performance enhancement was maintained for 24 hours. The results show that tDCS augments both skill acquisition and retention in a complex detection task and that the benefits are rooted in an improvement in sensitivity d′, rather than changes in response bias ß. Stimulation-driven acceleration of learning and its retention over 24 hours may result from increased activation of prefrontal cortical regions that provide top-down attentional control signals to object recognition areas.

via PLoS ONE: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Augments Perceptual Sensitivity and 24-Hour Retention in a Complex Threat Detection Task.

Buy a DIY Brain Supercharger for $100 – Businessweek

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Photograph by Matt Sornson

It should be noted that Sornson studies marketing, not neuroscience, and the rest of his crew specialize in software and website design. “This machine will be designed for people interested in experimental use,” Sornson says.

The GoFlow β1 has yet to go on sale, but there are some specs available. It will cost $99 and come with a 60-pack of disposable electrodes, a placement map, and a 5-milliamps safety fuse, which is nice. Sornson has started to contact professors at Michigan State and Western Michigan University about conducting tests with the contraption—and hopefully adding some scientific rigor to the device.

 

via Buy a DIY Brain Supercharger for $100 – Businessweek.
GoFlow has a video now.

Tinnitus Clinical Trial: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS for the Treatment of Tinnitus

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This would be huge.

Detailed Clinical Trial Description
Subjective tinnitus is a distressing condition characterized by the sensation of sound or noise in the absence of internal or external stimuli. Research indicates that tinnitus may develop due to maladaptive plastic changes in the auditory cortex and limbic system. These changes can be targeted using safe and noninvasive brain stimulation techniques like transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS. TDCS alters the excitability of the cortex using a weak direct current and may lead to long-term plastic changes, making it a potential therapeutic tool for the treatment of tinnitus.
Transient improvements in tinnitus have been reported after inhibitory stimulation of the auditory cortex and after excitatory stimulation of the prefrontal cortex, however the effects of a combined stimulation paradigm remain unknown. We hypothesize that a cumulative effect will be observed following repeated sessions of tDCS by modulating both the excitability of the auditory cortex and prefrontal cortex.

via Tinnitus Clinical Trial: Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS for the Treatment of Tinnitus [Conditions: Tinnitus; Interventions: BrainSTIM Transcranial Stimulator, BrainSTIM Transcranial Stimulator].