Mike Weisend – Treating the Brain from the Outside
We met Michael Weisend back in podcast #4 (March 2013!) and have been following along ever since. In this interview Mike discusses what he’s been up to at Rio Grande Neurosciences. What caught my ear especially were the discussion around ‘closed-loop TES’, where EEG information informs when and where to stimulate with TES. Also, his discussion of personalized disposable bio-degradeable electrodes was interesting. Mike closes the interview with an invitation to anyone knowing how to engineer an ‘EEG amplifier’ that would allow for the separation of EEG data and active TES stimulation, to contact him. (mike.weisend [theAtSign] riograndeneurosciences.com). Kudos to Richard Jacobs for an interesting interview.
Tag Archives: Rio Grande Neurosciences
Here’s What Zapping Your Brain with Electricity Feels Like | LiveScience
Interesting to note that Michael Weisend is now associated with San Francisco based company Rio Grande Neurosciences.
The current was set to 2 milliamps, about 1,000 times less than the electrical current that flows through a typical iPad charger. But only about 1/50th of that current makes it through the skull to the brain, Weisend said. The stimulation, which lasted for 10 minutes, was aimed at my right inferior frontal cortex and the right anterior temporal lobe, which are brain areas thought to be important for learning. If this were a real experiment, Weisend would have scanned my brain first to determine the optimal placement for the electrode, but in my case, he made an approximation.
I turned the electricity on myself, and the first thing I noticed was the mild stinging where the electrode attached to my head. Weisend assured me this was normal, but said if the sensation continued, he would turn it off and try to get a better connection. Next I noticed a slight taste of metal in my mouth, a common side effect of tDCS, according to Weisend.
Source: LiveScience.com