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Boosting Your Brain With Batteries
Bifurcati writes "Running a tiny current acrosss your head increases your verbal skills reports Nature News. 103 nervous volunteers received 2 thousandths of an amp and showed a 20% improval in a simple verbal test, compared to a control group (same setup, just no current in the wires). Somebody better buy the politicians a couple of car batteries..."
I cannot wait to overclock my brain.
Canthros
What happens when you up the voltage on your CPU? That bathtub curve becomes a lot shorter in timespan.
Hope the same doesn't happen with your brain.
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
and all I got was this lousy erection that won't go away!
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
And now we know what Bush had strapped to his back during the debates.
Anyway she reports a 20% increase. Hmm, if I get my math right that mean they got 24 words in 90 seconds?
Now it all depends on how the results were calculated. It obviously had some kind of effect if EVERYONE who had the current did 20% better then those who didn't. But this is never the case. Not everyone without the current would have gotten 20. Some would have gotten 16, some 24. Same with the current applied.
The study is far to small and inprecise. We are only talking a few words more. Because the subjects who received the current knew it (they reported an icchy feeling) the test is not really blind as these test need to be. That might have inspired them to do better.
If the same can be done with more complex language tests then it could prove that something is happening here other then the placebo effect.
Anyway I am the kind of person who always gets electric/static shocks from everything, by this logic I should be a language genius. I am not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You need more even brain coverage by the current. Perhaps by using a tinfoil hat as one of the electrodes. Other posts have mentioned where to stick the other electrode, so I won't go into that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It'd be noticeable unless its confined to the brain (since there are no receptors in the brain itself). 2 milliamps is quite a bit, in fact. 6 milliamps at the heart is sufficient to cause loss of muscle control and impair circulation. 4 milliamps will impair your muscle control enough that if it were applied to you, say, in your bathtub, you'd have a hard time getting out. It only takes 60 milliamps at the heart to kill you outright.
From the article: "And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects."
If the effect is psychological, having a physically detectable (by the subject) component is likely to reinforce it.
"They're givin' me 10,000 watts a day you know, and I'm hot to trot. The next woman that takes me out is gonna light up like a pinball machine, and pay off in silver dollars. " (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest)
I do that now. That's why I need the overclocking.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If the effect is psychological, having a physically detectable (by the subject) component is likely to reinforce it.
Hmm, so maybe to increase my verbal skills I should rub poison ivy on my skalp replicate the ichy sensation.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
Previous tests tried several thousand volts, and had the opposite impact on verbal skills, with most saying either "gnnnnh!" or nothing at all. On the other hand, the effect was permanent.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
You misspelled "nucular".
You're not a statistical genius either. If 103 people get an average 20 words for each person in 90 seconds on the first round, that is a total of 2060 words for all of them. If you then apply current and test them and they get 2472 words, some individuals may have gotten 16, while others may have had 32, and the average increase over the sample was 20 percent. And with 103 people, that's a large enough sampling to show a real effect.
Of course, that could mean that they all just did better the second time. That's why the author of the paper split them into two groups, a zapped group and a control group. With 50 people, you're still working with a large enough sample to get useful averages as indicators, though not proof. And what did she discover? The zapped group did twenty percent better than the control group. If the control group showed NO improvement, they'd have 1000 words total, and the zapped group would have 1200 words.
Placebo effect is rather far-fetched here. Yes, the zapped people did feel an itchy feeling, but both groups had electrodes and believed they'd be zapped. The real zappees performed much much better than their counterparts.
What bothers me most about your post is that you're ripping her study apart because it's not absolute proof. Of course it isn't. It's a study. All science is looking at indicators, trends, probabilities, hypotheses... and it's totally counter-productive to wait until you've proven it outright. What you should be saying is, "Hmm... that's really interesting that she reported such a large improvement, and her results definitely indicate something curious going on. Perhaps this deserves a closer look."
If you're going to attack studies and reports, people, make sure you have the credentials and expertise to do so. Usually if somebody is publishing in or being reported on by Nature, they've got their ducks in a row, and your 2-minute armchair critique is going to fall hopelessly flat. Ask questions, offer insights, but criticism comes best from peers, which most of us are not.