Thync, a Wearable That Zaps Your Brain To Calm You Down or Amp You Up

blottsie sends this first-hand report on how it felt to use a wearable device called Thync, which sends small amounts of electricity into your brain for the purpose of either calming you down or making you feel energized. While the unit I used isn't the finalized physical version, the best way to describe it is as a two-part device, one of which is fasted to the front of the right side of your temple, and one behind your right ear. It's not a helmet, which is what I absolutely assumed it would be. It's relatively discreet sort of dual patch system ... It didn't... hurt. Hurt isn't the right way to describe it. It felt like a tightness; it felt like the patch was trying to crawl across my skin. But — if you can believe this — in a good way. And while Thync was attached to the right side of my head, occasionally I felt 'tingles' pulling and hitting my brain on the left side and in the middle. I was feeling progressively awake and aware. Granted, I had patches stuck to my head sending gentle vibrations to my brain, so that might have been part of my sudden alertness. But still, after 20 minutes of Thync I just felt... better.

Comments

A new kind of drug?

[axlash]

If the devices like this really do end up working, they'd be doing what many recreational drugs do today.

I wonder what this would mean for the war on drugs...

Claims it felt good

[gurps_npc]

I think Larry Niven (and I am sure many others) wrote about a future where people got addicted to a device that electrically stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain.

Is this the beginning of our new addiction?

Future notes from Molly McHugh's journal

[Bovius]

Day 35 of insomnia. I only slept for 40 minutes today, with Thync turned up to maximum calming for 6 hours. I still managed to get a few hours of work in with alert enhancement on. Could barely focus. Need more sleep.

I'm pretty sure the FDA still has jurisdiction.

[sirwired]

I'm fairly certain that devices that glue to the side of your head and run electrical current through your cranium qualify as "Medical Devices". The whole bit about "not intended to diagnose or treat a health condition" is the sort of loophole that applies to natural supplements, not FDA device regulations.

From the FDA website:
(Among other things) A medical device is "intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve any of its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of any of its primary intended purposes."

Re:I'm pretty sure the FDA still has jurisdiction.

[StikyPad]

FWIW, they're apparently working with the FDA already.

Thync technology employs energy levels within the normal range of brain activity and we work with the FDA to assure product safety. Over 1,000 peer-reviewed published studies across more than 20,000 sessions further support the safety of our approach. http://www.thync.com/

And the FDA has already approved at least one such device, albeit for migraine treatment.
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/...

Re:Great, wearable home electroshock therapy!

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Before this, we referred to wearable devices that did this as "hip flasks".

Does it work?

[Graydyn Young]

I doubt that this device really works. If it does, I will be shocked.

Re:Life imitates art, as usual

[OzPeter]

-- Larry Niven, "The Ringworld Engineers", 1980

It goes back a bit further than that. Death by Ecstasy, published 1968

Apparently it works, but it can be dangerous

[smellsofbikes]

There was a recent Radiolab about this general technique, that's totally worth listening to: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
(It's also a lot better-written than the summary.)

The idea is that by applying DC voltages to different parts of your skull, you can affect how your brain works. The theory is that the current passing across part of your brain changes how your brain learns from mistakes, messing with the pattern-acquisition feedback. In the story, they specifically concentrated on a woman training in a sniper video game, who was having to identify attackers vs. civilians, and how much it changed her ability to do that, but they also discussed a big underground scene of people trying this out at home for other purposes or just to learn about what happens. They were moving the contact patches around and then trying things to see what they were or weren't good at. One guy doing this found a spot that left him largely blind for several hours afterwards, so it's not all roses, but the people trying language acquisition and finding it much easier both to acquire and, later, post-treatment, to recall, new languages, really got me interested.

Re:Blind experiment

[smellsofbikes]

Have a patch that doesn't actually apply voltage, but vibrates or something like that. User still feels like he/she is getting some sort of effect, but there's no brain-zapping involved.

In the Radiolab discussion, they were doing tests with the woman who was doing the sniper training, both with and without the system running. She thought her performance was about the same, but the people analyzing it said it was dramatically different, because among the things affected was her perception of time. She felt like she was playing the game until she got killed, which was maybe a matter of a minute or two, but when she was playing really well, she was playing for much longer periods of time and didn't realize it.
As I recall, they specifically compared it to programmers who talk about The Zone, where they're coding very effectively and have reduced perception of the passage of time, and making the claim that the two effects, of heightened efficiency and reduced perception of time passage, may be related.