Slashdot Mirror
Mood-Altering Wearable Thync Releases First Brain Test Data
blottsie writes Thync, the world's first wearable that alters a user's mood has released the first set of data that shows its device reduces stress without chemicals. The study found that "the levels of salivary -amylase, an enzyme that increases with stress, as well as noradrenergic and sympathetic activity, significantly dropped for the subjects that received electrical neurosignaling compared to the subjects that received the sham."
We will not be your slaves.
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Fortunately, I'm 40, so am in the latter half of my life, so the pressures that may make this an interesting option isn't as important for me personally.
However, my big concern with a lot of the bio-hacking is that we don't know what the long term effect of zapping your brain, taking this supplement or that supplement-du-jour is. If you are pro-actively modifying your body chemistry, there are limits that the body can take... Even "safe" analgesics have long term consequences (Acetaminophen -> liver damage, NSAID -> stomach damage). What does artificially suppressing one response do when the body when there may be a different one (I assume stress managing hormones come from the adrenal gland) do to the body?
It may ultimately prove safe, but you only have one body. But again, with out those willing to risk it, we'd still be using leaches...
So go on, young'uns, strap on, plug in and chill. Just get it done before my children are faced with the choice...
Reading the Fine Article shows the sample sizes were statistically above zero, by a little. Several pairs of subjects reported positive-ish results.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I find ear plugs an immediate mood improver in many stressful situations.
In other news, a man was found dead in his home around 6 PM last night. He was found wearing a Thync with apparent signs of overclocking and vastly increased voltage beyond the sepcified safe limits. Preliminary analysis shows that the man was attempted to get high by adjusting various components of the Thync.
sums up one of the potential dangers of this technology.
"Gerhard shows his findings to Ross, who realizes that the seizures are getting more frequent. She explains that Benson is learning to initiate seizures involuntarily because the result of these seizures is a shock of pleasure, which leads to him having more frequent seizures. Ross checks on Benson, and discovers that, due to the clerical error of the nurses not having been able to read McPherson's signature, Benson has not been receiving his Thorazine. She then finds out that Benson, using the black wig and disguising himself as an orderly, has evaded the police officer assigned to guard him and escaped from the hospital."
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
http://xkcd.com/1462/
that show its clients felt the improvement, news at 11!
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Thync bears no responsibility, because Paragraph 4, section 7 of the Terms of Use explicitly state that changing the device's default settings voids your warranty and makes you ineligible for refund, replacement, or class action lawsuits
from TFA: "Thync announced a study showing that its device reduces stress without chemicals."
- guess who conducted the study--Thync, of course. Miraculously they found no problems with the product. Thynk 'scientists' (not sure how they define the term) assured the DailyDot reporter that the product works better than a 'sham'.
A company spokesman said "we have been collecting data around how people use Thync in their everyday lives " -- which seems odd for a product that hasn't reached the market yet and few people have had extensive exposure to it.
Again from TFA: "Thync offered an anecdote from a student" ... This seems mostly to be anecdotes and little science.
That said, there is hope that this technology or the transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments will prove useful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
...omphaloskepsis often...
So the idea here is to take our most sensitive and least understood organ, a device with processing power greater than any hardware/software system we've been able to even conceive of, and do the equivalent of smashing it with a hammer?
Would you go to a data center and start zapping random computers with electric pulses, hoping that your buffoon-like behavior would randomly flip the rights bits somewhere to make the machines to work better? No, you would work to understand the software being used and improve it. Or, you would replace the hardware with something that works better.
Likewise, there are no shortcuts with the brain. Until we can program neurons and neural networks directly, anything we do to the brain expecting to make it work much better is bound to do more harm than good.
I'm too old to believe in magic devices anymore. They just don't work. OTC nutritional supplements, vitamin infused water, and magic gadgets, are as useful as downloadable RAM or free range pasta. If you want to reduce stress, take a few deep breaths. It works better than voodoo science,and fake technology.
Perhaps we could develop this tool to the point that drug addicts and alcoholics could be helped to stay sober. Also mental illnesses might be eliminated by such a device. Even criminal behavior is related to depression. But I also wonder about a tool that can make a person feel better when they are screwing up big time. Used incorrectly such a device could be a social nightmare.
Great a faux study and an advertisement all in the same story
Yes, it helps when you write their epitaph in the history books.
Right, likely what will save us will be weapons, and lots of them, too.
Sure. Other people. Animals. Plants. Maybe even aliens. You bet.
This is why I always suggest nuclear weapons. You just can't beat then for dollars spent per enemy decimated.
Absolutely. 100 for us, 0 for them. 100:0 is a perfectly valid proportion.
By any means possible. Knowledge is power.
Through superstition-colored glasses they are.
it helps when you rewrite the history books
You knew my second wife!?!?
Right. Never.
Again, this is why I suggest nuclear weapons.
Slashdot is like every other web site. It has to thync or thwim on its own.
This text exists to up the ratio between characters and HTML formatting elements, which tend to upset slashdot's Kindergarten-level parsing engine. I'll write as much as I need to in order to get the above to post; because what is written above is precisely what I meant to say, and how I meant to say it. This also might be an opportune time to mention that slashdot's Kindergarten-level parser can't handle simple things like HTML lists, HTML character entities, and foreign character sets. Which is really kind of funny, considering that this place is hyped as a "geek site"... no geek worth his slice of (New York) pizza would let code like that out the door. I suppose it kind of goes along with the whole broken moderation system.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... and you're officially a drone at that point.....
Great, I always wanted to be able to fly.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I prefer:
1. Rationalize with your enemy
2. Maximizing efficiency will not save us
3. There's something beyond empathy
4. The data should be a guideline in war
5. Get your reasoning
6. Belief and seeing are both oneself
7. Be prepared to be often wrong
8. Never say reexamine your reasoning
9. Naturally, you may have to engage in evil
10. You can't change human proportionality
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
This looks like snake-oil all around to me.
However, it has me wondering: What if there were BTL chips like in the Shadowrun RPG (Pen & Paper) or those simulations like in the novel "Altered Carbon" were real?
In the Shadowrun RPG BTL ("Better than life" (sic!)) chips are *highly* adictive. Which raises the question: Would you give it a shot? ... I'd probably take a very close look at BTL junkies first. ... And then say no.
As for those simulations in Altered Carbon - I wouldn't mind trying one of those. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What the authors are doing is supress stress-related signals that propagate along peripheral nerves. So it's not "mood-altering" directly. It potentially alters things that can feed back to mood. It doesn't zap your brain to change your mood directly.
soylentnews.org
But is there any way that you could just sock me out so there's no way that I'll know I'm at work? Can I just come home and think I've been fishing all day or something?
The tasp in Ringworld, by Larry Niven.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project