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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."
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.
http://xkcd.com/1462/
that show its clients felt the improvement, news at 11!
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
A system in which new means of production are created by the private interest reinvesting gains from business activity (aka "free capital")?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
Check your shirt tag and your jeans. Where were they made? Vietnam? Thailand? How about the device you used to type this empty platitude? What was the wage of the person that built it? Stop bitching about capitalists; you are one.
Actually to use the correct terminology that would just be a matter of domestic labor benefiting from the exploitation of foreign labor. In order to be a capitalist you would need to own shares in the clothing manufacturer, of course many people do that sort of thing through their 401k but that's not what you were talking about.