Meetup : Austin, TX TCDS Experiment
Discussion article for the meetup : Austin, TX TCDS Experiment
The Austin, TX meetup is in a new location for just this week; we’ll be meeting in CBA 4.342 on Saturday the 18th at 1:30 PM. We’re going to be trying out transcranial direct current stimulation. Please bring a laptop (or some device that can implement dual n-back) and headphones; I’ll have the electrodes, batteries, and other assorted materials. If you could do a session or two of dual n-back before showing up, that’d be great, but isn’t necessary.
(Parking: You can either park wherever you parked for Caffe Medici and walk ~three blocks to the east, or you can part in the Brazos street garage (at Brazos and MLK) and walk west then north to CBA.)
You’ve attracted the attention of the rest of LW. Did this experiment go ahead? What were the results?
Preliminary results were here. Essentially, it was a tiny, poorly equipped experiment, and our results showed that the current slightly impeded our ability / desire to to DNB. It seems plausible to me that we may have misread the papers we were working off of, because they just describe anodes and cathodes (and it’s ambiguous whether that’s the battery’s anode or your head’s anode).
My takeaway was that you can alter your mental experience with TCDS, but that doing it in a positive way is a nontrivial undertaking. I am slowly putting together better equipment to do more rigorous testing, and will describe my results once that happens.
Any more updates now that it’s 2013?