Scientific Method - Blog Posts
The Scientific Meme-thod
http://memehunter.tumblr.com
Look! A scientist who says more scrutiny is needed! Yea!
AND - “Don’t try this at home!”
Cadaver study casts doubts on how zapping brain may boost mood, relieve pain
Earlier this month, György Buzsáki of New York University (NYU) in New York City showed a slide that sent a murmur through an audience in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Midtown Hilton during the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. It wasn’t just the grisly image of a human cadaver with more than 200 electrodes inserted into its brain that set people whispering; it was what those electrodes detected—or rather, what they failed to detect.
When Buzsáki and his colleague, Antal Berényi, of the University of Szeged in Hungary, mimicked an increasingly popular form of brain stimulation by applying alternating electrical current to the outside of the cadaver’s skull, the electrodes inside registered little. Hardly any current entered the brain. On closer study, the pair discovered that up to 90% of the current had been redirected by the skin covering the skull, which acted as a “shunt,” Buzsáki said.
The new, unpublished cadaver data make dramatic effects on neurons unlikely, Buzsáki says. Most tDCS and tACS devices deliver about 1 to 2 milliamps of current. Yet based on measurements from electrodes inside multiple cadavers, Buzsaki calculated that at least 4 milliamps—roughly equivalent to the discharge of a stun gun—would be necessary to stimulate the firing of living neurons inside the skull. Buzsáki notes he got dizzy when he tried 5 milliamps on his own scalp. “It was alarming,” he says, warning people not to try such intense stimulation at home.
Buzsáki expects a living person’s skin would shunt even more current away from the brain because it is better hydrated than a cadaver’s scalp. He agrees, however, that low levels of stimulation may have subtle effects on the brain that fall short of triggering neurons to fire. Electrical stimulation might also affect glia, brain cells that provide neurons with nutrients, oxygen, and protection from pathogens, and also can influence the brain’s electrical activity. “Further questions should be asked” about whether 1- to 2-milliamp currents affect those cells, he says.
Buzsáki, who still hopes to use such techniques to enhance memory, is more restrained than some critics. The tDCS field is “a sea of bullshit and bad science—and I say that as someone who has contributed some of the papers that have put gas in the tDCS tank,” says neuroscientist Vincent Walsh of University College London. “It really needs to be put under scrutiny like this.”
debugging is a science. a really boring science, but a science nonetheless.
hypothesis
procedure
results
conclusion
repeating when you don’t get the result you were god damn looking for, why is it still printing that, there are zero print statements in this program what the fuck