This is interesting. On a recent Kevin Rose podcast he and his guest talked about targeted treatment for ADHD, dementia, etc. using video games. At one point they also discussed people using self-built gadgets to stimulate their own brain using electric current ( they do not recommend it though ).
As an aside, I've found meditation to be very helpful in treating my non-clinical depression. It's also one of the key tools I use to help with my addiction/alcoholism issues.
And please, if you're thinking of taking your own life reach out to someone.
I think it's a bad idea to self-experiment with electricity and the brain. See "Popular electric brain stimulation method used to boost brainpower is detrimental to IQ scores"
I can't imagine doing this to myself. They were quite clear on the podcast that they weren't recommending it. Even if they did, no thanks from this guy.
This is common misconception about mindfulness meditation. The goal of mindfulness meditation is not to quiet mind(though this happens with practice). It's to learn how to notice when your mind is unquiet.
So when you notice your mind wandering this is mindfulness. Imagine you're coding all day long, and then you have this moment where you notice that you're not paying attention to coding, but instead thinking about what it would be like to be a ninja. You might have been thinking about being a ninja for 5-10 minutes before you realized it. But this moment when you realize, oh hey I was thinking about something other that what I thought I was thinking about is a moment of mindfulness. And this is what you're practicing.
So when you notice your mind wandering, be happy, this is a moment of mindfulness. Your mind was probably wandering for a while before you realized it, but this moment is the moment you realized it.
I'm not sure about mindfulness meditation specifically or what exactly that even refers to, but some people use a mindfulness bell that is rung randomly a few times a day for exactly that purpose. One old form of mindfulness practice is to use breath changing from in to out or out to in as moments of mindfulness. See Centering in Zen Flesh Zen Bones translated by Paul Reps (from a document predating Buddhism):
There is also a kind of meditation practice called "just note gone" where the idea is to start giving absense of stimulation a distinct notice (by noticing when something you had been perceiving is no longer there). I think most sit down and meditate practices tend to focus on that kind of thing (feeling the absense of stimulation as a distinct thing) via different methods.
Most common forms of meditation are mindfulness meditations.
A common form of meditation is focusing on your breath. This meditation is composed of two parts, trying to pay attention to breath, and noticing when your mind wanders.
Most people think the most important portion of that exercise is focusing on breath. But in truth it's the second part, the noticing.. The first part is growing your attention, but the second part is practicing your mindfulness.
For mindful meditation, that's not necessarily a bad thing... just focus on catching the thoughts and letting them go. I have a highly productive ADD so a voice recorder really helped with this step (record the idea to clear my mind). It can be helpful to start mindful meditation by listening to music or looking at a mostly static scene (nature, city, picture, whatever - no TV).
From there, maybe experiment with silent meditation. I got there by focusing on successively simple stimuli (city -> picture -> mental picture -> simple shapes -> dot -> nothing).
I agree with the other commenters, that's really part of the process. You do get better at it. Mind drifts... back to the breath, it wanders... back to the breath.
It, quite literally, is practice.
I don't use an app, but I know a few people that have had some success with them.
That's fine, returning to the attempt is a big part of it. You don't just start blanking out for a half-hour, it's like a muscle that has to be exercised, or a skill that improves with repetition. Just set a timer on your phone for 5min, it's hard to get mad about wasting 5min.
That's kind of what it is when you start. It's like working a muscle, you have to start with really light weights or you just get exhausted and discouraged. Like, start with a timer set for two minutes and work your way up one minute at a time.
A few years ago while working on my undergrad I helped proctor a study involving a similar technology--transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)--and it's impact on working memory. Although neither the tech nor the desired outcome in OP's article is identical to my undergrad project, the researchers are likely facing similar challenges which seem universal for low-current brain stimulation experiments:
- Effects are measurable but very very small
- Frequent stimulation is required to achieve the desired effect
- The desired effect diminishes over time
This seems really promising, particularly because they're changing the treatment for specific patients rather than using a one-size-fits-all model. I hope their trials go well.
When I was doing research with TMS the problem we were trying to solve was focusing the magnetic field to a small point in order to target specific areas of the brain instead of stimulating a larger area. There was a lot of research being done to do this, but that seemed to be the biggest technological hurdle to the technology in addition to what you noted.
I once saw a presentation at a BCI conference about using DBS to treat depression. They basically installed a 'happy button' in someone's brain, and it worked.
On the one hand, it's sort of scary. On the other hand, what are you supposed to do when nothing, not art nor work nor drugs nor thought, does anything to ameliorate the pain?
I can see both sides of this, at once, like I'm looking at an ambiguous image: duck, or rabbit?
On one hand, it's absurd: "Electrochemical system is changed by electricity! Shocker! Be afeared'n'affrighted!" The brain is a physical system, your personality is a result of the behavior of that system, so changing the physical system is going to change the personality. It's a more controlled version of Phineas Gage and the railroad spike.
(Plus, dirty little secret: Electroconvulsive therapy works. It has nasty side-effects, but it makes depression go away rather quickly. So the basic idea of chasing away mental problems by shocking brain tissue is not new, despite a decades-long effort on the part of artists to make people think ECT is simply meaningless torture.)
On the other hand, I can see how this would be challenging to someone who finds emotional states deeply meaningful, especially if they (as most people who look for "meaningful emotional states" seem to) find sad states more meaningful than happy ones.
It's the myth of the happy pill, by which I mean the myth that depression is this wonderful, meaningful Long, Dark Night Of The Soul and that taking something to fight it is "making you feel better" in a coercive sense, and depriving you of that meaning, and, possibly, preventing you from getting to the root of the problem, which must needs be done through talk therapy.
My conclusion is this: Emotions in and of themselves aren't meaningful, treating symptoms doesn't mean you can't also look for root causes, and, sometimes, an organic dysfunction is the root cause, as opposed to something you can talk out.
Even if the root of someone's depression were something that could be talked out, what depressed person wouldn't want to work that out while not depressed?
I guess that while the person is not depressed and feels great, it totally makes no sense to talk about anything related to the depression. This could quickly provide the patient with the insight that a depression is purely physical, and that nothing needs to be talked about really.
I think it's scary too, but maybe for different reasons. It's a step towards building an experience machine [1]. Whilst I fully empathise with DBS as a treatment to otherwise incurable atypically negative mental states, much as I am on-board with VR enabling physically or financially limited persons to enjoy the full gamut of human experience, I baulk at the idea of this becoming mainstream.
Why? Because the implication of a 'happy button' in the hands of everyone and anyone horrifies me. Sure, you and I might have better things to do than to hold that sucker down and experience unending monotone bliss for the remainder of days, but how sure are you that the majority of humanity won't? How many lives might be wasted because someone's instinct was to go for immediate bliss instead of trying to make things better in the long run? It'd be the final drug.
I question what safety measures they are putting in place to prevent some sort of negative feedback loop... I wonder if this has the potential issue with functioning properly based on a loop that compounds and compounds on itself.
Not necessarily... I can just imagine a scenario where the "algorithm" reacts based off of some stimulus in the brain and applies stimulation in an attempt to counteract that...
If there's so much as a small flaw and the stimulation it applies in return causes the original stimulus to worsen instead of be relieved, I could imagine the reaction from the algorithm continuing to make the situation worse if not carefully designed.
My father had DBS implants to attempt to address Essential Tremor symptoms. This works for some people. It did not for him. I would hate to see a depression-related tuning phase similar to what was required before they realized the implants couldn't improve the shakiness in his hands.
https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/Adam-Gazzaley
As an aside, I've found meditation to be very helpful in treating my non-clinical depression. It's also one of the key tools I use to help with my addiction/alcoholism issues.
And please, if you're thinking of taking your own life reach out to someone.
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org