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tDCS
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
Ingredients:

One (1) brain, inside skull

One (1) 9-volt battery
Two (2) wires
Two (2) damp sponges

Instructions:

Attach battery to wires, attach wires to sponges, attach

sponges to skull, one over each eyebrow. Simmer once a day until mental health reaches a firm
consistency.

It sounds like something you dreamed up in the basement with your stoner friends in high
school. (In fact, you may actually have done so.) But transcranial direct current stimulation is the
hottest thing to hit the improvisational health management scene since acupuncture. A growing
body of evidence suggests that sticking a battery onto your head could hack into your brain's
operating system and make life generally more worth living. Think of it as Norton Utilities for the
mind.

That's not an oversimplification of the process. tDCS is literally that simple. The total cost of a
treatment is less than $5 of parts from Radio Shack and a sponge. No prescription needed. No
needles, no pills, no insurance companies, no weird hormonal fluctuations, no commercials
saying "I'm glad [drug of choice] has a low risk of sexual side effects!"

An analysis of the pros and cons of tDCS yields fairly impressive results.

PROS CONS

Improved hand-eye Could end up looking stupid

coordination Small, but not entirely
Better memory absent, chance of permanent
Less depression brain damage
Recover from brain damage
Less senility
Me talks nice like teacher
Better memory
Control seizures
Cure migraines
Become superior human,
crush puny unenhanced
inferiors, survive apocalyptic
"rise of the machines"
Better memory
Let's face it, there's a reasonably good chance you're going to
end up looking stupid even without the battery stuck to your
head. Especially after the rise of the machines.

The therapeutic art of applying electricity and other traumas

to the brain has a long and mostly unpleasant pedigree, with
most treatments being the medical equivalent of kicking the
jukebox in order to make it play a tune, except that the
jukebox trick works about 99 times more often as most
treatments used to hack brain functions. Electroconvulsive
therapy—aka electroshock—is a hacking technique more
consistent with Jason Voorhees than Kevin Mitnick. ECT
applies up to 500 volts of electricity to the entire brain. But as
everyone knows, it's not the voltage that kills you, it's the
amperage—between 200 and 1600 milliamps. By comparison,
tDCS applies a trivial nine volts of electricity with an
amperage generally not in excess of two milliamps.

For an ECT treatment, patients are strapped to a table, with

special salves applied to prevent their skin from burning,
and gagged to prevent them from biting off their tongues. In
contrast, a patient receiving a tDCS treatment could literally
perform brain surgery on another patient during the
procedure with only a slight tingling sensation to distract
him or her.

The main reason that tDCS has become the latest rage in
alternative medical treatment is precisely because it's so
innocuous. The voltage is so low that it's (almost) impossible
to do any harm. As far as anyone can tell, patient their
nothing to lose except their dignity, and most patients with
brain problems have already been forced to make
compromises on that front.

Although the technique in tDCS is extremely simple, its

actual effect is complicated to the point that no one can
really say exactly what it does to the brain, an organ which
scientists recently discovered is very, very complicated. It
seems to work better when applied during sleep. (Very
probably.) It may reverse or moderate the extremes found in
bipolar disorders, as well as reversing the electrical polarity
of neurons. (Which is different.) (We think.) It also seems to
moderate the extremes of brain seizures—when an electrical storm sweeps over the neural
circuitry that powers consciousness. (We're pretty sure.)

Although its negatives are few, most of the positives are disputed to a greater or lesser extent.
Studies have found that tDCS may or may not offer one or more of the following benefits:

If you strap on the battery and set a timer so that the voltage kicks in during the deepest
levels of sleep, tDCS improves both visual and verbal memory function. Some studies found
enhancments in memory for waking patients as well, though others have delivered
conflicting results.
 On the bright side, studies have repeatedly found that
tDCS can change in brain characteristics such as blood
flow distribution, electrical polarity and motor response.
Unfortunately, these changes are often of debatable
value, and the changes caused by tDCS are more akin to
shuffling playing cards than building a house of them—
you can cause a general wave of activity with reasonably
predictable parameters, but it doesn't guarantee a
precise result.
Numerous studies have also found that the changes
caused by tDCS can have a lasting and possibly even
permanent effect. So if you shuffle the deck well, you
can enjoy a prolonged lucky streak. Unfortunately, that
also means that negative effects—such as susceptibility
to migraines in certain cases—will persist.
tDCS can be used to moderate the negative side effects of
psychoactive drugs and to enhance the effects of other
brain-shaping technologies like transcranial magnetic
stimulation.
Depending on the polarity of the connections, tDCS can be used to adjust the "contrast"
setting in human vision, as well as to enhance or suppress the ability to visually detect small
movements. The treatment appears to be reversible in these cases, offering the prospect of a
"Display Settings" control panel for your brain.
For those suffering from persistent itchiness or chronic pain, tDCS can depress tactile
sensitivity.
tDCS is currently under study for the treatment of dementia, seizures, memory-related
disorders and generally any problem that involves a brain locked in a pattern of misfires—
from depression to tinnitus. There have been no studies yet on whether tDCS can dislodge
an annoying commercial jingle from your head, but there is reason to hope.

All these treatments make use of a brain quality known as

neuroplasticity, a metaphor for mental and neural activity that
equates the brain's operating system to a lump of putty that can
be squeezed and stretched into different configurations. Early
research into neuroplasticity resulted in gross insults to the
brain, whether via lobotomy or ECT. More recent work has
focused on TMS—a form of magnetic stimulation which causes
all the neurons in the brain to simultaneously fire in the same
direction, a process vaguely analagous to rebooting your
computer, except that your computer isn't likely to
spontaneously develop seizures after rebooting. tDCS is a gentler
approach. It nips and molds around the brain's outer edges
rather than flattening the putty with a sledge hammer before
attempting to roll it back into its original shape.

As for the do-it-yourself crowd, the technology of tDCS is pretty basic. Anyone who grew up with
the Radio Shack 100-in-one science experiment kit can build a working tDCS stimulator.
However, hacking the brain itself contains some inherent risks.

If you opened up your computer and randomly connected available circuits, you might discover
an interesting new effect, but it's far more likely you would completely fry your motherboard.
The brain is much more resilient than your
computer, and tDCS is much less intrusive than
randomly rewiring live circuits. But if your
experiments end up giving you a permanent facial
tic, a lasting case of impotence, or your dog starts
talking about the Antichrist, don't come crying to us.

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