[HN Gopher] I just hacked my brain (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
I just hacked my brain (2015)
Author : apsec112
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-03-21 03:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.linkedin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.linkedin.com)
| tablespoon wrote:
| This is potential Darwin award material: I watched a YouTube
| video and know about Ohm's law, time to zap my brain!
|
| This guy has the right idea:
|
| > Dennis Eckmeier
|
| > Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience
| Consulting, and Advocacy
|
| > As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody
| against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you
| really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical
| engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use
| professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3.
| don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about
| to hit the switch: don't. :P
| Sanzig wrote:
| Yeah... reading it in further detail, he applies current
| _across_ his head between the mastoid processes. I thought it
| was local stimulation between two surface electrodes under the
| ear. A quick look at the literature shows that the targeted
| structures are too deep for an approach like that, so they have
| to go across the head.
|
| Style points for bravery, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't
| want to pump over a milliamp of direct current right underneath
| the squishy mass of goo that contains my conscious self.
| Especially not with an uncontrolled source like a battery - any
| sort of stimulator really ought to be current limited.
|
| A milliamp is an awful lot, IEC 60601 specifies a 0.1 mA
| patient leakage current and I'm pretty sure they weren't
| expecting even that small leakage current to be applied to the
| head.
|
| It's still cool, but yeah, nobody try this at home.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > Style points for bravery
|
| It's only bravery if you know the risks. :)
| AR_14 wrote:
| The guy was standing while his experiment, right? That is for
| me the potential Darwin award material here.
|
| Actually loosing balance due to this could lead to a
| potentially lethal head injury.
| MisterTea wrote:
| What makes you think no precautions were taken?
| capableweb wrote:
| Incredible that this guy is building is own electrodes and
| sending electricity to his body, but what you are noticing is
| that he might, potentially, get a head injury because he was
| standing!
|
| I'm sure some injuries were to be counted on in this case.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| It's a 9V battery. Relax.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's a 9V battery. Relax.
|
| That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/jury-rules-radio-station-
| jennifer...
|
| > Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, was among
| 18 people who entered the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii"
| competition. They tried to drink as much water as they could
| without urinating in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii gaming
| console....
|
| "It's just water. Relax."
|
| > "Can you get water poisoning and, like, die?" asked the
| female disc jockey.
|
| > "Not with water," a male disc jockey replied. "Your body is
| 98 percent water. Why can't you take in as much water as you
| want?"
|
| > "Maybe we should have researched this before," the female
| disc jockey added....
|
| > Strange drank nearly two gallons of water in over three
| hours on Jan. 12, 2007. During the contest, she could be
| heard complaining about pain to disc jockeys at 107.9 "The
| End."
|
| > "Oh, it hurts," Strange said, while one male disc jockey
| remarked that she looked pregnant and another, a woman, said
| "That is so funny."...
|
| > Strange left after taking second place, winning a pair of
| concert tickets. She then called in sick at work and died in
| her bathroom just hours after the contest.
| temp0826 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponatremia
| 99_00 wrote:
| Your example doesn't show why a 9v battery used in this way
| is dangerous.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Your example doesn't show why a 9v battery used in this
| way is dangerous.
|
| So? It's part of a more general argument against assuming
| household items are safe when you're using them in highly
| unusual ways or far outside of normal parameters.
|
| But if you need a specific example of someone killing
| themselves with a 9V battery to get the message, a
| sibling comment actually linked to a Darwin award where
| someone did just that.
| 99_00 wrote:
| No one is advocating intentionally sticking electrical
| probes into your body. So, again, it doesn't show that a
| 9 volt battery used in the way described by the article
| is dangerous.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| >> It's a 9V battery. Relax.
|
| >That's the kind of thinking that leads to stuff like this
|
| It's also the kind of thinking that leads to _getting
| killed by 9V batteries_.
| https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| A 9V battery is enough to deliver a lethal current under the
| right conditions. Don't play with electricity unless you know
| what you are doing.
| 99_00 wrote:
| What are those conditions?
| Sanzig wrote:
| Damn, that's really cool.
|
| My concern with doing this with more than a demo setup would be
| elecrolysis injury due to long-term exposure to direct current.
| Humans are basically big bags of electrolyte solution, so
| applying DC for long periods of time results in ions bunching up
| at the electrodes and all sorts of nasty chemical effects. This
| is the main danger when children inadvertantly swallow coin cell
| batteries: it's not actually the heat that causes GI damage (heat
| generation from a shorted coin cell is minimal), it's the
| electrolysis-induced chemical burns that result when the battery
| pumps a few tens of mA through GI tissue.
|
| Is it possible to achieve the same effect using an AC waveform?
| That would likely be safer since it won't result in polarization.
|
| EDIT: also, I wouldn't do this to myself, at least not with a 9V
| battery and a couple of pieces of aluminum foil...
| torotonnato wrote:
| Slightly OT, but since the focus shifted to safety: is that
| battery really dangerous? I'm really asking.
|
| I remember, as a kid, testing for charged 9V batteries touching
| the bare electrodes with my tongue. It was a funny feeling, but
| that was way before the "little chemist" became the dumbed down
| shadow of itself and everyone was screaming "safety".
|
| For science, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now measuring the
| resistance of ~5mm of my tongue: it's 90kOhms, that should be a
| lower bound regarding the experiment.
| antonvs wrote:
| Here's the story of someone else who decided to measure his
| body's resistance with a 9V battery:
|
| https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
| torotonnato wrote:
| The poor sailor was a bit more hardcore though. Fascinating
| story
| BossingAround wrote:
| > The effect has been known for almost two centuries now.
|
| Ah good. Nothing like a good ol' electroshock brain treatment
| from the 1800s, also known as the golden age of brain medicine.
| philipswood wrote:
| Cool, but LinkedIn is probably the worst place to document
| this...
| dang wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| psychomugs wrote:
| Allen Pan leveraged GVS to remote control his friends:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S7FO2Qd6Zc
| phn wrote:
| Going on a tangent but upon reading about vestibular reflexes I
| recalled something I used to do as a kid:
|
| When in bed, ready to sleep, I could condition myself to believe
| the bed was tipping over to the side, up to the point where I
| would have the reflex of grabbing the sheets to keep myself from
| falling, similar to jolting awake up after falling in a dream.
|
| I wonder if something could be done to manipulate these
| perceptions without actually zapping the brain.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I'd love to understand the brain's capacity to fool itself.
|
| Sometime in my 30s I discovered I could "make my ears retract
| involuntarily". I'll think about pulling them back without
| actually trying to do so, and at some time in the near future
| that I can't anticipate, they'll retract.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-22 23:03 UTC)