The Shocking Future of Brain Zapping
Posted on March 11, 2015 by Soren Dreier
Author:
Ahmed - Elder
It’s all in your head—those icky feelings,
all that fog—and chemicals just aren’t that great at cutting through. That’s
why scientists are experimenting with changing the brain game by tweaking its
circuitry, rather than the chemical processes.
It might be a bit unnerving to us seasoned
pill-poppers, but some believe that electrical currents could be the new wave
in everything cerebral, from treating depression and addiction to enhancements
that would enable those seeking that mental edge to learn new skills faster or
remember more.
While pharmaceutical companies rake in
nearly $90 billion a year from global sales of mental health meds,
psychopharmacology research and development has slo wed to a crawl. With about
20 p ercent of Americans taking prescription medications for psychiatric and
mood disorders, there’s a lot of room for growth.
That’s where “electroceuticals” come in.
“People find electricity being applied to
treat depression very bizarre, but they find swallowing a pill to treat
depression or anything else very natural,” said Marom Bikson, a professor of
biomedical engineering and founder of a company that develops brain stimulation
hardware.
Zapping your noggin may seem like the new
wave of masochism rather than the cutting edge of medical tech, but the brain
is essentially an electrical organ; altering the currents alters the signals.
This has been the basis for psychopharmacology all along, but pills are slow,
and expensive to produce. According to Bikson, our reliance on drugs is “more
cultural than scientific.”
Using electrical currents to stimulate
specific elements in the brain to alter their functions sounds like an idea
direct from the future, but people have been therapeutically shocking their
bodies and brains since we first harnessed electricity. One of those early
adopters was the Roman Emperor Claudius, who pre ssed electric eels to his
temples to ease headaches.
While electrical brain stimulation never
went away, it fell out of favor as big pharma rose to the fore. In modern
times, the thought of applying electricity to the brain has been met with all
sorts of creepy feelings a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but brain
stimulation has evolved a lot since then. In 2000, Michael Nitsche and Walter
Paulus, two German scientists, looked at how targe ting electricity to certain
areas of the brain affects the functions of specific lobes, and brain
stimulation as we know it began to take shape.
Now, some researchers believe this
evolving science of what has come to be called “electroceuticals” might
reinvent the entire field of medicine as we know it.
“What if electroceuticals could be as
effective as drugs? What if electroceuticals could be one-hundredth as
effective as drugs?” Bikson ponders. “It would mean that electroceuticals are
going to change the world.”
***
Curious to see the new technology for
ourselves, we stomp through a sludgy March afternoon to meet Bikson his City
College of New York office. His research focuses on transcranial direct current
stimulation (tCDS), a non-invasive procedure that involves placing positive and
negative electrodes over the scalp to target specific parts of the brain and
bring about different neurological effects.
Unlike the rambling, breathless lists of
side effects at the end of Prozac commercials, there’s only one with tDCS: mild
irritation on the skin where the electrical nodes are placed. To prove it,
Bikson suggests we give it a go.
Eric volunteers, and is feeling just a
touch nervous about the whole thing, although the biomedical engineer assures
us nothing can go wrong. That sounds like precisely what a mad scientist might
say.
Bikson adjusts a sponge-lined strap over
Eric’s forehead and connects it to a beige box covered with dials and knobs.
For this demo, Bikson placed the electrodes on Eric’s head to impact an area that
relates to depression.
“This is the current and the light is
flashing which means that we’re going up slowly,” Bikson starts to count off
the current level until it reaches the initial target of one milliamp. “And
we’re stimulating.”
He adjusts a sponge-lined strap over
Eric’s forehead and connects it to a beige box covered with dials and knobs
He bumps up to “the typical high dose of
tDCS” which, at a whopping two milliamps, isn’t actually much at all. For
perspective, it would take 500 milliamps to power a 60 watt light bulb.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is about a thousand times more intense than
tDCS and floods the entire brain with currents, rather than just the parts of
the brain that impact certain moods or cognitive abilities.
The electrodes send off a bit of a prickly
heat sensation for the first few minutes, but Eric says he doesn’t feel much of
a difference in terms of emotional state. Bikson says that’s to be expected
with the first few rounds. Initially, the effects are limited, but over time,
the impact accumulates and the effects last longer.
“There’s already technology available
today that can, with limited discomfort or no discomfort, deliver much higher
intensities than people are using. And there’s no theoretical—not even
real—reason to think that this might be hazardous,” Bikson says. “We’re at baby
aspirin levels right now. [Researchers] are going really slow with this stuff.”
So why not ramp up the experiments?
Researchers have to be especially cautious because of how new the science of
tDCS is—and perhaps to avoid the horrors that have been observed to coincide
with ECT.
“Part of the reason why people are on the
fence is because the effects are small, [but] of course they’re small. The dose
has not increased in 15 years,” Bikson says.
But Bikson says that might be keeping them
from making real headway—and from having the sort of impact on test subjects
that would get the medical community engaged with this stuff.
One specific type of brain stimulation—and
there are a lot of different types—is already being use d to treat
Parkinson’s disease through a surgically implanted device that works much like
a pacemaker. That same technology is also being used to help treat neurological
disorders like epilepsy and even the after-effects of strokes. A different sort
of stimulation that uses lasers shows promise in helping rats kick a coke
habit.
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