{ Saturday, September 2, 2006 }
This was a great session on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, for which I took almost no notes, by Ed Boyden, who is a professor at Stanford and MIT, and who is putting together an effort to make it easier for independent hardware hackers to build their own TMS machines -- here it is on Sourceforge.
I knew nothing about TMS, but basically it is a non-invasive treatment using magnetic fields in the brain, and has been found to successfully treat various medical conditions, particularly addiction, depression and chronic pain. But not only that, it's also been said to break habits, improve attention and focus, induce visual phenomena, improve creativity and fluency and speed up language processing. One treatment's effects last for 6 weeks.
According to Linda Stone, who was sitting next to me, TMS hasn't been approved by the FDA in the United States, and she conjectures that this is likely because the pharmceutical companies have opposed it. There is nothing patentable about TMS, as the information has been at large in the world for some time, and its success she believes would undermine the pharmaceutical business of keeping patients in chronic conditions on lifelong prescriptions. Linda called it "Turbo-acupuncture." It has been approved for use in Canada, Israel and some European countries.
Looking around the web for more information, I found the Neurodudes web site ("at the intersection of neuroscience and AI") and this article in Science News that has a good bibliography.
LINK | 11:08 AM | TB
"improve attention and focus, improve creativity and fluency and speed up language processing".
Where do I sign up for this in Seattle? G-d knows I could use a little help! ;-D Not to mention that as an interpreter and translator I can imagine the applications of this technology can be particularly promising for those of us who must process huge amounts of multiple language data at a very fast pace.
Viv | September 3, 2006 12:51 PMHi Viv,
Anyone interested can participate! You can find others in your area who are intersted, learn more, sharing experiences, and meeting others interested, by going here. I must warn you that it's still early days, but we're trying to grow.
One of the functions of this community is to help people build their own, or to start groups that will share a device. In addition, our goal is to fine-tune protocols for modifying creativity, etc. so that we can optimize them significantly over what has been attempted to date.
Ed Boyden | September 3, 2006 5:34 PMCaterina,
More on bio-resonance and biophysics based medical technologies.... BTW, I love the work Ed Boyden is doing! It is certainly worth following him and his work.
I really do think biophysics based technologies can play an important role in the future of medicine. A biochemical approach, pharmaceuticals, etc. do have an important role to play in medicine. Energetic approaches, ranging from biophysics based devices to acupuncture, homeopathy, and meditation, can play a much more significant role and can reduce, in some situations, the need for pharmaceuticals. I mentioned a few devices that I've been treated with in Europe and in Canada, and I'll list here, the ones that I felt had a positive impact.
+ phototherapy: 640 nanometers of far infrared light can speed up bone and tissue healing and is especially helpful for dental infections and hip and knee problems. More research will be published on this over the next year or so.
+ Ondamed: http://ondamed.net/ This is approved in the U.S. as a bio-feedback device. I have one of these devices and I have used it extensively. MDs in the U.S., Europe and Canada have used this device to treat pain, depression, overall health issues, Lyme disease, and addiction (Denmark has a very successful smoking cessation program using the Ondamed.). They have a U.S. office in NY.
+ Oberon: http://biolaz.com/english/biolaz.html (this website is a little tougher to follow) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(device) -- a site with a number of good links. If I had not personally experienced a profound positive response to working with this device when I was fairly ill, I might not believe something like this could exist. The patient experience is far better with a very experienced operator for the device.
+ CoRe radionics: http://www.bioenergeticmedicine.org/index.htm
In my situation, I was treated by well-trained, healthcare practitioners using each of these technologies. As with any type of treatment, BOTH the treatment and the practitioner matter. I am grateful to be well again and it is, in part, due to having treatments with the technologies above.
I wonder if quantum mechanics, quantum physics, and string theory, as these field evolve, will ultimately contribute to explaining how these devices work.....
Cheers,
Linda
some people also use TMS as a God Helmet. i think that's a lot cooler :)
~C4Chaos | September 13, 2006 4:27 PMmarazzi prin omnitechgroup
marazzi | September 30, 2006 10:02 AM{ Post a comment }
Hi Caterina,
Thanks very much for the cool post!
We're actually doing almost all of our work at a wiki for now, located here -- we've decided the work is too informal so far to move to Sourceforge (although we do have an account open, with little or no activity on it).
We'd love anyone interested to contribute, and as you'll see, we have some of the major hardware milestones done! Foo Camp was a really exciting place to launch, and we're getting a lot done.
Just as important as the intellectual property -- we're very interested in building a community of people who will experiment and try out things related to TMS on their own brains. Already I've encountered so many people who have begun this kind of experimentation -- part of the website is dedicated to this kind of documenting of self report. In particular, we hope that people will share experiences and that we will derive great insights into how to modify brain activity for the better, through such comparisons!
Thanks for the encouraging post on our work :)
Best,
Ed Boyden | September 2, 2006 9:41 PMEd