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Thync is a consumer product. And that's exactly how we're reviewing it – much like we would a new iPhone or laptop. We share our experience and make our recommendations, but we aren't writing any research papers or conducting any double-blind studies on it (though the company does link to some of those on its website).
After using Thync every day for the last week and a half, I'm convinced that it's one of the most exciting new tech products of 2015. Like taking a hit of Mary Jane, it can push me from an anxious, over-thinking mood to one where I'm cool, collected and laid-back like a THC-infused Rastafarian. And if I'm feeling sluggish or unmotivated, Thync can also peel that layer away, like the sun burning a morning fog off of my consciousness.
I heard about the brain-mod crowd a couple years ago at the New York Maker's Faire. A team from DARPA gave a talk on an electro-stimulation cap they said was meant to fight Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans. This seems to follow. Has anyone from Soylent experimented with trans-cranial electro-stimulation?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 30 2015, @09:52AM
So, according to Wikipedia people think this works because it physically changes how well the neurons in your brain conduct electrical signals.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cloud.pt on Thursday July 30 2015, @01:10PM
The truth is we don't know what "well" is. Something that changes your mood today might be something that drives you to a different personality later on, or even gives you cancer or Alzheimer's in the long run. Time will tell. In any case, I can't grasp the reasoning behind better electrical conductivity improving mood. If anything, I imagine it would have an effect closer to making you feel time passing slower yet getting tired in less "real-world" time - after all, it's pretty much an overclock. Now, how would an organ fare with such an overclock, that is the question...
In any case, I vape with ecigs to replace real tobacco, so I'm all about the lesser evil. This is something I would try if I really had chronic trouble keeping a decent mood.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:54PM
In this case "well" is merely referring to the physical and objective degree of electrical conductivity, not as a judgement of the overall brain state itself...
This isn't like over-clocking the whole brain, rather modulating the relative strength of different "circuits" so as to produce a different neurocognitive profile, without any reference to an unknown hypothetical universal ideal (which I don't think even makes sense, tbh).
Indeed, these kinds of modulations are known to have effects of both improving or impairing particular sorts of moods or performance capacities, often involving mutual trade-offs between different ones.
The desirable use of stuff like this is basically to aid in transitions between states as appropriate or desired in a given circumstance, and/or to help adjust habitual tendencies.
Think of it more like: sometimes you want better visual thinking to solve a geometry problem so you shift resource utilization toward your visual centers at the expense of the verbal ones. Later, you want to solve a word problem so you do the opposite. At another time you just want to relax and zone out, so you down-regulate some excitable part that you might prefer to up-regulate some other time you want to be more motivated and attentive.
Long term effects are more a matter of how practice reinforces whatever is practiced, so any time you use this system to up-regulate a particular circuit you improve that circuit's ease and degree to which it can be up-regulated in the future, even without the external system. Likewise with down-regulation tending towards inhibiting the ease and degree to which it can be up-regulated / increasing the ease and degree to which the circuit can be suppressed. This can have benefits or detriments depending on specifically how you tend to utilize it.
This is all roughly speaking, and from a layman's potentially flawed understanding, of course.