Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions
actu.epfl.ch103 points by giuliomagnifico 16 hours ago
103 points by giuliomagnifico 16 hours ago
I evolved my mental model for adhd by reading newer research like:https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/30/adhd-should-not...
Metaphorically and analogy wise: If you think as genes as the holes on a flute, gene expression as the music then environment is what determines "bad" music. But there is no one specific gene that is known or corellated specifically for adhd symptoms.
ADHD is likely genetically caused but the genes are in everyone just expressed in specific environmental circumstances impossible to know for sure in a lab(cause they mostly look at outward behavior in lab settings and fmri blood flow).
But I've been doing meditation(45mins 3-4 days a week) I've also learnt for myself that 30 mins of power naps does wonders for my mind. The medication's effectiveness AND gated on the former two; SNRI, Dopamine reuptake inhibition is like carpet bombing and only makes you ready for rewiring: you still need to rewire with therapeutic and Behavior Therapy techniques.
But I know for a fact that my brain waves are different on days I do meditation and power naps.
I really do want to know if deep brain neural activity detection data can detect bad waves and possibly close the loop by providing corrective waves.
From experience, all mental illnesses are related and stem from change in the activation of the dopaminergic circuitry, likely at the nucleus accumbens level. It can be regulated consciously but only partially. Interoception via meditation.
Alternatively, it can be chemically shutdown/reset, the basic principle of neuroleptics. That is a coarser action though. When things hit the fan. Not nearly as much as the usual recommendations from clinicians.
For ADHD, they prescribe stimulants which make sense if we consider that the brain is searching for triggers of dopamine.
Some other conditions seem to require the opposite but this has a lot of side effects.
I think that in fact, the dopamine modulation require more fine grained handling and this is two sides of a same coin.
Just fyi adhd is not considered a categorical disease ATM. This means that it is not necessarily a disease in the same sense that flu or schizophrenia are diseases. It's a disease of excess
As someone who meditates and recently fixed his sleep, I can relate
Quite curious how you guys prepare and do your meditation sessions
Beginner level: sit in a chair and breathe slowly. Focus on the sensation of your breathing, feeling the air go in and out. If any intrusive thoughts creep in, try to revert back to focusing on your breathing. Meditation looks passive from the outside, but it is a cognitively active process that takes practice to achieve, just like drawing or programming or anything else you want to do. It's the art of placing your attention somewhere and keeping it there, not letting your thoughts carry you away.
Tangentially related: recently I've taken to doing a kind of "meditation-like" thing while trying to sleep where I imagine the number 300 visually, and attempt to count down towards zero, decrementing this counter visualization in my mind's eye. For an extra challenge, I try to do this while mentally saying the word "tock", but NOT mentally saying the current number. I find it extremely difficult, which is stimulating enough to keep my mind from wandering to places that tend to keep me awake, but not so stimulating that it prevents me from sleeping.
Most of this already exists, and I already have it implanted in my brain
Articles can be weird sometimes in the details they include/omit.
How has the RNS worked for you? I was a member of the ~4 person research team there for about 5 years and it’s cool beyond belief to see someone using it in the wild on my favorite forum.
It's been 4 years since I got it, and been quite a journey. I'll do my best to try and answer the question succinctly:
The RNS succeeded as a tool for capturing orders of magnitude more detailed data about how my brain functions and how medication impacts it. It also had some success in reducing the the severity of the fairly infrequent clinical seizure I do have. But, not only did it fail to live up to its promise of getting me off medication, it didn't even prevent me from needing to start taking one that's effective but has some pretty strong side effects (Xcopri).
Titrating onto Xcopri is a long, slow process. I started over the summer, and my doctor could see immediately see the degrees at which subclinical seizure-like activity stopped. Then, as the titration continued and the side effects started to become noticeable, my doctor could see how adjusting my other meds to reduce side effects impacted activity and could do so comfortably with a much finer tooth comb than he would otherwise.
Without the information the RNS provides, I would likely be unable to tolerate the Xcopri and the next step would be another brain surgery (although without the RNS, my epilepsy would appear to be much better controlled than it is. Because I rarely have a clinical seizure.)
So it seems to me that while these implanted devices have real power in their ability to collect data, their ability to reliably alter the brain function is questionable. But that data itself is huge . Hope you keep working in the space!
(glad to answer more questions; feel free to ask or DM me. I'm a bit more informed about this than the average bear)
Wow that’s awesome to see. Sorry you have epilepsy but what an exciting time for medicine.
Thanks for the wishes. I'm super lucky for the time I live in and access to cutting-edge medical care.
Other than a slightly worse-than-normal memory, I live a pretty normal life. Most people don't realize even I have epilepsy, let alone a computer in my skull with wires running deep into my brain sending electric pulses.
If I didn't live when I did and where I do (NYC) my life would be very different. And relative to many others, my seizures are not so bad.
Whoah, I’m blown away! Did not know this technology existed. Thanks for sharing, TIL
> The proposed SoC was extensively validated on two intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) datasets related to psychiatric disorders, achieving 80.9%/74.8% sensitivity and 74.2%/73.1% specificity on the multi-source interference task (MSIT) and the emotional conflict resolution (ECR) task, respectively. We further evaluated the SoC on the public DEAP dataset for electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition, achieving 70.5%/72.5% sensitivity and 69.8%/66.3% specificity for the arousal and valence states, respectively. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11685197]
I dunno, really need to see the comparative performance of other classifiers and the base rates in these datasets to know whether these performance metrics are anything we should care about, and whether e.g. a classifier on simple verbal probes to the subjects might simply yield better predictions than going through the EEG signals. You can do some really interesting EEG biofeedback stuff, so maybe this is useful, but I would think the full EEG head-gear would also provide much richer and more useful information than a measurement based on a single chip. Presumably this would be for psychiatric disorders or brain injuries where the core dysfunction we know is limited to a very specific region(s).
The end game is described in this short story: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf
Either that, or something nasty like the Gonchong from the Fighting Fantasy book series Island of the Lizard King.
I would post a link, but the only standalone topic page is on a Fandom site, which counts as doubly morbid.
Why do people think we're going to live forever. We hardly understand anything about the body.
This is going to be something in the cookie banners at some point.
"identifying cognitive and emotional states"
I have been looking for sources that can list human cognitive states. It's visible when people switch from one state to another, like going from creative focused thinking to conforming group think
I can identify quite a few from the outside when talking to people, but I would love to have a list so I can connect my observations with technical terms.
I would be shocked if there’s an agreed upon list, certainly not one supported by neuro recordings. You’re probably well-served by coming up with a good set by your own informal observation.
"Robert Plutchik" "Wheel of emotions"
Joy, Trust, Fear, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, Anticipation.
A start.
Those are emotions . An example of cognitive state switching as observed on others:
I went to a harbor master to pay for my berth.
1. First state is social, we had a quick chat.
2. Then he went to enter my details into a computer, which is a more focused task oriented state.
3. Then we had a chat again, a more social state.
So there were 2 cognitive states switching, a social, a task oriented and then another social one.
The emotion / cognition distinction is somewhat poor and often breaks down, because you can't really have one without the other (different mental states just involve differing degrees of both, phenomenologically). They aren't really causally separable, but are only really phenemonologically separable (cognition and emotion have different feels / textures, but almost always co-occur).
Most importantly, you rarely have "cognition-free" emotional states, because emotions always involve some mental model or representation of the self / world / self and world, i.e. they involve a cognitive state. Only in very extreme cases (drugs, perhaps some cases of persistent depression, etc) might you be able to have emotions that are largely uncorrelated with any kind of particular cognition.
Likewise, the same is almost certainly true for cognitive states, in that we tend to think about / model things because we need to evaluate those things. Evaluation too seems to rely heavily on emotional processes, in that damage to emotional processing tends to make rational / logical decision-making severely impaired (e.g. Damasio's work in the 90s, or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2396787/). Regardless, you can't remove evaluation / valuation from most thinking, and that is fundamentally linked to emotion.
Doesn't mean you couldn't potentially build a machine / thing that detects mental states, mind you. But it likely won't be very useful if it is just using simple folk-psychological terminology and concepts (or using such concepts will likely not result in much insights into the machine outputs).
So I was pretty sure I'd looked into some of this before. I auto-genned an html page really quickly based on my notes and some searching; here's a link to what I managed to pull together. You're asking a pretty specific question, so ymmv, but it might be of use?
You should record yourself & then label the videos based on what state you were in so that you can then verify it w/ an AI if you guessed correctly or not.
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> increasingly exploring its potential for severe psychiatric illnesses including major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I feel like many mental disorders would be fixed by just doing sports. I know some can't do sports, but most people can, and all of these solutions are actually bandaids because of living in the current world environment (where you scroll through social media, etc.)
Would you recommend the same to fix a person's a broken leg or eyesight problem?
Already said "I know some can't do sports." Also didn't say anything about fixing physical health issues.
My point is not ability to do the sport, is that you're taking mental diseases as different from "physical".
The brain is harder for us to understand than a femur, but that doesnt warrant dismissing its malfunctions. Exercise, good sleep and similar stuff is healthy for everyone, but suggesting healing OCD with that is just as ascientifical as suggesting to tough it out for a broken bone.
Either you don't do sports either or you are living proof that sports don't fix all mental disorders.
The CTE scandal that rocked high-contact sports like boxing and American football suggests that sports can cause mental disorders.
That said, physical activity, when carefully engaged in, is a great clearing agent for brain fog. Get to the gym, or go for a hike, jog, swim, or bike ride, if nothing else.
“I feel like many stomach ulcers would be fixed by just doing maths olympiads.”
See how that sounds?