Radiolab - 9-Volt Nirvana

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Be a better sniper! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe. Back in the early 2010s, Sally Adee, then an editor at New Scientist Magazine, went to a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) conference and heard about a way to speed up learning with something called trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). A couple of years later, Sally found herself wielding an M4 assault rifle to pick off simulated enemy combatants with a battery wired to her temple. But that got then-producer Soren Wheeler thinking about this burgeoning world of electroceuticals, and if real, what limits will it reach. For this episode, first aired back in 2014, we brought in Michael Weisend, then a neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institute, to tell us how it works (Bonus: you get to hear Jad get his brain zapped). And sat down with Peter Reiner and Nick Fitz, then at the University of British Columbia, to help us think through the consequences of a world where anyone with 20 dollars and access to a circuit board and a soldering iron, can make their own brain zapper. And then checked-in again to hear about the unexpected after-effects a day of super-charged sniper training can have on one mild-mannered science journalist. Episode credits: Reported by Sally Adee and Soren WheelerOriginal music by Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail].   Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Hello, Lulu Miller here. This week on Radio Lab, we are rewinding. To a far away time, a time when our North Star, our editor and chief Soren Wheeler, was but a young and green producer out in the field, get and tape, making it happen. In this episode, Soren tells the strange science fictiony story of how a nine-volt battery can turn a mild-mannered journalist friend, Sally A.D., into a somewhat lethal weapon. It's also a story about how the public used electricity from real 9-volt batteries to order up states of mind. But before I let you achieve this 9-volt Nirvana, I wanted to let members of the lab know about some bonus content

coming your way. Landing very soon on the members feed, you'll hear a few more secrets from Wales. This is a companion conversation to our recent episode, The Humph Back and the Killer. In this bonus conversation, producer Annie McEwen learns about how Wales appear to have family reunions and it's really lovely

so if you're not a member of the lab but are lab curious go to radielab.org slash join and sign up not to miss out and now onward to our story 9 volt Nirvana oh wait you're listening okay alright okay alright door listening Oh, wait, you're listening. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W and Y. The same! You're... This is Radio Lab, I'm Jada Bumrod. I'm Robert Kulwich. I'm Sorn Wheeler.

And this. Electricity E-L-U-N. Alright. I'm Sorn Wheeler. And this... Alright. If you want to sit there. Okay. If you stick the phones on and it's not saying hello to someone. And I don't know. Can you hear anyone? Can I hear anyone? I don't know. Can you hear anyone?

Oh my God! So in high! That's how you know this best. Thank you. Yes, I do. This is Sally A.D. She's an old friend of mine. How are you? We went to school together a long time ago. But these days, she's an editor.

A new scientist in London. And the reason I called her into the studios because of something that happened to her when she was working on a story for them. Yes, this was a story that I'd been chasing for years and years. Yeah, and for her. In 2007 at DARPA Tech, which is a big gathering

of weapons developers and researchers. It's like 5,000 guys all looking like agentsmith from the Matrix, you know, looking at the latest war toys. Drone's bazookas. Anyway, at some point she starts talking to this woman. And she was telling me about her program, which was that they had figured out how to apply sort of electrical current to the brain in order to accelerate the learning process. I was like, no f***ing s***.

So what Sally had stumbled into was something called TDCS, Stansford Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. The idea is, you take a couple little electrodes, you place them on your scalp, connected with wires to a battery, you send a little bit of electricity into your brain and then All kinds of things happen if you believe the claims, but For Sally it started with a casual afternoon of sniper training So after that conversation at the conference she tracked down a group in Carl's bad, California It's about an hour and a half south of LA who were are using this brain-zapping stuff to train snipers?

And I actually got new scientists to agree to send me to LA from London, which is not an insignificant expense. After a late-night international flight and some LA traffic... I haven't slept. I'm sleep deprived. Sally found herself at a place called Advanced Brain Monitoring, where they have a... little room. This little room where they've set up a little sort of 360 degree training simulation.

So it's kind of like a video game, but it's like the full, kind of like the full room in front of you. And so- Like the whole wall is a screen? Yes. Not only that, she says, but all around you in this room are these props. You're behind real sandbags, you know, in proper position, they teach you how to hold the rifle properly. And the rifle, except for the fact that it shoots blanks,

is basically the real deal. Yeah, and then it's got a laser sight. And they tell her, you know, okay, before we do this brain stimulation thing, we're actually gonna have you do some training without it. So they get her all set up, they put her behind the sandbags and they hit go. You know, first it starts out with really easy stuff like you're shooting virtual targets

that aren't people. Then it's quite, it's realistic you get to kick back from the CO2 cartridge and then you get this like Ding sound from when you hit, you know, the virtual metal target. And then it starts getting harder. So there's people instead of targets and then more and more people. Until the highest level is you are at a checkpoint, like a Iraqi checkpoint, and everything's fine, and then all of a sudden,

the Humvee in front of you blows up, and then from all over the place, dozens of people in suicide bombests start running at you with their rifles shooting you. And I'm just being blown up. I can't make the decisions fast enough. She said there were just too many of them. She couldn't figure out who to shoot first.

It was so, oh God, and I was so tired, and I was so jet lagged, and I was so bad at it. And it's funny because you think like, oh whatever, that's a video game, but it's amazing how stressful that gets. And at a certain point, the stress started getting to her. I was like, all right, stop. Let's just end this. She started thinking like, what the hell am I doing here anyway?

Like, oh my God, this isn't gonna be a story. And really, you just flew out to California for this. Oh, she was not very good at it. And then it kind of stressed her out. And then this guy walked in the room. Yes. Mike Wyzen. Mike Wyzen.

He's a neuroscientist. It looks like Greg Almond. He's got that like super long hair. I am fairly clean cut at the moment, but I had hair down to my belt buckle. So Mike Wyzen has put together this contraption. What is that big box that's sitting in your lap there? So this is a big red toolbox that we got literally from Sears. Mike was actually passing through New York City, so we invited him into the studio. And we have electrodes

That allow us to deliver current a bunch of wires I saw yeah, and a whole bunch of batteries So so we take a set of electrodes one electrode is attached to my right Temple and the other electrode is attached by a different wire to my Left arm and we turned on the juice? Did it hurt? It wasn't so much that I suddenly tasted metal in my mouth. It tasted like I'd licked the inside of an aluminum can. And then he's like, all right, try it again.

I'm like, oh, I'm not exactly expecting different results. So they start me out again right at the really hard checkpoint one. The thing blows up and then people start coming from all over the place. And I feel like they must have put it on an easy setting. Everything is just a little more straightforward. It's more obvious who I should pick off first. And I'm thinking to myself a little bit like, you you know, when is this gonna get really hard again? And then, you know, in turn or whoever comes in and turns on the lights, she's like, okay, you're done.

I'm like, well, wait, that's not, that's not, I've only been here for like three minutes. She's like, no, no, that was 20 minutes. Like, no, that's not true. And I look up in the clocks of all shifted by 20 minutes. And I swear to God it was three minutes. So almost every person that we put this on says, they get into what they call a state of flow,

where they don't recognize that the time is going by, they're just boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was like, did you guys make it easier? They're like, no, same level. Like, I think you guys made it easy. When Sally did it with brain stimulation, she performed at 100% accuracy. 100%.

I didn't leave anyone alive. How what was she before? I don't know, but she wasn't very good. Roughly three out of 20 the first time and 20 out of 20 second. Yeah. So, wait, so you're saying with just a little electricity she went from being like totally an app

to like a trained killer? Well, it's an end of one. We can't go too far, but I mean, this was just Sally's experience during this one demo, so it's not like a controlled study. But Mike has now used this device in a bunch of studies for the military. Yep.

For example, you had one study with people looking at those. Drany black and white radar images. this device in a bunch of studies for the military. For example, you had one study with people looking at those. Grannie Black and White, radar images. Trying to pick out, you know, what's an enemy vehicle and what isn't. And if he puts this device on their head while they're trying to learn how to do that, we can double the rate of learning.

Really? Well, how? What is it doing? OK, so what I think is that early on when you are learning something, Mike says that when you're trying to learn how to do something that's kind of tough, what's happening is that you're trying

a bunch of different things. You try all kinds of different ways to solve the problem. And occasionally your brain is stumbling across an ideal sequence of neurons. Every so often as you're practicing, all of a sudden your brain is like, oh, this, then this, then this, then this. Okay, that's it.

But then it struggles to find that again and it keeps messing up. And whatever, and if you look at an expert brain, you'll actually see that preferred circuit dialed in. Like they just do that over and over and over again, no more stumbling around. And so what Mike does is he figures out where that circuit is. And he gives it a little extra juice to an in essence prime the pump. So that that expert circuit is more likely to fire, and you're more likely to stumble into

it. And when you do stumble into it, you're more likely to stick with it. That's right. That's how we think it works. But are you sure of what you're hitting? I mean, you're putting electricity on the outside of people's heads, so are you able to target just a small cluster of brain cells

or is it a region that you're hitting or like a thousand cells? What I'm talking about is millions of cells. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah. Is that precise enough to target the place where a task is being done in a brain? If it's a million? In our work, yes.

And might claim that even though it's a blunt tool. Yeah, this is not a scalpel, this is a sledgehammer. If you know the right group of neurons or region of the brain to target, this can work with almost any task. If you want to target visual spatial learning, for example, searching an image, you'd put this on the right side of your head, roughly near the temple. But if you wanted to learn textual material, you can put this on the left side of your head, and it will have a similar effect. If you want to learn textual material. Be true. If I want to learn irregular verbs in French, I get one of your things I stick it on the part of my head that is good of a grammar.

We haven't tested it in with learning foreign languages, but if a native English speaker is learning a long English sentence, they can recall it. With greater fidelity, if they have this on their head while they study those sentences. And if you go right parietal back over just behind your ear and up above your ear, you can learn math better. That's it. We were all kind of like, eh, I don't know, but since Mike had his device there with him,

should we try it? Sure I'm ready. We thought, now let's try it and see for ourselves. Do you wanna do it, Rob? I don't know. I mean, Robert actually pretended he has an appointment We thought, no, let's try it and see for ourselves. Do you want to do it, Rob? I don't know. I mean, Robert actually pretended he has an appointment he left. But me, taking one for the team here, I don't do fear. Don't you need to be seated for this? Or I can sit down. Yeah, you should be seated. All right.

Stick around because we are going to put electricity right into the man's head. I'm talking about chat. man's head. I'm talking about chat. Alright, so you've got here in front of me you have two little circles of electrodes. Is that what these are? Yep. Red wires and black wire. So I get two of these on my head. One on your upper arm. One on my upper arm. For the demo, Mike showed me a bunch of stereograms. All right, so what am I doing here? I'm looking at a bunch of marbles, a million of them, and some kind of repeating pattern. Like, you know these things, Robert,

where you're staring at this 2D picture of like repeating pattern of marbles or something, and you're supposed to unfocus your eyes in just the right way so that a 3D picture will somehow emerge from the background. Yeah. Yeah. It seems to make me make me my eyes go bad.

So the idea of this demo is like, let's see if I can train my eyes to figure out how to pull the 3D picture out. You see it? I didn't get a cat. Yeah, I didn't get nothing. I have never been good at these. I mean, I get headaches when I go to 3D movies

and it took me like 10 minutes to get one As a butterfly there he is. Well, that's cool. Just see like just one. Wow look at that All right, so now you can juice me All right, I'm gonna turn it on okay, okay, I don't feel anything yet. Oh, yeah, okay. There it is Ah, what's it feeling feels like a bunch of mosquitoes are biting me in my temple. It's, I could taste it now too. So people get that. Huh.

I don't know what that is. Alright, so now I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at the stereoscopic images one more time. Here we are. We've got a green and pink. Whoa, that just became a world. Look at that. Suddenly a 3D globe just pops out of the background.

OK, next one. All right, so now I'm looking at a big green grass. Blades of grass repeating repeating repeating. Let's see. Whoa. Swans. I see swans. Or agami swans.

3D swans. Next one. Now I'm looking at a good sort of a trippy paisley background and a fanbie.ley background and Bambi 3d bambi next one. All right now. We have flower background sort of yellow and pink flower Thailand background. Whoa Boxes boxes floating in space next whoa a little ballerina doing a handstand on the balance beam robots Little Hershey's kisses popping right out a star. They're coming out really fast. Mmm, big pretzel. This is awesome.

Coiled snake. Come on anyway. Wow. That's what it feels like to get your brain juice done. Okay, I definitely felt like you couldn't give them to be fast enough. I was like, it was like another one, another one. Another one.

So maybe that's a flow state like you were describing I don't know. I feel very, very awake. Okay, so in the end, I ended up doing something like 50 stereograms in a really short amount of time. Great. So I definitely think something was going on, but I have to be honest, I mean, I was skeptical.

You were skeptical even when you were flying free? Well, it's like, I don't entirely trust the experience I had because it could simply be like a placebo, it could be it's I don't entirely trust the experience I had because it could simply be like a placebo, could be adrenaline, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It just, no matter what it just seems like the next flavor of new age thing. So I started calling around. My name is Peter Reiner and I'm professor at the University of British Columbia. Cool. So so Peter Reiner actually studies this whole field. He looks at public perception and the quality of research,

and I just basically asked him, you know, is this for real. Like, if you have a healthy brain, you put a little electricity into it, has it been proven that that will enhance learning or whatever else they claim? Well, maybe the best way to answer that is that part of the reason that there's all this interest is that TDCS appears to be relatively effective. He says this is based on a lot of different studies and a lot of different areas. But the key to what I just said is relatively, and so the caveat that I have to add is that

pretty much all of the studies that have been done to date are relatively small. He says it's early days, and the studies have been done have only been done with a few subjects. Maybe 20 people, larger studies, 40 or 50. Now a lot of these studies do find a positive effect, but if you're a hard-nosed scientist, you know, those small sample sizes aren't enough to make a very big claim. Even so. Turn it on, I'm gonna the truth.

The cat's kind of already out of the bag, because if you go on YouTube... White flash, really brief, really quick, that's cool. You can find a surprisingly large number of videos of people experimenting with these devices. I instantly feel very good, very calm, very safe, not really worried about anything. A lot of the videos show you how to make your own. First we'll start with the circuit diagram. Just go to Radio Shack and buy a few simple parts. There's the battery, that's going to be your 9 volt.

And here's a few alligator clips since they don't have any solder with me, although I have a switch in the circuit. I mean, YouTube just seems to be filled with people who are trying to hotwire their own brain. For the past year I've been wanting to engage my brain power since I have probably below average brain power comparison. I want to study newer sciences but as many of you I don't have the resources to go to this cool right now. So what I'd like to do is I like to use TZCS while I'm learning my vocabulary list. All right, so I want to give you an update on using TDCS to learn a foreign language.

People are using this for a whole range of things given how flexible the technique is. That's Nick Fitz. He works with Peter Riner, the guy we talked to earlier. And he says, not only can you do a lot of different kinds of things with this device, on top of that, it's dirt cheap. So let's say in the time that it takes me to listen to one of your episodes, I could probably go to the store, come back and build a TDCS device for around $20.

For $20? Right. And so as I said, I mean, is that something that makes you nervous? I'll say first, I think the DIY community is quite thoughtful, but it does make me nervous. There's some people with that report, lots of consciousness after using it.

There are some people that are reporting, feeling burns. There's actually one report of somebody going temporarily blind. This guy on YouTube. So a young Asian kid. I've been experimenting on where, which place is on my head would improve memory? He talks about how he spent a year

kind of experimenting with it. He put it in one place. After about five minutes, I felt really like really angry and depressed. Put it in another place. That's a really high score on Duma City. And I've only been stimulating my brain for about five minutes.

It's like he's playing Russian roulette with that thing. Oh yeah, yeah. Which brings up the larger point, you know, that this device is kind of impossibly hard to regulate. Because a kid like this can put it anywhere he wants in his head, and if he moves it just a couple of inches, it could have a drastically different effect. And that's really what is a concern.

Because according to Peter Reiner, while we might like to think of the brain as being a bunch of circuits that do separate tasks, really, it's an ecosystem. Every part affects every other part in some way. And when you put your electrodes on the head, you affect an area, a small area of the brain right under the electrodes. But it's already been shown that that effect can then multiply and sprint throughout the nervous system even down to your spinal cord. I mean, there's a theory out there that's called the zero-sum theory of the brain that some

people use as a framework for thinking about all this, which is like, you know, one part goes up, another part goes like, there's only so much juice in the brain, so if you send juice one direction, there's less juice somewhere else. So then if you were enhancing one part of your by definition diminishing another. Maybe, and to be honest... There was definitely an after effect. This is kind of why I ended up talking to Sally about this. Why I got so interested in this piece in the first place is because of what happened to her after the sniper training. So driving down from LA to Carl's Bad to go do this

was an absolute nightmare. I hadn't driven in like a year because I've been living in London where I just do public transportation. But on the way up, it's kind of like, I mean, I hate to compare it to Mario Kart, but it's just this extremely pleasant experience. I feel like I drove better that day than I ever drove before.

Like, it was very obvious where I could pass people without irritating them and just, I don't know, it's a weird memory, but I think I had more fun driving that day than I ever did since. And at some point, she realized it wasn't just about her driving ability. So, I would say that, I mean, I don't know how much I want to get into sort of in public on the radio about, you know, being a bit anxious. I mean, I guess that's not particularly controversial. Probably all writers are sort of riddled with anxiety. But I have this constant struggle

with all the little angry gnomes in my head, populating my head and telling me all the things that I don't do right. And all the things that I've done wrong that day, they just keep this incredibly comprehensive tally of them. And then the ones who worry about the future, and then the ones who tell me I'm gonna be living in a cardboard box in a year.

I mean, it's just like an amazing cacophony. But she says sitting in that car? They were just completely turned off, I think, for a couple of days. And it was a really, you know, really for a couple of days. For a couple of days. And to tell you the truth, it was kind of like everything just, I was just this person

that I hadn't experienced before. And I thought, maybe this is the actual sort of core person who I am when I'm not, when all my baggage isn't just weighing on me. It was like somebody had wiped a really steamy window and I was just able to look at the world for what it was. And I was curious whether like there's a connection there that like to be a good performer of some task. Goes along with shutting down the parts of yourself that say, I don't know, I don't think, maybe I can't, maybe I shouldn't. And that like there's actually a real connection between amping up one and tamping down the other.

It makes sense because if you're giving one circuit more power, you might be taking away from other places. Yeah. It's funny. I mean, I find this, since you and I are just been on stage for a while, one of the things I struggle with most during the performances is I'm sitting there, we're both sitting there, we've got our scripts,

and I have this box of buttons, and I have to remember which buttons do what things, and there's the musicians, and I just figure out where they come in and out. And all of these things, they become competing voices. They become these little shattering gnomes that Sally puts it in my head, and I'm like, wait, what is that? Okay, now, when does that come in?

Where are we? What's happening? Oh my God, you're messing this up. Jack, come on. Why did you keep doing it? And I get like kind of crazy. Sometimes during a show, I can't actually even focus on what you're saying.

It's not a good feeling. And then there are other times where're saying. It's not a good feeling. And then there are other times where something happens, it's almost like a mode. And suddenly it's like, fw, right there. I know I'm right with you. It's the easiest thing in the world to listen to what you're saying, and respond instinctively in the moment.

And they literally feel like different chemical modes, or maybe electrical modes, you know what I mean? That's really, that's very interesting to me. Because I mean, going back to the performance stuff, you can't really make it happen. I mean, I guess you could, I suppose, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like it's somehow...

Feels like it's a gift, you know? Like, oh, thank you, universe. I feel really awake and present right now. Thank you. What happens when it's an expectation? You know, what happens to our, the way in which we move through the world, if we can just, if we can create that on demand, and order it up. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think the gift versus ordering it up is that's pretty deep to me. I mean I don't I feel like in a world where you order things up then you're in a world where you think you deserve things or you think you've earned them or you think other people haven't. That's a world that's a world that's empty

of true gratitude. To tell you the truth, one of the really worrying things to me was afterward how much I craved doing it again. It felt like a drug with no side effect. I mean, I don't know if I'm gonna get addicted to electricity seems unlikely. Gotta get some, man. Shoplifting batteries. Licking them. In the supermarket corner, licking cymbal batteries.

Thank you so much. No problem. And thanks a lot to Sally Eighty. So time to say goodbye. I'm Chad Ebbomrod. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab was created by Chad Ebbomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler, Lulu Miller and Lots of Nasser, our echo hosts. Susie Lechtemberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keith is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our

director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brustler, Rachel Kusik, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Neneza Bandum, Mack Kilti, Annie McEwan, Alex Niesen, Sarah Carrey, Anna Rosk with Puzz, Sarah Sandbach, Aryan Weck, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Bone Wong. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. This is Joel Mossbacher calling from New York City. Leadership Support for Radio Labs Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science, Sandbox, Assignments Foundation, Initiative, and the John Templeton

Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. you