So I issue the challenge. Who wants to try this? I am happy to be part of this experiment. If necessary I would be happy to arrange funding.
Edit: I spent more time reading the paper and now think this study has limited relevance for practical learning, see my reply to romeostevensit below. I’m no longer planning to invest time in this project.
I have already been considering this and would be happy to try it out. I am a biomedical engineering grad student and believe I am well positioned to get the equipment operating. I tried just setting up a strobe at 10 Hz and staring at it for a couple seconds. It’s a pretty intense thing to look at. It feels “activating.”
Brainstorm
I think it’s probably tractable to figure out a way for people to self-test. It’s self-blind compatible, since users won’t know their brain frequency or phase. Potentially, a computer program could measure these outputs from the EEG, then randomly assign that day’s use to be in any of the three experimental settings that show no, low, or large effects. It could put the user through one or more tasks to measure the effect, and it could be configured to report that data automatically over the long term.
I was considering the idea of creating infrastructure for users to self-test at home and then potentially report their data back to a researcher.
Logistical challenges with a distributed study like this would include:
Sourcing EEG devices, getting users to set them up correctly, and teaching them to use the software
We’d need to make sure the specific data necessary to obtain for this use case can reliably be obtained by a lower-end EEG headset.
My major concern is that this study found that a 1 Hz difference between brain wave frequency and flash frequency made a huge difference to the learning rate, as did flashing at the peak vs. trough. You’d need a device capable of dealing with these frequencies and then you’d need to calibrate it, probably on a per-user basis.
Writing software to permit measurement, display of the flash, testing of user learning and performance. If we wanted to do a distributed study in users’ homes, it would need to be compatible with a range of platforms.
If academic publishing is a desired outcome:
Writing software to allow reporting of that data back to the researcher (or at least to the user)
Finding an adequate number of test subjects and funding
Writing, publishing, dealing with reviewer feedback
A more lightweight approach would be to just purchase the EEG device and figure out how to set it up to use yourself. That’s probably simpler than helping a whole bunch of users figure out how to get the equipment and software working. You’d then either have to figure out how to quantify your self tests, or just stay tuned to the literature to see if this sort of approach continues to replicate and show robust effects across tests.
An even simpler approach would be to just expose yourself to 1.5 seconds of 9-11 Hz strobe daily on the presumption that sometimes, it’ll happen to be sufficiently close to your actual phase and frequency that it’ll create an effect, and that it’s at least not hurting your learning rate. That’s a big pile of assumptions and gives you no feedback, but it’s very easy to do.
Wouldn’t it be neat if this light intervention could cause the phase and frequency of the person’s alpha waves to change in a predictable way?
What if flashing this pattern at 11 Hz at a particular phase, for example, could cause the subject’s alpha waves to change to 11 Hz and in-phase? If that in turn caused the effect on learning to improve, then you could potentially make a device like this that wouldn’t require measuring the user’s alpha waves. It would just synchronize the alpha waves with the flashes, enforcing the learning benefit without requiring observation. That might make this a scalable tool, since then you could have a browser app to deliver this stimulation and wouldn’t require electrodes at all.
Edit: emailed the lead author to ask if this is a thing, will post a followup if I hear back
If I was interested in this line of research, that’s what I’d focus on: figuring out how to control the user’s alpha wave frequency and phase.
Edit: I spent more time reading the paper and now think this study has limited relevance for practical learning, see my reply to romeostevensit below. I’m no longer planning to invest time in this project.
I have already been considering this and would be happy to try it out. I am a biomedical engineering grad student and believe I am well positioned to get the equipment operating. I tried just setting up a strobe at 10 Hz and staring at it for a couple seconds. It’s a pretty intense thing to look at. It feels “activating.”
Brainstorm
I think it’s probably tractable to figure out a way for people to self-test. It’s self-blind compatible, since users won’t know their brain frequency or phase. Potentially, a computer program could measure these outputs from the EEG, then randomly assign that day’s use to be in any of the three experimental settings that show no, low, or large effects. It could put the user through one or more tasks to measure the effect, and it could be configured to report that data automatically over the long term.
I was considering the idea of creating infrastructure for users to self-test at home and then potentially report their data back to a researcher.
Logistical challenges with a distributed study like this would include:
Sourcing EEG devices, getting users to set them up correctly, and teaching them to use the software
We’d need to make sure the specific data necessary to obtain for this use case can reliably be obtained by a lower-end EEG headset.
My major concern is that this study found that a 1 Hz difference between brain wave frequency and flash frequency made a huge difference to the learning rate, as did flashing at the peak vs. trough. You’d need a device capable of dealing with these frequencies and then you’d need to calibrate it, probably on a per-user basis.
Writing software to permit measurement, display of the flash, testing of user learning and performance. If we wanted to do a distributed study in users’ homes, it would need to be compatible with a range of platforms.
If academic publishing is a desired outcome:
Writing software to allow reporting of that data back to the researcher (or at least to the user)
Finding an adequate number of test subjects and funding
Writing, publishing, dealing with reviewer feedback
A more lightweight approach would be to just purchase the EEG device and figure out how to set it up to use yourself. That’s probably simpler than helping a whole bunch of users figure out how to get the equipment and software working. You’d then either have to figure out how to quantify your self tests, or just stay tuned to the literature to see if this sort of approach continues to replicate and show robust effects across tests.
An even simpler approach would be to just expose yourself to 1.5 seconds of 9-11 Hz strobe daily on the presumption that sometimes, it’ll happen to be sufficiently close to your actual phase and frequency that it’ll create an effect, and that it’s at least not hurting your learning rate. That’s a big pile of assumptions and gives you no feedback, but it’s very easy to do.
A further thought:
Wouldn’t it be neat if this light intervention could cause the phase and frequency of the person’s alpha waves to change in a predictable way?
What if flashing this pattern at 11 Hz at a particular phase, for example, could cause the subject’s alpha waves to change to 11 Hz and in-phase? If that in turn caused the effect on learning to improve, then you could potentially make a device like this that wouldn’t require measuring the user’s alpha waves. It would just synchronize the alpha waves with the flashes, enforcing the learning benefit without requiring observation. That might make this a scalable tool, since then you could have a browser app to deliver this stimulation and wouldn’t require electrodes at all.
Edit: emailed the lead author to ask if this is a thing, will post a followup if I hear back
If I was interested in this line of research, that’s what I’d focus on: figuring out how to control the user’s alpha wave frequency and phase.