This isn’t directly related to TMS, but I’ve been trying to get an answer to this question for years, and maybe you have one.
When doing TMS, or any depression treatment, or any supplementation experiment, etc. it would make sense to track the effects objectively (in addition to, not as a replacement for subjective monitoring). I haven’t found any particularly good option for this, especially if I want to self-administer it most days. Quantified mind comes close, but it’s really hard to use their interface to construct a custom battery and an indefinite experiment.
Hey, I remember your medical miracle post. I enjoyed it!
”Objectively” for me would translate to “biomarker” i.e., a bio-physical signal that predicts a clinical outcome. Note that for depression and many psychological issues this means that we find the biomarkers by asking people how they feel...but maybe this is ok because we do huge studies with good controls, and the biomarkers may take on a life of their own after they are identified.
I’m assuming you mean biomarkers for psychological / mental health outcomes specifically. This is spiritually pretty close to what my lab studies—ways to predict how TMS will affect individuals, and adjust it to make it work better in each person. Our philosophy—which I had to think about for a bit to even articulate, it’s so baked into our thinking—is that the effects of an intervention will manifest most reliably in reactions to very simple cognitive tasks like vigilance, working memory, and so on. Most serious health issues impact your reaction times, accuracy, bias, etc. in subtle but statistically reliable ways. Measuring these with random sampling from a phone app and doing good statistics on the data is probably your best bet for objectively assessing interventions. Maybe that is what Quantified Mind does, I’m not sure?
The short answer is that if this were easy, it would already be popular, because we clearly need it. A lot of academic labs and industry people are trying to do this all the time. There is growing success, but it’s slow growing and fraught with non-replicable work.
Not my medical miracle post, just my comment on it.
“Objectively” for me would translate to “biomarker” i.e., a bio-physical signal that predicts a clinical outcome.
Yes, though I wouldn’t restrict it to “clinical” because I care about non-medical outcomes, and “bio-physical” seems restrictive, though based on your example, that seems to be just my interpretation of the term.
Note that for depression and many psychological issues this means that we find the biomarkers by asking people how they feel
These are legitimate biomarkers, but they’re not what I want, and I’m struggling to explain specifically why; the two things that come up are that they have low statistical power and they’re a particularly lagging indicator (imagine for contrast e.g. being able to tell whether an antidepressant would work for you after taking it for a week, even if it takes two months to feel the effects). They’re fine and useful for statistics, and even for measuring the effectiveness of a treatment in an individual, but a lot less useful for experimenting.
I’m assuming you mean biomarkers for psychological / mental health outcomes specifically. This is spiritually pretty close to what my lab studies—ways to predict how TMS will affect individuals, and adjust it to make it work better in each person.
That sounds really cool. I’m assuming there’s nothing actionable available right now for patients?
Our philosophy [...] is that the effects of an intervention will manifest most reliably in reactions to very simple cognitive tasks like vigilance, working memory, and so on. Most serious health issues impact your reaction times, accuracy, bias, etc. in subtle but statistically reliable ways.
Yep. This is basically what I’m hoping to monitor in myself. For example, better vigilance might translate to better focus on work tasks, or better selective attention might imply better impulse control.
Measuring these with random sampling from a phone app and doing good statistics on the data is probably your best bet for objectively assessing interventions. Maybe that is what Quantified Mind does, I’m not sure?
QM doesn’t work so well on phone and hasn’t been updated on years and has major UX issues for my use case that makes it too hard to work with. It also doesn’t expose the raw statistics. Cognifit (the only app I’ve found that does assessment and not just “brain training”) reports even less.
Do you have a specific app that you know of?
The short answer is that if this were easy, it would already be popular, because we clearly need it. A lot of academic labs and industry people are trying to do this all the time. There is growing success, but it’s slow growing and fraught with non-replicable work.
I don’t think this is true. My alternative hypothesis (which I think is also compatible with the data) is that it’s not hard, but there’s no money in it, so there’s not much commercial “free energy” making it happen, and that it’s tedious, so there’s not much hobbyist “free energy”, and academia is slow as things like this.
This isn’t directly related to TMS, but I’ve been trying to get an answer to this question for years, and maybe you have one.
When doing TMS, or any depression treatment, or any supplementation experiment, etc. it would make sense to track the effects objectively (in addition to, not as a replacement for subjective monitoring). I haven’t found any particularly good option for this, especially if I want to self-administer it most days. Quantified mind comes close, but it’s really hard to use their interface to construct a custom battery and an indefinite experiment.
Do you know of anything?
Hey, I remember your medical miracle post. I enjoyed it!
”Objectively” for me would translate to “biomarker” i.e., a bio-physical signal that predicts a clinical outcome. Note that for depression and many psychological issues this means that we find the biomarkers by asking people how they feel...but maybe this is ok because we do huge studies with good controls, and the biomarkers may take on a life of their own after they are identified.
I’m assuming you mean biomarkers for psychological / mental health outcomes specifically. This is spiritually pretty close to what my lab studies—ways to predict how TMS will affect individuals, and adjust it to make it work better in each person. Our philosophy—which I had to think about for a bit to even articulate, it’s so baked into our thinking—is that the effects of an intervention will manifest most reliably in reactions to very simple cognitive tasks like vigilance, working memory, and so on. Most serious health issues impact your reaction times, accuracy, bias, etc. in subtle but statistically reliable ways. Measuring these with random sampling from a phone app and doing good statistics on the data is probably your best bet for objectively assessing interventions. Maybe that is what Quantified Mind does, I’m not sure?
The short answer is that if this were easy, it would already be popular, because we clearly need it. A lot of academic labs and industry people are trying to do this all the time. There is growing success, but it’s slow growing and fraught with non-replicable work.
Not my medical miracle post, just my comment on it.
Yes, though I wouldn’t restrict it to “clinical” because I care about non-medical outcomes, and “bio-physical” seems restrictive, though based on your example, that seems to be just my interpretation of the term.
These are legitimate biomarkers, but they’re not what I want, and I’m struggling to explain specifically why; the two things that come up are that they have low statistical power and they’re a particularly lagging indicator (imagine for contrast e.g. being able to tell whether an antidepressant would work for you after taking it for a week, even if it takes two months to feel the effects). They’re fine and useful for statistics, and even for measuring the effectiveness of a treatment in an individual, but a lot less useful for experimenting.
That sounds really cool. I’m assuming there’s nothing actionable available right now for patients?
Yep. This is basically what I’m hoping to monitor in myself. For example, better vigilance might translate to better focus on work tasks, or better selective attention might imply better impulse control.
QM doesn’t work so well on phone and hasn’t been updated on years and has major UX issues for my use case that makes it too hard to work with. It also doesn’t expose the raw statistics. Cognifit (the only app I’ve found that does assessment and not just “brain training”) reports even less.
Do you have a specific app that you know of?
I don’t think this is true. My alternative hypothesis (which I think is also compatible with the data) is that it’s not hard, but there’s no money in it, so there’s not much commercial “free energy” making it happen, and that it’s tedious, so there’s not much hobbyist “free energy”, and academia is slow as things like this.