How about TMS/tFUS/tACS ⇒ “meditation”/reducing neural noise?
Drastic improvements in mental health/reducing neural noise & rumination are way more feasible than increasing human intelligence (and still have huge potential for very high impact when applied on a population-wide scale [1]), and are possible to do on mass-scale (and there are some experimental TMS protocols like SAINT/accelerated TMS which aim to capture the benefits of TMS on a 1-2 week timeline) [there’s also wave neuroscience, which uses mERT and works in conjunction with qEEG, but I’m not sure if it’s “ready enough” yet—it seems to involve some sort of guesswork and there are a few negative reviews on reddit]. There are a few accelerated TMS centers and they’re not FDA-approved for much more than depression, but if we have fast AGI timelines, the money matters less.
[speeding up feedback loops are also important for mass-adoption—which both accelerated TMS/SAINT and the “intense tACS program” that people like neurofield [Nicholas Dogris/Tiffany Thompson] and James Croall people try to do]. Ideally, the TMS/SAINT or tACS should be done in conjunction with regular monitoring of brainwaves with qEEG or fMRI throughout.
Effect sizes of tFUS are said to be small relative to certain medications/drugs [this is true for neurofeedback/TMS/tACS in general], but part of this may be that people tend to be conservative with tFUS. Leo Zaroff has created an approachable tFUS community in the bay area. Still worth trying b/c the opportunity cost of trying them (with the right people) is very low (and very few people in our communities have heard of them).
There are some like Jeff Tarrant and the Neurofield people (I got to meet many of them at ISNR2024 ⇒ many are coming to the Suisun Summit now) who explore these montages.
Making EEG (or EEG+fNIRS) much easier to get can be high impact relative to amount of effort invested [with minimal opportunity cost]). I was pretty impressed with the convenience of Zeto’s portable EEG headset at #Sfn24, as well as the convenience of the imedisync at #ISNR2024 [both EEG headsets cost $20,000, which is high but not insurmountable—eg if given some sort of guarantee on quality and useability I might be willing to procure one] but still haven’t evaluated the signal quality of each when comparing them to other high-quality EEG montages like the deymed). It also makes it easier to create the true dataset of EEGs (also look into what Jonathan Xu is doing, though his paper is more about visual processing than mental health). We also don’t even have proper high-quality EEG+HEG+fMRI+fNIRS datasets of “high intelligence” people relative to others [especially when measuring these potentials in response to cognitive load—I know Thomas Feiner has helped create a freecap support group and has done a lot of thought on ERPs and their response to cognitive load—he helped take my EEG during a brainmaster session at #ISNR2024]
I’ve found that smart people in general are extremely underexposed to psychometrics/psychonomics (there are not easy ways to enter those fields even if you’re a psychology or neuroscience major), and there is a lot of potential for synergy in this area.
[1] esp given the prevalence of anxiety and other mental health issues of people within our communities
How about TMS/tFUS/tACS ⇒ “meditation”/reducing neural noise?
Drastic improvements in mental health/reducing neural noise & rumination are way more feasible than increasing human intelligence (and still have huge potential for very high impact when applied on a population-wide scale [1]), and are possible to do on mass-scale (and there are some experimental TMS protocols like SAINT/accelerated TMS which aim to capture the benefits of TMS on a 1-2 week timeline) [there’s also wave neuroscience, which uses mERT and works in conjunction with qEEG, but I’m not sure if it’s “ready enough” yet—it seems to involve some sort of guesswork and there are a few negative reviews on reddit]. There are a few accelerated TMS centers and they’re not FDA-approved for much more than depression, but if we have fast AGI timelines, the money matters less.
[speeding up feedback loops are also important for mass-adoption—which both accelerated TMS/SAINT and the “intense tACS program” that people like neurofield [Nicholas Dogris/Tiffany Thompson] and James Croall people try to do]. Ideally, the TMS/SAINT or tACS should be done in conjunction with regular monitoring of brainwaves with qEEG or fMRI throughout.
Effect sizes of tFUS are said to be small relative to certain medications/drugs [this is true for neurofeedback/TMS/tACS in general], but part of this may be that people tend to be conservative with tFUS. Leo Zaroff has created an approachable tFUS community in the bay area. Still worth trying b/c the opportunity cost of trying them (with the right people) is very low (and very few people in our communities have heard of them).
There are some like Jeff Tarrant and the Neurofield people (I got to meet many of them at ISNR2024 ⇒ many are coming to the Suisun Summit now) who explore these montages.
Making EEG (or EEG+fNIRS) much easier to get can be high impact relative to amount of effort invested [with minimal opportunity cost]). I was pretty impressed with the convenience of Zeto’s portable EEG headset at #Sfn24, as well as the convenience of the imedisync at #ISNR2024 [both EEG headsets cost $20,000, which is high but not insurmountable—eg if given some sort of guarantee on quality and useability I might be willing to procure one] but still haven’t evaluated the signal quality of each when comparing them to other high-quality EEG montages like the deymed). It also makes it easier to create the true dataset of EEGs (also look into what Jonathan Xu is doing, though his paper is more about visual processing than mental health). We also don’t even have proper high-quality EEG+HEG+fMRI+fNIRS datasets of “high intelligence” people relative to others [especially when measuring these potentials in response to cognitive load—I know Thomas Feiner has helped create a freecap support group and has done a lot of thought on ERPs and their response to cognitive load—he helped take my EEG during a brainmaster session at #ISNR2024]
I’ve found that smart people in general are extremely underexposed to psychometrics/psychonomics (there are not easy ways to enter those fields even if you’re a psychology or neuroscience major), and there is a lot of potential for synergy in this area.
[1] esp given the prevalence of anxiety and other mental health issues of people within our communities