Tag: transcranial magnetic stimulation
Brain Wave Pseudoscience
iSynchrony has put together a plausible-sounding bit of bafflegab to justify what it sells. The reality of neurology is against their claims.
Zap Your Way to Learning?
The company Halo Neuroscience is now offering a device, the Halo-Sport, which they claim enhances sports performance through “neuropriming.” Their website claims: Neuropriming uses pulses of energy to increase the excitability of motor neurons, benefiting athletes in two ways: accelerated strength and skill acquisition. Regular readers of SBM can probably see where this is going. A proper threshold of evidence Before I...
Hacking the Brain – A New Paradigm in Medicine
The word “paradigm” is over misused and overused, diluting its utility. Thomas Kuhn coined the term in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to refer to an overarching explanatory system in science. Scientists, according to Kuhn, work within a paradigm during periods of “normal science,” punctuated by occasional “paradigm shifts” when the old explanatory model no longer sufficed, and a radically new explanatory...
Brain Stimulation for the Masses
In the last decade or so there has been increasing research into non-invasive brain stimulation techniques for a variety of conditions. These include transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), random noise stimulation (tRNS), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These techniques alter the excitability of neurons in the brain, seem to have an effect on plasticity (the ability to...