One of my ongoing experiments is testing the parameters of tDCS. About three months ago I came across a montage which showed a noticeable effect on my EEG recordings.
The montage is a bit complicated compared to most, however in all of my testing it’s the only one that’s showed efficacy in test pools greater than n=5.
The montage requires an electrode at roughly FP(z) on 10-20 and below the inion, where the skull wraps around the cerebellum. I’ve been able to personally run currents up to 5mA, but have found the tolerability to start dropping at ~3mA. The montage requires 15 minutes, then switching polarity of the electrodes for another 15 minutes. Finally, the most important part is that you must not be sedentary for the stimulation. Taking a walk, working on something physical, the more vigorous the more tolerable it is at higher current. Just don’t let the electrodes slip because that will be jolting. This has been applied 3-4 times a week, however all subjects especially myself, have had several missed weeks due to life.
In general I’ve noticed much greater alpha/beta synchronization in most test subjects, and all test subjects show most frequencies resting closer to -70mV when working on cognitive batteries or “hard” tasks. Personally, I didn’t see much change to voltage, but what I do see is a much more synchrony, particularly across my delta (I have weak eyes open delta in frontal areas and dominant delta eyes closed) and alpha frequencies. Actually everyone’s graphs started to look a lot prettier after a month or roughly 10-15 applications.
This is not a “mental health” montage. It is not designed to address any “psychiatric symptoms”. It may, however the investigation here is to determine how tDCS can impact the overall energy flows in the brain. So far the results have been consistent enough that it may be time to formalize the protocol and study parameters.
My next step is multi-placement testing, I suspect that there are coordinated pairs of targets which will provide optimal synchronization results so experimenting to suss out those pairs will be fun if/when this formalizes. After that on the roadmap will be attempting to figure out if electrode movement between optimal sites has an impact on overall synchronization.
Edit:
I think I have a bit of lead on why tDCS results are so inconsistent and it’s kind of a forehead slapper.
First, tDCS shouldn’t provide immediate results. Most of the immediate results we see are probably placebo or localized processing effect. Just an all around oopsie, and I boned myself here by trying to replicate existing work and got the same existing bad data from it.
Going over the data again, it’s not that tDCS requires multiple sessions over a long period of time to take effect, it’s that astrocytic reconstruction takes time, period. I missed this because I got too busy looking for magic instead of looking at mechanics. Right now the lead time between effect is somewhere between 4 days on the fastest subjects to 3 weeks on the slowest subjects. I suspect that we can tie this directly to calcium signalling levels, big calcium will integrate faster than small calcium.
This feels like a pretty significant breakthrough on this.