What movies teach us about brain enhancement
In this week's issue: Brain Spas, Meditation Apps, Sleep Stories, Digital Therapeutics, Neuromodulation and Light Therapy.
Hey all, greetings from Santa Monica!
I spent Saturday morning volunteering at the farmers market. Part of our job there is enforcing masks and distancing.
Spend time at the farmers market and you realize: 6 feet doesn’t mean the same thing to all people. Not everyone has the best spatial awareness. I call these people Social Distance Violators, or SDVs.
How do you deal with these SDVs who get too close? You could publicly shame them. Toss rotten vegetables. Blind them with pepper spray. Use a taser.
Or try doing what my friend Justine does:
“Tell them you have feelings for them and you want a commitment. That always scares people away.”
Last week I wrote about neuroscience research on the brain, learning and creativity. This week I’m sharing with you what I’ve learned about neuromodulation.
How can we use technology to enhance brain function, mental health and performance?
A Health Spa for the Brain
I visited Neurovella Brain Spa recently in Santa Monica. The system combines a zero-gravity chair, soothing nature sounds, neuromuscular massage and visually-oriented brainwave entrainment (BWE). It feels like a warm bath washing over your brain.
Neurovella was created by neurosurgeon Dr. Amir Vokshoor to treat brain and spine surgery patients and help with recovery. The guided meditation promotes neuroplasticity, the development of new connections between neurons.
So-called neuromodulation technology is still in its infancy but has huge potential. Someday it may be as normal to train the brain to increase cognitive function as it is to improve muscle tone at the gym.
Digital Therapeutics
Why should we care about brain enhancement?
We’re battling a second pandemic of mental health. Healthcare workers are struggling with PTSD. Psychiatry experts are seeing increased depression, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation.
The pandemic spreads an existential feeling of unsafety. It alters your nervous system, changing the way you see and perceive threat.
How can technology help people cope with mental health challenges in a pandemic?
More people are turning to meditation apps like Calm and Headspace. Calm’s Sleep Stories are billed as “bedtime tales for grown-ups.” The latest Sleep Story by singer Harry Styles, released last week, sent fans into a frenzy.
We’re seeing more companies develop so-called digital therapeutics for mental health and performance:
Using video games to treat children with ADHD (Akili Interactive)
Helping people with substance use disorder using electronic cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT (Pear Therapeutics, the first FDA-approved prescription digital therapeutic)
Serving up a digital version of Emotional Faces Memory Task (EFMT) to treat depression (Click Therapeutics)
You can find a list of free meditation classes and mental health resources here (thanks to my friends at MyIntent).
Neuromodulation: The Next Frontier
Why do NBA players prepare for games by strapping on brain-zapping headphones?
There’s growing interest in neuromodulation—the use of electricity, sound waves and magnets to enhance physical and mental performance. Researchers are exploring the technology’s potential to improve learning, fight addiction and depression, and improve walking ability in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
You can find a list of clinical studies on neuromodulation here.
What Movies Teach Us about Brain Enhancement
It sounds like an episode of Black Mirror: You go to bed wearing an electromagnetic headset to consolidate memory formation and promote learning and creativity. Letting your brain luxuriate in a warm electromagnetic bath while you sleep.
Science fiction can be instructive when we’re trying to imagine future states of the world—how we’ll work, how we’ll live, how we’ll manage our health. Before the future is invented, it must be imagined.
What can movies teach us about the risks and benefits of brain enhancement?
The Matrix: “I know Kung Fu,” says Neo, after having martial arts skills uploaded into his brain. The science: There’s evidence that neuromodulation can enhance learning (see Halo Neuroscience), but we’re nowhere near this kind of on-demand brain upgrade. (What would be the first skill you’d install in your cranium?)
Inside Out: A Pixar classic that zooms into a child’s brain and lets us see her memories form, change, and evaporate over time as she matures. The science: EEG scans can help us learn about brain activity and what brain regions are associated with certain emotions, but we don’t yet have the resolution to see new memories being formed. (How cool would that be!)
Black Mirror: The Entire History of You: My favorite Black Mirror episode, set in a future where a "grain" technology records people's audiovisual senses, allowing a person to re-watch their memories. The science: It’s not a stretch to imagine recording our entire lives. But connecting it all to a neural implant, and making it searchable and accessible on demand—that’s a bit further down the road. (How hard will it be to let things go in a relationship when high-def memories are retrievable in the blink of an eye?)
Limitless: Bradley Cooper’s character discovers a smart pill, NZT, that turns him into a genius and helps him outwit the Russian mob. The science: The closest thing we have to smart pills are nootropics like Provigil (Modafinil). Nobody’s developed a genius pill yet, but I’m sure drug companies are working hard on it. (It would make billions.)
Inception: A mind-bending film about implanting and extracting memories in the brain. The science: We can’t directly enter people’s memories like Leo’s intrepid brain detective, but we’re developing powerful new ways to affect people’s moods and emotions. (Just ask Mark Zuckerberg how technology can be used to hack a human’s emotional state.)
Want a deeper dive on this technology? Here are some other examples of neuromodulation in development:
Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES): A company called Cervella got FDA clearance last year for a system that delivers micro-pulses of electric current through the brain to treat insomnia, anxiety, and depression.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): This technology has been FDA approved as a treatment for people with major depressive disorder. It could be used as an adjunct to traditional anti-depressant meds like SSRIs.
Neurofeedback: The Muse headband uses EEG, electro-encephalography, to translate your mental activity into nature sounds, using real-time displays of brain activity in an attempt to teach self-regulation of brain function.
Photobiomodulation (PBM): Devices like the Vielight Neuro Gamma use near-infrared light to regulate your body’s circadian rhythm, reduce inflammation and enhance memory and cognition.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation: The vagus nerve is the largest nerve of the autonomic nervous system and plays a key role in heart, lung and digestive function. Strong vagal tone helps you relax faster after experiencing stress. There’s growing awareness of vagus nerve health as people realize it’s the centerpiece of the fight-or-flight system and controls how our bodies respond to stress.
Red Light Therapy
One of the simplest hacks for brain health: Light. A few months ago I installed red incandescent light bulbs in my bedroom & bathroom. We know exposure to blue light at bedtime interferes with your body’s melatonin production and negatively affects sleep quality.
Try using red lights in your bedroom. Use apps like f.lux or Iris to auto-optimize your screen’s colors & brightness and minimize blue light exposure at night. You’ll wake up feeling more refreshed and more primed for creative thinking.
Photo of the Week
I picked up this ficus tree last week at the farmers market. The ficus tree reminded me of a book I’m reading, The Overstory. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 novel that’s told largely from the perspective of trees.
The Pulitzer Board described the book as "an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them."
Reading the book has been transformative. I’ll never look at trees the same way.
Until next week,
Daniel Zahler
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By Daniel Zahler
I’m Daniel, a healthcare and life sciences consultant based in Santa Monica, California. Every week I write an email newsletter with perspectives on health and wellness trends, and strategies & tactics on how to optimize cognitive, physical and emotional health.