9-Volt Nirvana
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Hello, Lulu Miller here. This week on Radiolab, we are rewinding to a faraway time, a time when our North Star, our editor-in-chief, Soren Wheeler, was but a young and green producer out in the field getting tape, making it happen. In this episode, Soren tells the strange science fiction-y story of how a nine-volt battery can turn a mild-mannered journalist friend, Sally Adie,

into a somewhat lethal weapon. It's also a story about how the public used electricity from real 9-volt batteries to order up states of mind. But before I let you achieve this 9-volt nirvana, I wanted to let members of the lab know about some bonus content coming your way. Landing very soon on the members feed, you'll hear a few more secrets about

from whales. This is a companion conversation to our recent episode, The Humpback and the Killer. In this bonus conversation, producer Annie McEwen learns about how whales appear to have family reunions. And it's really lovely. So if you're not a member of the lab, but are lab curious, go to radiolab.org slash join and sign up not to miss out. And now onward to our story, Ninevolt Nirvana. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay.

You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. This is Radiolab. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. I'm Soren Wheeler. And this... Electricity, electricity.

All right. If you want to sit there. Okay. If you stick the phones on and start saying hello to someone. And I don't know, can you hear anyone? Can I hear anyone? I don't know. Can you hear anyone? Oh my God, so in high. So you know this person? Thank you. Yes, I do. I do. This is Sally Aidey. She's an old friend of mine. How are you? We went to school together a long time ago, but these days she's an editor. A new scientist.

And the reason I called her into the studio is because of something that happened to her when she was working on a story for them. Yes, this was a story that I'd been chasing for years and years. It began for her. In 2007 at DARPA Tech. Which is a big gathering of weapons developers and researchers. It's like 5,000 guys all looking like Agent Smith from The Matrix, looking at the...

Drones, bazookas. Anyway, at some point she starts talking to this woman. And she was telling me about her program, which was that they had figured out how to apply sort of electrical current to the brain in order to accelerate the learning process. And I was like, no f***ing s***.

So what Sally had stumbled into was something called TDCS. It stands for transcranial direct current stimulation. The idea is you take a couple little electrodes, you place them on your scalp, connected with wires to a battery. You send a little bit of electricity into your brain and then all kinds of things happen, if you believe the claims. But... For Sally, it started with a casual afternoon of... Sniper training.

So after that conversation at the conference, she tracked down a group in Carlsbad, California. It's about an hour and a half south of L.A. Who were using this brain-zapping stuff to train snipers. And I actually got new scientists to agree to send me to L.A. from London, which is not an insignificant expense. After a late-night international flight and some L.A. traffic... I haven't slept. I'm sleep-deprived. Sally found herself at a place called Advanced Brain Monitoring, where they have a...

Little room. This little room where they've set up a little sort of 360 degree training simulation. So it's kind of like a video game, but it's like the full, kind of like the full room in front of you. Like the whole wall is a screen? Yes. Not only that, she says, but all around you in this room are these prototypes.

props. You're behind real sandbags, you know, in proper position. They teach you how to hold the rifle properly. And the rifle, except for the fact that it shoots blanks, is basically the real deal. Yeah, and then it's got a laser sight. And they tell her, you know, okay, before we do this brain stimulation thing, we're actually going to have you do some training without it. So they get her all set up, they put her behind the sandbags, and they hit go.

You know, at first it starts out with really easy stuff, like you're shooting virtual targets that aren't people. Then it's quite, it's realistic. You get the kickback from the CO2 cartridge and then you get this like ding sound from when you hit, you know, the virtual metal target. And then it starts getting harder. So there's people instead of targets and then more and more people. Until the highest level is you are at a checkpoint, like an Iraqi checkpoint, and everything's fine. And then all of a sudden...

The Humvee in front of you blows up. And then from all over the place, dozens of people in suicide bomb vests start running at you with their rifles shooting you. And I'm just being blown the f*** up. I can't...

I can't make the decisions fast enough. She said there were just too many of them. She couldn't figure out who to shoot first. It was so, oh God, and I was so tired and I was so jet lagged and I was so bad at it. And it's funny because you think like, oh, whatever, that's a video game, but it's amazing how stressful that gets. And at a certain point,

The stress started getting to her. I was like, all right, stop. Let's just end this. She started thinking like, what the hell am I doing here anyway? Like, oh my God, this isn't going to be a story. And really, you just flew out to California for this. She was not very good at it and it kind of stressed her out. And then this guy walked in the room. Yes. Mike Wisend. Mike Wisend. He's a neuroscientist. He looks like Greg Allman. He's got that like super long hair. I am fairly clean cut at the moment, but I had hair down to my belt buckle.

So Mike Wisend has put together this contraption. What is that big box that's sitting in your lap there? So this is a big red toolbox that we got literally from Sears. Mike was actually passing through New York City, so we invited him into the studio. And we have electrodes.

that allow us to deliver current. - You have a bunch of wires I saw. - Yeah, and a whole bunch of batteries. - So-- - So we take a set of electrodes-- - One electrode is attached to my right temple. - Yep. - And the other electrode is attached by a different wire to my left arm. - And we turn on the juice.

Did it hurt? It wasn't so much that. I suddenly tasted metal in my mouth. It tasted like I had licked the inside of an aluminum can. And then he's like, all right, try it again. I'm like, oh, I'm not exactly expecting different results. So they start me out again right at the really hard checkpoint one. The thing blows up and then people start coming from all over the place. And I feel like they must have...

put it on an easy setting, everything is just a little more straightforward. It's more obvious who I should pick off first. And I'm thinking to myself a little bit like, you know, when is this going to get really hard again? And then the, you know, intern or whoever comes in and turns on the lights, she's like, okay, you're done. I'm like, well, wait, that's not, that's not, I've only been here for like three minutes. She's like, no, no, no, that was 20 minutes.

Like, no, that's not true. And I look up and the clocks have all shifted by 20 minutes. And I swear to God it was three minutes. So almost every person that we put this on says they get into what they call a state of flow where they don't recognize that the time is going by. They're just boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was like, did you guys make it easier? They're like, no, same level. I'm like, I think you guys made it easy. When Sally did it with...

With brain stimulation, she performed at 100% accuracy. 100%. I didn't leave anyone alive. Now, what was she before? I don't know, but she wasn't very good. Roughly 3 out of 20 the first time and 20 out of 20 the second. Yeah. So you're saying with just a little electricity, she went from being like totally inept to like a trained killer? Yeah.

Well, it's an N of 1, so we can't go too far. I mean, this was just Sally's experience during this one demo, so it's not like a controlled study. But Mike has now used this device in a bunch of studies for the military. For example, he had one study with people looking at those... Grainy black and white radar images. Trying to pick out, you know, what's an enemy vehicle and what isn't. And if he puts this device on their head while they're trying to learn how to do that... We can double the rate of learning. Really? Yeah.

Well, how? I mean, what is it doing? Okay, so what I think is that early on when you are learning something... Mike says that when you're trying to learn how to do something that's kind of tough, what's happening is that you're trying a bunch of different things. You try all kinds of different ways to solve the problem. And occasionally...

Occasionally, your brain is stumbling across an ideal sequence of neurons. Every so often as you're practicing, all of a sudden your brain is like, oh, this, then this, then this, and this. Okay, that's it. But then it struggles to find that again, and it keeps messing up, and whatever. And if you look at an expert brain, you'll actually see that preferred circuit dialed in.

Like they just do that over and over and over again, no more stumbling around. And so what Mike does is he figures out where that circuit is and he gives it a little extra...

juice to, in essence, prime the pump. So that that expert circuit is more likely to fire, and you're more likely to stumble into it. And when you do stumble into it, you're more likely to stick with it. That's right. That's how we think it works. But are you sure of what you're hitting? I mean, like, you're putting electricity on the outside of people's heads. So are you able to target just a small cluster of brain cells or...

Is it a region that you're hitting or like a thousand cells? What I'm talking about is millions of cells. That's a lot. Yeah. Is that precise enough to target the place where a task is being done in a brain if it's a million cells?

In our work, yes. And Mike claims that even though it's a blunt tool... Yeah, this is not a scalpel. This is a sledgehammer. If you know the right group of neurons or region of the brain to target, this can work with almost any task. If you want to target...

Visual spatial learning, for example, searching an image, you'd put this on the right side of your head, roughly near the temple. But if you wanted to learn textual material, you can put this on the left side of your head and it will have a similar effect. If you wanted to learn textual material. It can't be true.

You mean if I want to learn irregular verbs in French, I get one of your things, I stick it on the part of my head that is good over grammar? We haven't tested it with learning foreign languages, but if a native English speaker is learning a long English sentence, they can recall it.

With greater fidelity, if they have this on their head while they study those sentences. And if you go right parietal, back over just behind your ear and up above your ear, you can learn math better. We were all kind of like, eh, I don't know. But since Mike had his device there with him. Should we try it? Sure, I'm ready. We thought, let's try it and see for ourselves. Do you want to do it, Robert?

I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Robert actually pretended he has an appointment. He left. But me? Taking him for the team here. I don't do fear. Do I need to be seated for this? Yeah, you should be seated. I should be seated. All right. Stick around because we are going to put electricity right into the man's head. I'm talking about chat.

All right, so you've got here in front of me, you have two little circles, electrodes. Is that what these are? Yep. Red wires and black wires. So I get two of these on my head? One on your upper arm. One on my upper arm. For the demo, Mike showed me a bunch of stereograms. All right, so what am I doing here? I'm looking at a bunch of marbles, a million of them, in some kind of repeating pattern. Like, you know these things, Robert, where you're staring at this 2D picture of, like,

repeating pattern of marbles or something. And you're supposed to unfocus your eyes in just the right way so that a 3D picture will somehow emerge from the background. Yeah. These things make my eyes go batty. So the idea of this demo was like, let's see if I can train my eyes to figure out how to pull the 3D picture out. You see it? I didn't get it happening.

I ain't got nothing. I have never been good at these. I mean, I get headaches when I go to 3D movies and it took me like 10 minutes to get one. Ah, there's a butterfly! There he is. Whoa, that's cool. To see like just one. Wow, look at that. Alright, so now you can juice me. Alright, I'm gonna turn it on. Okay. Okay, I don't feel anything yet. Ooh, yeah, okay, there it is. Ah.

What's it feeling? Feels like a bunch of mosquitoes are biting me in my temple. It's, uh, I could taste it now too. So people get that. Huh. We don't know what that is. Alright, so now I'm gonna look at the stereoscopic images one more time. Here we are. We've got a green and pink. Whoa. That just became a world. Look at that. Suddenly a 3D globe just pops out of the background. Okay. Next one. Alright, so now I'm looking at a big green grass. Blades of grass repeating, repeating, repeating. Let's see.

Swans. I see swans. Origami swans. 3D swans. Next one. Now I'm looking at a good, sort of a trippy paisley background. And Bambi! 3D Bambi. Next one. Alright, now we have flower background. Sort of yellow and pink flower tile background. Whoa. Whoa.

Next. Robots! Little Hershey's Kisses popping right out. A star! They're coming out really fast. Mmm, big pretzel. This is awesome. Coiled snake.

So anyway. Wow. That's what it feels like to get your brain juiced up. Okay. I definitely felt like you couldn't give them to me fast enough. I was like, another one, another one, another one. So maybe that's a flow state like you were describing. I don't know. I feel very, very awake.

Okay, so in the end, I ended up doing something like 50 stereograms in a really short amount of time. Wow. So I definitely think something was going on, but I have to be honest, I mean, I was skeptical. You were skeptical even when you were flying free? Well, it's like, it's, I don't entirely trust the experience I had because it could simply be like a placebo, it could be adrenaline, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It just, no matter what, it just seems like the next flavor of new age thing. So... Hello?

I started calling around. My name is Peter Reiner, and I'm a professor at the University of British Columbia. Cool. So Peter Reiner actually studies this whole field. He looks at public perception and the quality of research, and I just basically asked him, you know, is this for real? Like, if you have a healthy brain, you put a little electricity into it, has it been proven that that will enhance learning or whatever else they claim? Well, maybe the best way to answer that is that...

And he says this is based on a lot of different studies in a lot of different areas. He says this...

early days and the studies have been done have only been done with a few subjects. Maybe 20 people, larger studies 40 or 50. Now a lot of these studies do find a positive effect but if you're a hard-nosed scientist you know those small sample sizes aren't enough to make a very big claim. Even so...

The cat's kind of already out of the bag, because if you go on YouTube, White flash, really brief, really quick. That's cool. You can find a surprisingly large number of videos of people experimenting with these devices. I instantly feel very good, very calm.

Very safe. Not really worried about anything. A lot of the videos show you how to make your own. First, we'll start with the circuit diagram. You just go to Radio Shack and buy a few simple parts. There's the battery. That's going to be your 9 volt. And here's a few alligator clips since I don't have any solder with me, although... I have a switch in the circuit. I mean, YouTube just seems to be filled with people who are trying to hotwire their own brain. For the past year, I've been wanting to increase my brain power since...

I have probably below average brain power compared to normal people. I want to study neurosciences, but as many of you, I don't have the resources to go to the school right now. So what I like to do is I like to use TDCS while I'm learning my

All right, so I want to give you an update on using TDCS to learn a foreign language. People are using this for a whole range of things, given how flexible the technique is. That's Nick Fitz. He works with Peter Reiner, the guy we talked to earlier. And he says not only can you do a lot of different kinds of things with this device, on top of that, it's dirt cheap. So let's say in the time that it takes me to listen to one of your episodes, I could probably go to the store, come back and build a TDCS device for around $20.

$20? Right. And so I'm, as I said, I mean, is that something that makes you nervous? I'll say first, I think the DIY community is quite thoughtful, but it does make me nervous. There's some people that report loss of consciousness after using it. There are some people that are reporting feeling burns.

There was actually one report of somebody going temporarily blind. This guy on YouTube, young Asian kid. I've been experimenting on which places on my head would improve memory. He talks about how he spent a year kind of experimenting with it. He put it in one place. After about five minutes, I felt really angry and depressed. Put it in another place. That got me a really high score on lumosity, and I've only been stimulating my brain for about five

It's like he's playing Russian roulette with that thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which brings up the larger point, you know, that this device is kind of impossibly hard to regulate. Yeah.

Because a kid like this can put it anywhere he wants on his head, and if he moves it just a couple of inches, it could have a drastically different effect. And that's really what is a concern. Because according to Peter Reiner, while we might like to think of the brain as being a bunch of separate circuits that do separate tasks, really, it's an ecosystem.

every part affects every other part in some way. And when you put your electrodes on the head, you affect in theory a small area of the brain right under the electrodes. But it's already been shown that that effect can then multiply

and spread throughout the nervous system, even down to your spinal cord. I mean, there's a theory out there. It's called the zero-sum theory of the brain that some people use as a framework for thinking about all this, which is like, you know, one part goes up, another part goes... Like, there's only so much juice in the brain. So if you send juice one direction, there's less juice somewhere else. So then if you were enhancing one part, you're by definition diminishing another. Maybe. And to be honest... There was definitely an after effect.

This is kind of why I ended up talking to Sally about this. Why I got so interested in this piece in the first place is because of what happened to her after the sniper training. So driving down from L.A. to Carlsbad to go do this was an absolute nightmare. I hadn't driven in like a year because I've been living in London where I just do public transportation. But on the way up, it's kind of like...

I mean, I hate to compare it to Mario Kart, but it's just this extremely pleasant experience. I feel like I drove better that day than I ever drove before. Like, it was very obvious where I could pass people without irritating them. And just, I don't know, it's a weird memory, but I think I had more fun driving Mario.

That day than I ever did since. And at some point, she realized it wasn't just about her driving ability. So I would say that, I mean, I don't know how much I want to get into sort of in public on the radio about, you know, being a bit anxious. I mean, I guess that's not particularly controversial. Probably all writers, like, are sort of riddled with anxiety. But, you know, I have this constant struggle with all the little things

gnomes in my head, you know, populating my head and telling me, like, all the things that I don't do right and

But she says, sitting in that car? Really?

Really? For a couple of days? For a couple of days. And to tell you the truth, it was kind of like everything just, I was just this person that I hadn't experienced before. And I thought maybe this is the actual sort of core person who I am when I'm not, when all my baggage isn't just weighing on me. It was like somebody had wiped a really steamy window and I was just able to look at the world for what it was.

And I was curious whether there's a connection there, that to be a good performer of some task goes along with shutting down the parts of yourself that say, I don't know, I don't think, maybe I can't, maybe I shouldn't. And that there's actually a real connection between that.

amping up one and tamping down the other. It makes sense because if you're giving one circuit more power, you might be taking away from other places. Yeah. It's funny. I mean, it does. I find this like, you know, since you and I are just been on stage for our, um,

One of the things I struggle with most during the performances is I'm sitting there, we're both sitting there, we've got our scripts, and I have this box of buttons, and I have to remember which buttons do what things, and there's like the musicians, and I just figure out where they come in and out. And all of these things, they become competing voices. They become these little chattering gnomes that Sally puts it in my head, and I'm like, wait, when does that, hey, okay, now, when does that come in? Where are we, what's happening? I don't know.

You're messing this up. Dad, come on. Why do you keep doing it? And I get kind of crazy. Sometimes during a show, I can't actually even focus on what you're saying. It's not a good feeling. And then there are other times where something happens. It's almost like a mode. And suddenly it's like right there. I'm right with you. It's the easiest thing in the world to listen to what you're saying and respond instinctively and in the moment. And they literally feel like different things.

chemical modes or maybe electrical modes you know what I mean? That's really that's that I that's very interesting to me because I mean going back to the performance stuff you can't really make it happen I mean I guess you could I suppose but it it doesn't feel that way it feels like it's somehow feels like it's a gift you know like oh thank you universe I feel really awake and present right now thank you what happens when it's an expectation?

What happens to the way in which we move through the world if we can create that on demand? If we can order it up. I think the gift versus ordering it up, that's pretty deep to me. I feel like in a world where you order things up, then you're in a world where you think you deserve things or you think you've earned them or you think other people haven't. I agree with that completely. That's a world that's empty of true gratitude.

To tell you the truth, one of the really worrying things to me was afterward how much I craved doing it again. It felt like a drug with no side effect. I mean, I don't know if I'm going to get addicted to electricity.

Seems unlikely. Gotta get some, man. Shoplifting batteries. Licking them. In the supermarket corner, licking nine-volt batteries. Thank you, Soren. No problem. And thanks a lot to Sally 80. So time to say goodbye. I'm Robert Krowich. I'm Jed Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nenasambandam, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Anil Kulthar,

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