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1. 13. 7. 1. TinyElectric Current Makes Others LookBetter
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Tiny Electric Current Makes Others Look Better
Scientists Manipulate Part of the Brain, Causing Changes in Human Behavior
COLUMN By LEE DYE
June 30, 2013—
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology have figured out how to make you look
better in the eyes of your mate. All you have to do is run an extremely weak electrical
current through a key part of your lover's brain, and you will look better than you did
before.
For a few minutes, at least.
But these folks aren't trying to create a love drug. They are developing the technology
that may help unravel some of the deepest secrets of the human brain, possibly leading
to new treatments for some of life's most tragic diseases.
And it all depends on a surprisingly simple gizmo that can be powered by a 9-volt battery.
The instrument sends a tiny current -- only 2 milliamps, or 10,000 times weaker than you
can get from an ordinary household outlet -- through the brains of volunteers on
Caltech's campus in Pasadena, Calif.
That incredibly weak current was enough to make the volunteers judge images of human
faces as more attractive than they had seemed before the current was applied.
"You don't feel anything," biomedical engineer Vikram Chib, lead author of a study
published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, said in a telephone interview. "It's not like
shock therapy. I've done it on myself. You don't feel anything."
It may turn out to be a bit of a milestone in brain science. The Caltech team believes they
are the first to demonstrate a correlation between human behavior and activity among the
brain's billions of neurons, or brain cells, according to experimental psychologist
Shinsuke Shimojo, coauthor of the study.
In other words, they were able to modify activity in the brain and observe a change in
behavior resulting from that modification. To the participants, those faces really did look a
lot better, and the strongest effect occurred in participants whose neural activity was
modified the most.
It's worth noting, however, that the experiment also demonstrates just how vulnerable the
human brain is to seemingly trivial external forces. Two milliamps is practically nothing, yet
it produced a measurable effect. So it doesn't take much to make a difference.
"Very small imbalances in your brain chemistry, which is related to brain electrical
activities, can cause big problems," Crib said.
Does that explain why some kid shows up at school with an AK-47? Probably not entirely,
and that's not the point of this research.

2. 13. 7. 1. TinyElectric Current Makes Others LookBetter
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This may be the most important part -- the neural activity took place in the midbrain, an
extremely important part of the brain that encompasses the reward system that drives so
much human action, and it had been thought that this type of technology could not reach
that deeply into the brain.
The technology is called "transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS)," which Crib
described as "cheap, simple and safe." It has been used for years to study areas of the
brain that are just below the scalp, but the Caltech team figured out how to make it
penetrate deeper into the brain by in effect hitchhiking on another part of the brain that is
closer to the surface.
The method involves placing an anode and a cathode on two locations on the scalp, and
a small current passes from the cathode through the brain to the anode.
The brain is an electronic marvel as much as it is a biochemical device. It produces its
own current that empowers the brain's nerve cells. So adding a little more current is no big
deal.
Some 99 volunteers agreed to be wired up and placed inside a functional magnetic
resonance imaging scanner. Most of those acted as controls, including some who were
wired up but did not receive the current, but 19 got the full treatment. While in the scanner
they were asked to rate the attractiveness of a series of human images, both before and
after the current was applied.
The scanner monitored activity in two areas, one just behind the forehead, which is close
enough to the surface for the technology to manipulate. The researchers theorized that if
they used the weak current to deactivate that area, that would cause a rise in activity in
the midbrain -- the area they could not reach directly.
And that's exactly what they found. They were able to increase activity in the midbrain, the
reward center, and that caused an increase in the perception of attractiveness in the
images.
A tiny electrical stimulation caused a behavioral response, and the stronger the
stimulation, the better looking the images seemed. None of the controls experienced
anything like that.
Crib said the team has passed the proof of concept phase, but much more remains to be
done.
This technique could not measure an increase in dopamine -- sometimes called the love
drug, which can also result in many psychiatric disorders if the supply is insufficient -- in
the reward center, so the entire experiment must be repeated with a different scanner,
probably positron emission tomography (PET.)
If it passes that milestone, it will probably move quickly into clinical trials because it may
be useful in the treatment of such devastating diseases as Parkinson's and depression.
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