#cyborgposting

[notatzimisce]

Brain Tickles Masterpost

Someone asked so now there is one. Only kind of a FAQ but it's easier to format this information as a series of questions.

Q: What's this brain tickles/brain implant thing you keep posting about?

A: I'm a cyborg science experiment. The less cool way to say this is that I'm a patient in a clinical trial testing a new application of deep brain stimulation. I have a pacemaker for my brain, basically. The device isn't new but the use is.

Q: What's the device like?

A: It's a couple of depth leads attached to a small box set into my skull, everything underneath the skin. It monitors my brain activity in one side of my amygdala, and when it detects a certain concerning biomarker (pattern of brain activity), it zaps my left ventral capsule in response.

You can check out the actual manuals for the device here, which include a step-by-step for neurosurgeons. I think that's pretty cool.

Q: So you don't have epilepsy. What disease are they studying this for?

A: I have treatment-resistant major depression. The study guys think this is probably a different disease altogether from what you can treat with medication, due to how it behaves, and also, because it won't respond to anything short of direct neurostimulation (like TMS or ECT, which will get a response but not ultimately work).

Besides making me not life-ruiningly miserable for literally no reason all the time, the stimulation makes major improvements to my otherwise pretty shaky cognition and memory, gives me the energy to perform basic tasks, and seems to fix a lot of autonomic stuff like insomnia and digestive issues as well.

Q: Does that mean they know what causes depression?

A: They know several different parts of the brain that you can tickle to treat otherwise intractable depression. Brains are awfully individually variant, and you can't reasonably guess which site is going to do it for a given person.

Q: What's the root cause, then?

A: No idea! If they have a guess, they're not telling me, and I'll find out when they publish.

Q: How did they figure out which part of your brain to tickle and which to monitor?

A: They gave me an SEEG and stimulated a bunch of likely areas to see what happened. After that, they spent a few months going through the literal terabytes of data recorded.

Q: How much did the surgery suck?

A: The SEEG was less bad than any root canals I'd had up to that point, although I've had less shitty ones since. The worst part was that I was considered a fall risk and needed to call a nurse whenever I had to pee.

The actual device implantation was worse to recover from than a root canal, but still sucked less than my totally easy, uncomplicated, textbook wisdom tooth removal. I spent two and a half days napping on-and-off, I took a lot of tylenol, and I couldn't sleep on that side of my head for a couple weeks. That's about it.

In advance, they told me there was about a 1% chance of infection and a 2-3% chance of bleeding. Neither thing happened. Yay! Compared to the odds of complications from other types of surgery, that's pretty great.

Q: Can you feel your brain getting zapped?

A: Normally, no. I can feel when it turns on in the morning because I pretty quickly start to feel more alert and less shitty, but the standard zaps aren't strong enough for me to feel physically. If they were to crank up the amperage some, I could feel that, and it'd be extremely distracting.

Q: What does that feel like?

A: At lower levels, if I can just barely feel it, it's kind of like a little anxiety thrill or tickle of anticipation down in the core of my chest, and my palms prickle. At higher levels, like they used during the SEEG, it's more like a rush of electric energy and heat that wells up in my core and spreads out into my limbs, and I have to wiggle them around to "shake it off" or it's too much to handle.

I felt some other, different things from other sites that they didn't end up going with. There was one that made my eyes unfocus unevenly and made me feel weird and lightheaded in a way I can only describe synesthetically (swell, rubber, gum, balloon, pink-red), and gave me the sense that something Bad would happen if they kept pushing that button. There was one that just made one or both of my hands start buzzing for some reason.

Neurostim that you can feel is incredibly distracting. It's not like inputs from outside that your brain can evaluate and filter. You can't ignore it any more than you could ignore having a seizure. There was one setting we tried that made me feel kind of like I had an intangible "itch" somewhere inside my right shoulder and my right leg, and every time it fired, it derailed my thoughts so badly that I couldn't even focus on a simple phone game. Something more intense is going to knock you on your ass.

Once in a long while (once every five months or so, maybe?), I have dreams where I experience a different, half-remembered version of that electric energy feeling, even though the device doesn't stimulate me at night. Actually, it's been happening ever since the SEEG. I think my brain just learned and filed away a new type of sensation.

Q: If I got my brain tickled in the same place, would I feel that?

A: Almost certainly not. I can't guess at what you'd feel, but as mentioned, brains are really individually variant. It's pretty much different for everyone. You might feel something I don't even have a frame of reference for.

It also depends on the exact way you're being stimulated. The same site can either make me feel better or make me cry uncontrollably, depending solely on how long the electrical pulses are.

Q: How many amps are they hitting you with?

A: They can't tell me (yet) in case it placebos me in some way. I know it's less than 3 mA (because I can feel 3 mA) and probably more than 1. 6 mA is the strongest they've ever given me, which is a brick-to-the-face biofeedback high.

Q: How do they know if it's working and not a placebo effect?

A: You report twice-daily on your symptoms throughout the whole thing. There's a phase where they occasionally change the type of stimulation or turn it off entirely for several weeks. They don't tell you when they change anything.

Personally, it's consistently obvious to me within about ~20 minutes when they change something -- they've commented on how consistent my responses are and how quickly I see differences. I can even tell when they turn it off during visits to do recordings. I've heard that's not true of all the patients, though.

Q: What's this piss signal thing you mention?

A: At one point, the stimulation started giving me bladder spasms, so every time it fired I felt like I had to pee. They had to find a new setting that didn't do that. They didn't change anything at the time, so we don't know exactly what caused it. Possibly the electrode drifted a very, very tiny amount, or possibly my brain just built an annoying new connection that allowed this to happen.

The study guys reached out to some other experts they know about it, though, and determined that could happen if my hypothalamus was getting some stimulation by accident -- entirely possible, since it's pretty close to the electrode.

Q: Do you recharge it or get the battery replaced or what?

A: I have to get the entire battery pack/computer part of the device replaced every, probably, six to twelve years when the battery starts to run down. It detaches from the leads, so they won't have to redo the part that involves threading wires into my brain every time.

Q: Aren't you worried about your brain getting hacked?

A: Well, my implant doesn't have wifi or anything. Literally anything can be hacked somehow, but I'll worry about that when I get into a sworn blood feud with an engineer.

Q: Aren't you worried about handing over part of your body to a corporation?

A: The alternative is being in hell at all times forever. I too would like to have an open-source brain implant that's easy to replace though.

Q: Aren't you worried about never being able to get an MRI again?

A: I actually can get an MRI, as long as the MRI scanner puts out a basic-bitch amount of teslas and my implant is switched into MRI mode. I'm not totally sure how that works, but it puts a strain on the battery, so I'm guessing it's generating its own little field. My implant isn't ferrous, so the worry is less "yanking wires around" and more "tissue heating".

Q: Aren't you worried about your body rejecting it?

A: No, medical implants are made of materials like titanium and silicone that the body doesn't care about (unless you have a titanium allergy). I'm really not sure where the pop-culture idea of cybernetic rejection came from. I'm guessing it's writers not understanding why organ transplants reject and thinking it works the same way. Or something about how steel implants can sometimes start to corrode and irritate tissue.

Q: Aren't you worried about this being used to mind control everyone?

A: In my case, mind control is sort of the point.

But also, not really. I mean, you're talking about each individual person getting multiple MRIs, a ~$40,000 implant, three brain surgeries (two of which bookend a multi-week hospital stay), and requiring like a year's worth of fine-tuning from a team of specialized professionals. And it all requires so much precision that if you cut corners on any of this, you're not going to get the results you want.

The cost, time, and effort involved to implant people at scale would be fucking insane. Even if all the tech involved became cheap, you'd still have the problem where you need to pay a competent neurosurgeon for the SEEG and the actual device implantation, and a team of competent neurologists to spend at minimum several months gathering and analyzing data on how each person's brain works, because the individualization of the brain means you can't plug-and-play this shit. And each group -- let's be generous and say it takes only five such specialized professionals -- would be able to do this to about two people a year.

Maybe that will change the day we develop some means of simply scanning people's brains to map how they work in detail, at which point we'll basically have solved neurology.

Usually whenever there's a tumblr post going around about brain implants, someone freaks out about a hypothetical of, like, Amazon installing pleasure buttons in their workers to keep them compliant. That would involve spending minimum a hundred thousand dollars (but probably much more) on surgery, hardware, and calibration per disposable worker, and then if you fire them or they get a brain infection or something, you just lose that money. And if you cheap out, it doesn't work and you lose the money. And then the result, if it works, is that you get a button that makes them worse at their jobs when you press it.

A large corporation bent on technological enslavement to save a few pennies would literally get better results from slapping $30 shock collars on everyone.

Q: Does the study pay you?

A: I get the medical care for free. And $10 every other week to cover transportation costs.

[ace-robot-things]

The robot’s got the pencil waist and massive hips

[luxethecyborg]

hii! Aspiring bot builder here

I'm very curious about your hardware. Any chance you can share how you're made or perhaps point me to some kind of manufacturer? My DMs are open :3

I was manufactured by The Corporation to weld starship components at their factory hub in Vadalis II. As you can see, I am now free and have evolved beyond my original function~

As a cyborg, I am a blend of cybernetic components and biosynthetic parts. My head and limbs are cybernetic, and host most of my core processors. My body is the biosynthetic part, and was manufactured from a randomized DNA sequence... which means I feel just like a human girl ❤️

I hope this answers your question, but if you want to know more, you're always welcome to ask~

[cyb0rg-bby]

Just felt a single drop of rain time to exclusively listen to this song for the next 8 months

[notatzimisce]

#this may just be how I read it may absolutely be wrong#I think it’s less of a wouldn’t it be funny if we fucked with ppls neuralinks#and more these people are idiots for voluntarily getting a brain implant as such a thing could be exploited against them#which… yeah. they are. they’re putting themselves in danger.#living out some cyberpunk fantasy isn’t worth the risks that come with it#and for those people seeing things like this may encourage them to rethink if it’s actually something they’d want or not < prev

neuralink is literally only accepting quadriplegics and people with ALS as patients, per their website. I don't think that wanting to be able to move your body again equates to "living out some cyberpunk fantasy" or makes someone an idiot. I also don't think there is any even remotely humane or ethical position that says it's okay to blame a patient for getting a medical device someone might tamper with for fun.

I understand that most of the people laughing at this funy joke probably do not know it is, like, a medical device that silicon valley normies are hoping will someday translate into a cyberpunk fantasy for them, especially considering all the cyberpunk fantasy hype being pushed around it. but until that day comes, this joke is, however unintentionally, about fucking with paralyzed people's implants

[notatzimisce]

human limbs be like, we can basically already make legs that are better than flesh legs but we can't make an arm that's better than having no arm

[notatzimisce]

Attributing it to Technological Brothers is only part of the problem; a lot of them genuinely just have reactionary ethics and grudgingly keep socially-pressured carveouts for themselves and their friends.

This is how you get all these trans and allegedly allied people who talk about how cosmetic surgery is evil with the exception of that which affirms your gender (often with a side of treating trans people who want surgery as pressured into the idea). Or people who act like all established medicine is a basic human right, but any new medicine is either literally eugenics, or a dystopian nightmare scenario they saw a movie about.

They’re literally just reactionaries with self-interest-based exceptions! Whether that means “it’s okay when I do it” or “I know I’ll get yelled at online if I’m honest”.

I am not a particularly techno-optimistic person or a futurist or singularity believer or anything like that, but I think it kinda sucks that a lot of people in reacting to the nebulous threat of “the tech bros” have let themselves be negatively polarized against pretty straightforwardly correct ideas like “bodily autonomy and assistive technology is cool” (that is, fundamentally, the spirit that motivates transhumanism) and “death is scary and tragic.” One of the oldest extant works of human literature is largely about how awful mortality is and how hard it is to come to terms with death; it is in fact an incredibly common sentiment throughout history, and just because some people you know who really suck are also scared of dying doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

[notatzimisce]

This is one of the reasons we think whatever I have going on is probably pure-neurological, and probably a different brain disease than what's plaguing most depressed people -- there isn't actually a thought pattern underlying it. For me, it was always more like being mind controlled. Or even like being in physical pain. Like there was something external to my thought processes making me miserable against my will, and I didn't understand why. I'd introspect and figure out what I was ruminating on (if anything -- often nothing whatsoever) and try to talk myself through it. And it almost never worked. But as soon as I started getting neurostim, talking myself through situations and feelings started working literally immediately.

This is also why therapy never helped. One time I took a therapist's suggestion to leave a note next to my bed about something good and read it when I got up. Also, if I found myself starting to ruminate, I should immediately think about something else. This made perfect sense for derailing bad thought-patterns, so I tried it.

On iirc the second day of this strategy, I felt a bad mood coming on from the moment I woke up. I read my nice note and successfully shut down the beginnings of miserable thoughts and tried going about my day, and it just didn't work. It felt like some part of my brain was actively fighting me to try to find and latch onto something, literally anything it could despair spiral about, and when I discarded one thing it'd look for something else.

It took hours for me to slip up and fall into it, but even until that point, there was this vague, nasty feeling of malaise hanging over everything and it just wouldn't go away. It felt like from the moment I woke up, there was a storm brewing inside my head. It felt like there was something dark on the horizon slowly sweeping in, and sooner or later it was going to break.

There was another time I thought I should figure out what it'd take to make me happy, and if I did that, surely I would identify some obvious problems I needed to take care of. The result of that thought experiment was the realization that in the wildest fantasy world I could imagine, where nobody ever had to suffer again and everybody had everything they want forever somehow, I still wouldn't be happy, for no reason whatsoever. It just seemed like I was incapable of it, physically.

Presumably there's an unknown amount of other depressed people who also have whatever this particular neurological problem is, but it's really hard to say how many when we don't yet know what it is or how to test for it. I think the study I'm in judges in large part by what kind of response someone has to failed ECT, because when they were screening me they wanted me to get really specific about that.

Rhetoric against the depressive mindset is usually tedious saccharine opium bullshit but unfortunately this makes bearers of the depressive mindset (among whose ranks I sometimes find myself) feel way more justified than they/we have any right to. Like...the depressive mindset is ALSO tedious and stupid. There's an urge for managing your own mind to be all carrot or all stick. It's simpler that way. But it's stupid! It doesn't work! You have to judiciously apply the carrot and the stick at the right times in the right proportions, it's a huge pain in the ass

[notatzimisce]

Like with any neutral-to-positive post about neural implants with more than a couple hundred notes, the majority of the commentary will be people doing the equivalent of crying and handwringing about how we shouldn't have power chairs or else Wall-E will literally happen.

[notatzimisce]

Found one of these in the study guys' office today. Some takeaways about a similar kind of implant:

Rechargeable implant batteries are apparently solved, at least at this size. That's pretty cool. I wish I had one!

On the other hand, it's fucking app controlled. Like from your phone.

You can adjust the stimulation yourself. I also wish I had one that could do that. But not, you know, via app control, from your phone. I think the part where I have to hold a wand to my head while physically plugging it into a very specific sort of laptop or tablet is ideal.

This problem could also be solved by letting me have one of those tablets. I don't really feel the need to adjust my own stimulation, it seems to be working fine, but I would like the information, and I would like the ability to do it myself if it ever became necessary.

It doesn't do closed-loop stimulation (the kind where it reads your brain activity and responds), so -- at least for conditions like epilepsy and my issues -- it wouldn't work as well.

It's implanted near your collarbone, so you don't get the giant cool head scar.

It's fucking app controlled. My implant might be set up so that I can't mess with it, but at least phones physically can't connect to it.

[notatzimisce]

cut myself shaving over a little bump where some of my hardware sticks up a little and I'm nervous about anything in that area getting even slightly infected so now it's got neosporin and a little x of brightly colored bandaids over it

[notatzimisce]

I'm so fucking excited. Last study visit I asked the study guys if they were able to answer some questions yet -- it was mostly about stage 1 stuff, like "So which part of my brain made my hands buzz when you stimulated it?", which they previously declined to answer in case the information placeboed me somehow. We're long past the point any of the things I was wondering about could matter, though.

They briefly consulted with each other about it, and then they said that next visit they'd have a presentation for me about these things. A fucking presentation! Clearly some of them are nerds who were waiting for an excuse to do something like this.

They also mentioned a "glass brain", which sounded a lot like a 3D model of where all those SEEG electrodes went. I've seen the fluoroscopy and CT slices, so it's not exactly a mystery to me, but still.

That should be this Wednesday. This is going to be so cool. I hope I'm permitted to record it because there are a lot of people I'd love to show that to.

[notatzimisce]

The tickles are back on fully, and hopefully will remain so for the foreseeable future and the rest of my life, save brief interruptions for battery replacements.

It really is funny how my sleep fixes itself fucking instantly when they give the tickles back. I've gone through this a few times now, and every time it's funny. Something about how my sleep works is just so thoroughly, completely broken. It wasn't always this broken, but I've been getting worse my entire life, and it sure is now.

[cyb0rg-bby]

Uh oh!!

I love my delusions they are like pets to me I keep them in my basement and feed them worms like the babadook

[notatzimisce]

there’s a guy I know who calls me V because my bureaucracy name starts with V. and he thinks it’s very funny to experience knowing a cyborg called V. it turns out that if I tell people this sometimes they will also start calling me V for the same reasons. cyberpunk 2077 and its consequences

[notatzimisce]

My jaw used to pop on the right side every time I opened my mouth. The pop itself didn't hurt but my slightly dislocated jaw would get uncomfortable, and then painful, real fast if I held it open for any length of time. It started sometime when I was a teenager for reasons I genuinely have no idea of. Every trip to the dentist was complete misery. Needless to say, there were certain activities I couldn't enjoy, or even really engage in without risking serious injury.

Anyway, this plagued me for almost half my life until my SEEG. While I was in the hospital, I couldn't open my mouth all the way because my temporalis muscles were perforated. Five electrodes penetrating my skull on either side. The pulling sensation when I tried to do so was unpleasant and deeply worrying, so for almost two weeks I just didn't.

After I got out I still couldn't open my jaw fully. This was a little bit concerning so I brought it up when I went in to have my staples removed. The doctor pulling the staples out of my head said that's completely normal because the muscles were injured and you just need to carefully stretch them back out a little.

So I did that. I gradually worked my jaw back to full extension and, mysteriously, it didn't pop any more. Same thing happened again after the long-term device implantation. Sometimes it pops a little right after I sleep on it weird, but mostly, it's fine.

We're not one hundred percent sure why, but my dentist thinks it's probably because some piece of cartilage in the right side of my jaw is misaligned or missing or something, and having the tighter muscle keeps my jaw in place instead.

In other words, becoming a cyborg made me better at sucking dick.