Just read the story, thought it was very reminiscent of one of the plot points in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) - until I noticed the publication date of 1988, 4 years earlier!
Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.In retrospect the core concept can be paraphrased as: Self-awareness and consciousness in pigs is the only thing that prevents them from flapping their trotters fast enough to fly(to the moon).
I also recommend Different Kinds of Darkness.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o...
But only for the brains of people with severe or undertreated epilepsy of carefully selected varieties. You can trigger a potentially fatal seizure by showing them an appropriately stimulating image. Which likely was a known concept to the author of the story.
For the rest of us the negative feedback along the optical axis puts a stop to such shenanigans.
Experiments with cats( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1111849/ ), and the outcome of patients with strabismus/lazy eye(effective blindness on defective eye), suggests that seeing (or not seeing) is a learned trait. Which is a few steps removed from being a backdoor to epileptic seizures or remote controlling heart activity
Given that AMEs do transfer interocularly,[8] it is reasonable to suppose that they must occur in higher, binocular regions of the brain. Despite producing a less saturated illusory color, the induction of an AME may override a previously induced ME, providing additional weight to the argument that AMEs occur in the higher visual areas than MEs.[8]
This is the closest I've ever felt to being a Borg.
Curious, could seizures caused by strobe light be related to the effects of draining of this fluid?
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Am I an outlier?
Still nothing.
I'm in the US. I am guessing a script is the same thing wherever you are as what is called a referral here. I will ask around. Thankyou for the idea. I will research what outpatient imaging facilities are around me. Would they use some kind of mirror system to watch this image? I can't imagine a PC could be near the MRI.
But in practice I think you can show up at any imaging center and get some kind of "full body MRI" to screen for cancer or some other risk. They'll probably ask about family history and other predispositions but even if you didn't have those they'd still take your money.
It feels odd, its hard to describe it feels like something weird is happening in the brain.
Edit: I reduced the brightness, contrast and changed the black mode of the monitor and went through several cycles. I still get the over-shadow effect for anywhere from 1.5 to 2 seconds but no other effects. Perhaps my supplements are interfering or confounding. I guess it may be useful to note what supplements the test subject is consuming along with dosage to determine if that is a confounding factor.
Increased CSF flow aids in clearing metabolic waste, distributing nutrients, and reduced oxidative stress. You'll feel none of this after a 3 minute session.
A lot of the reactions here reek of placebo.
What I also noticed were the after image effects. A strong blue dot every time it flashed and circles divided into 8 sections like a star.
This was trippy.
It certainly feels quite strange after watching the prototype for 8 cycles.
It's similar to the effect of being hit with big news (good or bad), and the "sinking" feeling that comes with it, becoming suddenly introspective and oddly calm under pressure.
At least to me, of course. I have no idea if others have that same reaction.
I can focus better after but it doesn't clear my head, just use that frustration or anger to become determined.
If you try raising one eyebrow or wiggling one ear (assuming you can't already do that), you might find that you're briefly activating lots of little muscles around the target as your body tries to figure out where that's mapped in your brain. Once you get the right muscle, you can relax the other false positives, and eventually just have the single muscle isolated. It's similar in my "brain flow" thing: usually a couple random muscles in my head want to join in, but I can intentionally relax them and keep the "flow" going. A common one is the tensor tympani -- the two "muscles" seem to be closely mapped together. If you can rumble your ears (manually activating the tensor tympani), try initiating a rumble, and then "move" the activation in between your ears, right to your mid-back brain. (Again: I know there's no actual muscle there, so /shrug).
With the "muscle" in the mid-back of your brain, I understand that much more. If you respond well to meditation and get a sensation from asmr for instance, if we're speaking on the same area, that area gets sensations if the person is more prone to stress.
When I sort of make myself hotheaded, or have any drug, or even really relax, I feel sensations at that area. I wonder if you're the same.
If you try raising one eyebrow or wiggling one ear (assuming you can't already do that), you might find that you're briefly activating lots of little muscles around the target as your body tries to figure out where that's mapped in your brain. Once you get the right muscle, you can relax the other false positives, and eventually just have the single muscle isolated. It's similar in my "brain flow" thing: usually a couple random muscles in my head want to join in, but I can intentionally relax them and keep the "flow" going. A common one is the tensor tympani -- the two "muscles" seem to be closely mapped together. If you can rumble your ears (manually activating the tensor tympani), try initiating a rumble, and then "move" the activation in between your ears, right to your mid-back brain. (Again: I know there's no actual muscle there, so /shrug). Another closely mapped muscle, at least for me, is a small one around/under/behind the ears that has a "face tightening" effect. It's like there are three muscles conceptually mapped to similar brain space: one tightens my ears/eyes/temples, one rumbles my tensor tympani, and one induces a feeling of "flow" down my spine and through my brain.
Now the question is if this provocation and resulting CSF flow is actually beneficial. Do you spike activity and get a rebound attempt at waste clearing due to waste accumulation of the neural spike, or is this like a massage for the brain that gives you a invigorating CSF dump?
I suspect it might not be a health improving activity. (I also suspect that you can get even more CSF flowing if you spin yourself at 6G in a full body centrifuge and that this too would not be conductive to health)
Being able to set a max duration would be neat, in case it's unsafe to lose track of time and let the pattern run for too long?
Classic outdated comment BTW ;)
setInterval(flickerImage, 250); // 8hzFramerate of 24Hz differs from the 120Hz as presented in the paper, but here there is no 40Hz flicker attempt so it shouldn't be an issue.
Compression may affect the edges of the lines, but downloads are enabled.
8Hz version - https://vimeo.com/1023278230/8ad6db6234
12Hz version - https://vimeo.com/1023275135/378186db55
What measurements or tests can I do to judge whether something is happening, or has happened after watching the videos?
Makes me think of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where a datafile can be a narcotic or mind virus. Maybe that's not such a crazy idea?
It kind of makes sense. We can look at images of food and get a physical reaction like hunger, or look at macabre images and feel disgust, or stare at animations for one minute and then be affected for many minutes afterwards when we look away.
It doesn't surprise me we're still discovering new mechanisms for triggering physical reactions in our bodies.
Edit: I do agree it's pretty wild regardless :) Especially wild if we're finally discovering mechanisms that have useful effects, not just "fun" effects like visual distortion.
The more you think, the more blood to the brain, the faster the cancer grows.
Think about it.
Also, I've been at concerts where the light show guy seems to have reverse-engineered the filters our brains use to process raw signal into "images", and could use the lights to create just the raw primitives.
A few hours of that and it was like I was learning to see all over again, a tune-up/calibration of my visual system.
> Psychophysics Toolbox Version 3 (PTB-3) is a free set of Matlab and GNU Octave functions for vision and neuroscience research
Scientists almost never want to share their code and it makes me sad. Why wouldn't they want to make their paper more easily reproducible?
I once worked in an IT department of a genetics laboratory, which consistently publishes high impact papers in journals like Science and Nature.
While I was there I got to see some of the R/Python/Java code that had been created for all kinds of studies that had taken place there. It was some of the worst code I have ever seen.
But I do agree, the complete methodology including the code should be shared.
We work in the neurotech/sleeptech space doing slow-wave enhancement which, it is believed, increases glymphatic activity [2]. Recent studies have looked at the promise of alzheimer's prevention [3].
More links to research papers are on our website https://affectablesleep.com/science
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07132-6 [2] - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1... [3] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10758173/
There is a number of disease models that show reduced or no glymphatic clearance and as such these people need treatments to clear out their brains and these image routines seem to help. A lot of people find this pattern extremely taxing to watch especially for the recommended number of cycles, you can feel the effect on the brain its hard to describe the sensation its a bit numbing and the image has the sensation of changing as the cycle runs like its a visual trick. You might get left feeling like you have been clubbed over the head the first time.
I find it interesting this is one aspect of disease research I am looking into and is related to Long Covid and ME/CFS.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
[2] https://www.paulkeeble.co.uk/posts/cff/