When I have time, which is usually on the weekends, I use tDCS shortly after waking up. Most of my use is with the flow/depression montage F3 & Fp2. While it’s not exactly a 9V cup of coffee, I find that it does help me get from waking up to working on something in little time.
Sleep Log: Affects from F3 (anode), Fp2 Montage
Over the period of 20 nights, I have tracked some data related to my quality of sleep and dreams. This information is at the bottom of this post.
Summarized findings:
- I sleep better at night if I did use the tDCS F3, Fp2 montage
- I feel more rested and able to start my day when I wake up if I have used tDCS but not taken any benadryl
- Benadryl + tDCS = sleepy in the morning, likely to snooze
- My dreams have become more vivid and realistic
- I become lucid infrequently-
- When I do become lucid, it is only because I am experiencing a nightmare. I am unable to manipulate my dream into something more pleasant (to date). In my lucid nightmares, I attempt to calm myself by remembering that it is a dream and that my mind is creating it- unlike lucid dreams of my past, I am unable to manipulate my surroundings or decrease any sensations of physical pain. I have been able to calm myself, but not change anything. Though it is my own mind, and I have awareness of this fact, and I can control my own actions, I am not in control of the dream. The dream controls me.
Affects on anxiety: seemingly little. While this particular montage is largely used to treat depression, it has had minimal impact on the depression that I have experienced this summer- but I am happy about how it has impact my sleep, so it’s all good.
For the next 20 days, I will experiment with the FpZ, oZ montage- which is used to treat major depression. I am excited to see if this impacts my sleep or dreams, and especially excited to see any changes on my depression.
Here is the spreadsheet of my sleep log:
| Night: | Date: | Dreams? | Lucid? | Awake? | Back to sleep? | tDCS? | Rested next AM? | Anxiety (0-10) | Dream details: |
| Sunday | 7/27/2014 | Nightmares | Slightly | Did not wake | N/A | Yes | No, snoozed | 2 | N/A |
| Monday | 7/28/2014 | No memory | No | Woke twice | Yes | No | No, snoozed | 3 | N/A |
| Tuesday | 7/29/2014 | No memory | No | Woke twice | Yes | No | No, snoozed | 5 | N/A |
| Wednesday | 7/30/2014 | Vividly realistic | Not at all- too realistic to tell I was dreaming | Woke twice | Yes | Yes | Yes, snoozed twice | 5 | Texting someone from the past |
| Thursday | 7/31/2014 | Vivid but not entirely realistic | No | Woke at 4am: kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes, snoozed once | 3 | Stealing cinnamon rolls from Panera |
| Friday | 8/1/2014 | Vivid, some nightmares | Once- when I realized I was having a “no-pants” nightmare | Many times after 3am- kittens | Yes | Yes | Slept till noon | 2 | At work but forgot to put on pants |
| Saturday | 8/2/2014 | Vivid, exciting and fun | No | Once at 6am- kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes- only slept till 10a | 6 | Exploring an old friends apartment, protesting a war |
| Sunday | 8/3/2014 | No memory | No | 5am- kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 3 | N/A |
| Monday | 8/4/2014 | No memory | No | 3am- kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 3 | N/A |
| Tuesday | 8/5/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4 | N/A |
| Wednesday | 8/6/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4 | N/A |
| Thursday | 8/7/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4 | N/A |
| Friday | 8/8/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 4 | N/A |
| Saturday | 8/9/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 3 | N/A |
| Sunday | 8/10/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | No, snoozed | 5 | N/A |
| Monday | 8/11/2014 | No memory | No | Kittens | Yes | No | Yes | 7 | N/A |
| Tuesday | 8/12/2014 | Vivid | No | Kittens | Yes | Yes | Yes | 7 | Mom came over at 5am when I was leaving |
| Wednesday | 8/13/2014 | Very few, during snooze time, realistic | No | Kittens- they were not being disruptive, just cuddly | Yes | Yes | No, snoozed 1 hr | 5 | Stole all the chocolate from coworker |
| Thursday | 8/14/2014 | Yes, realistic | No | Did not wake | N/A | Yes | Yes | 6 | Eating pizza with coworker, speaking with myself as a child the house I grew up in. She told me about her life- some were real memories, some were just the dream |
| Friday | 8/15/2014 | Yes, good and bad | Yes, teeth nightmare | Multiple times | Yes | No | Yes | 4 | Teeth fell out of face, grew back, fell out again, painful, caused me to become lucid |
Our First Box
I’ve made a few changes to our setup and at this point it is almost entirely different. I began by making new electrodes because our sponges were getting a little used. Because I read that thickness is a large determiner of resistance, I tried shaving a slice off a sponge and found it rather easy. I took two of the slices and combined them around the sheet of metal. The result is an electrode that is smaller in all dimensions. The tingly sensation is a little stronger, but this allows for more precise position (as if we our placements are even accurate, hah).
I bought a milliampere panel meter off of eBay for $9.95. I could hardly find meters with a nice scale, so I settled with 1 mA – 10 mA. I also bought a project box from Fry’s for $9.99. With these items, some items that we bought previously but did not use, and some electrical tools, I built our first tDCS box. We are pretty happy with the outcome.
I connected each item with the 1k Ohm resistor and 2 mA Current Regulating Diode, but I wrapped them in heat-shrink first in fear that they might touch something else and cause problems.
Left Anterior Temporal Cortex
I believe that the left anterior temporal cortex is involved in some creativity or problem solving, and I’ve recently seen pictures on popular blogs with this area being stimulated. So, I tried a cathodal stimulation of the left anterior temporal cortex with the anode over my right eye. I did the current standard 2 mA over 20 minutes. The area near the temple is definitely more tingly than other areas during stimulation.
I’ve had a headache nearly all day, and I was wondering if this would change that. Immediately after the stimulation I noticed no difference in the head pain, although it may be slightly less worse. During the stimulation I was playing Total War: Shogun 2. I have nothing special to note about that experience.
After the stimulation I went for a walk. Sometime before the end of the walk, I noticed that I no longer had the headache. tDCS? I don’t know. I have the worst eyesight of anyone I know, and I am nearly never without my contacts or glasses. However, my contacts had been bothering me so I put on my glasses, and I don’t like my glasses so I felt like taking them off for the walk. This was a different experience than I’m used to. It was nice to see everything as giant shapes of colors, so I had a pleasant experience.
Affect on Sleep and Anxiety
This is my first post on our blog (I am the partner), and I would like to describe the impact that our DIY tDCS has had on my sleep and anxiety.
I have had difficulty sleeping for 13 years (described at the end of this post), and I was concerned that our experiment would have a negative impact on my ability to sleep at night. I also have anxiety, and I had read on several blog posts that tDCS can increase anxiety in those who already suffer from anxiety disorders and can even cause panic attacks. I haven’t had an anxiety or panic attack in years, so I decided that this was a risk I was willing to take.
We have been experimenting for two weeks, and it has not had a negative impact on my ability to:
1. Faill asleep at night
2. Achieve REM sleep
3. Stay asleep
4. Fall asleep again if I do wake up in the middle of the night
5. Feel rested in the morning
Here is what I have experienced since we began:
1. Vivid imagery in the dreams that I do remember
2. Increase in lucid dreams
3. Decrease in waking in the middle of the night
4. Feeling more rested in the morning (I have actually begun going into work 1-2 hours earlier than usual – which is great because then I can go home earlier).
Impact on anxiety:
I did experience elevated anxiety last Wednesday afternoon, but there are many variables that contributed to my mental state that afternoon. I cannot say with certainty that it was caused by tDCS.
I’d like to contextualize my sleeping patterns to give any readers an idea about my “baseline” sleeping patterns.
From ages 9-14, I experienced night terrors and hardly slept as a result. I tried many techniques to make sleeping easier (being a kid- aromatherapy, white noise, nightlights, classical music, reading a book, writing, etc), but they were not helpful.
From ages 14-21, I took benadryl on a nightly basis, with occasional tolerance breaks. I attribute my difficulty sleeping as an adult to generalized anxiety disorder, which I was diagnosed with at age 19.
So, in general, I have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep at night, but in the two week period that my partner and I have been experimenting with tDCS, the overall quality of my sleep has improved.
Goodnight!
F3 & Fp2 and a Note on Headbands
We have been using two skinny headbands for holding the electrodes in place. We have noticed that the headbands can soak up some of the saltwater, and this can result in spreading or moving the current to other places that the headbands touch. In one extreme case, a fully wet headband holding sponges on the backs of our heads was distributing current to our foreheads. Because they are so small, the current density was probably high, and we noticed reddening of the forehead around the band.
I think the solution to this is something similar to what is found on commercial sponge electrodes: rubber. Usually the sponges come wrapped in rubber, which would prevent sponge contact with the headbands. I will be looking into something like this for the future.
I dislike having to work on the weekends, and because I have some work to do on this Sunday morning I have decided to try a common depression montage: anode at F3 and cathode at Fp2. As usual, we are just eyeballing these positions. I do my typical method of starting with the potentiometer turned all the way down (the pot is wired so that clockwise turning decreases resistance, so you can turn up the current), and then over the next couple of minutes turning it all the way up. It starts around 0.8 mA, and with the saltwater penetrating my hair and the knob all the way up it ends at 2.03 mA. I do this for 20 minutes, then turn the pot down and unplug. There’s the usual flash from going from 1 mA to 0 mA in a very short time period.
Multiple things coalesced into a nice relaxing period of time. After SubjectX helped me put this montage on, the kittens and her disappeared into another room and I haven’t heard a noise since. I’ve been writing this post while it’s on, and it feels pretty peaceful. I’m able to write without distracting thoughts, so I have a sort of flow going on. After the trial I began to work on my freelance work (emphasis on free because it’s for a friend). It took a few hours, but I might have enjoyed it a little more than I would have.
Posterior Parietal Cortex
I started this trial by eyeballing the position of the Posterior Parietal Cortex and placing the anode on the left side. I’ve chosen this area because it “is known to be crucially involved in numerical magnitude processing and mental arithmetic.”
After turning the circuit on the current was at 0.8 mA. Over the next three minutes it rose to its lower limit of 1 mA, and over five minutes I raised it to 2 mA. The feeling is as expected, but it is a little different because it is on the back of my head and I am used to the electrodes being near my forehead.
I played a round of Dota 2, but this is rather un-empirical due to the nature of so many things being out of my control. However, it does involve some mental math. We played a pretty good game: 30 minutes, took all of the barracks, and lost no towers.
Current Regulators and Distributors
Our current regulating diodes arrived today, so we’ve decided to give them a try. They should allow the current to get up to their allowance, and then try to keep it there. So, I’ve installed the 2 mA CRD in the circuit and removed most of the resistors. The CRD itself is acting as a resistor, and I found that just one of the 1k Ohm resistors allowed us to get between 1 mA and 2 mA control with the 5k Ohm potentiometer.
In an effort to improve our electrodes, I’ve installed a current distributor in the sponges. I used a thin piece of metal that came with the breadboard I bought. When I broke it in half, the size worked pretty well. I’m connecting the cables to the metal and hoping that it spreads the current more evenly throughout the sponges. We can tell that there is now a wider area of effect.
With the Multimeter
Shortly before RadioShack closed, I was in there buying 30″ jumper cables and 12V batteries for my multimeter. I was there at the right time because someone had just returned a Rasberry Pi kit with a missing piece, and because the guys had seen me a couple of days before, they offered me the kit for free as it was going to the trash. In it was a larger breadboard, more jumper cables, and many components such as voltage limiters, resisters, capacitors, etc.. Unfortunately, after looking most of them up I am afraid that I will not be able to use them for this project as they are meant for higher current applications. Either way, I have more electrical components and an additional breadboard.
With the multimeter I was able to confirm that my setup varies between ~0.9 mA and ~1.8 mA. However, I noticed that our heads are significant resistors because the actual max current that passed through my head was 1.43 mA, and for SubjectX it was even lower than that. Even at 0.9 mA SubjectX found the skin irritations too intense, so we had to slowly ramp up the current as she adjusted to it. With a little research we found that there are gender-based differences in effects with tDCS. In general, I think that SubjectX is more sensitive than I, but I think that the lower current was due to the amount of hair that she has. At first, the effects were not noticeable and the current was only 0.2 mA. After tying back much of her hair, we were able to get to the 0.9 mA that we tried to stay at.
For our electrodes we are using basic sponges cut to ~2.75″ square. We are mixing 1tsp of salt with 16oz of water for the saltwater. I would like to try different sized sponges and mixtures of salt to water to see how that changes things. A little research shows that sponges will not be a great electrode without a proper current distributor; currently most of the current probably goes through the closest part of the sponge into our heads.
Because of the additional resistance from ourselves, I’ve removed one of the resistors from the circuit. I could remove another to get closer to 2 mA, but we are feeling the sensations even at 1 mA. It is clear that ramping up to 2 mA will be a good idea. We both went for 20 minutes, but because we were slightly intoxicated a priori, it’s hard to say what actually happened because of that.
The Beginning
Inspired by a recent episode of RadioLab, my partner and I have ventured into the realm of Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). After a Sunday afternoon of research, we were at the local RadioShack picking up parts. I had ordered some current regulating diodes (1 mA, 1.5 mA, 2 mA) that were recommended. However, we could not wait to get started, so I took some more advice and got enough parts to get started.
The setup consisted of one 9 volt battery, five 1k Ohm resisters, and a 5k Ohm potentiometer. We cut up a sponge to use as the anode/cathode. I also bought a multimeter to test the setup; but I did not notice that it required a special 12 volt battery, so I was unable to use it during this setup. We received a $10 coupon for spending more than $30, but it won’t be active for two more days. So, I’ll hold off on that purchase until the coupon works.
Part list (RadioShack Part Number):
- 9V Battery (2300853) : $4.99
- 5K Linear Pot (2711714): $3.49
- Breadboard Wire Kit (2760173): $6.99
- 4x Alligator Clips (2700356): $2.49
- 5x 1K Ohm Resistors (2711321): $1.49
- Breadboard (2760003): $9.99
We actually bought more than that, but that is all that we used for this setup. Theoretically, the setup should result in a range between 0.9 mA and 1.8 mA, but I know that our heads will act as resistors and so it will be less than that. Without the multimeter we are unable to see what it actually is.
We each tried the setup using a headband to hold the sponges on our left/right foreheads, with the anode being on the left side. We felt as we expected from our research to feel: warm and prickly sensations. We each ran the current for about 15 minutes. We may have felt slightly different, but possibly not.
We have a lot more research and testing to do. Within the next few days I will purchase the correct battery for the multimeter and long jumper cables. As you can see from the picture, the longest cable from the breadboard is very short. This results in us having to hold the breadboard right in front of our faces. Also, the current regulating diodes will arrive by mail within the next week, so we will have more accurate results soon.
I love strategy games, so my trials will probably be more focused on what most gamers want out of tDCS. I will let SubjectX explain her intentions when she posts.