Revisiting Roswell

A couple of years ago, I went to visit my cousin's family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and while in the state I insisted on making the drive out to see the International UFO Museum in Roswell.

Yes, it was campy, but it was fun.  My wife spent most of the visit rolling her eyes, but I did get a poster for my classroom, and an opportunity to have my photograph taken having a nice drink in an alien bar that would have only been improved by having a band like the one in Mos Eisley spaceport.

The "Roswell Incident" is one of the most talked about and thoroughly studied UFO stories in history.  In 1947, the museum's website says, "something happened" in the desert plains near Roswell.  The government says it was the crash of a high-altitude weather balloon, but there are alleged whistleblowers (most notably Lieutenant Walter Haut) who claim that it was the wreck of an alien spacecraft.  There are famous photographs of an "alien autopsy," traces of material from the wreckage, and dozens of eyewitness accounts.

What does it all add up to?  Not much, is my opinion.  Could the Roswell debris be the wreckage of an interstellar alien spaceship?  I suppose.  Could it be a hoax, a conglomeration of stories that grew by accretion after a completely natural, terrestrial event?  Yes.  What we have thus far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence that science demands, so for me the jury is still out.

Then of course, there's Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the whole thing:  "You're telling me that these aliens flew halfway across the galaxy, and then they couldn't land the damn ship?  If those are the kind of alien visiting the Earth, then they can go home.  I don't want to talk to 'em."

But even given the fact that we have all of the evidence that we're likely to get -- meaning that skeptics like myself will remain unconvinced either way, the believers will continue to believe, and the disbelievers will continue to disbelieve -- the whole thing is still debated endlessly.  People look for new angles, however unlikely those are to lead to anything productive.  And some of those new angles are so odd that they make the original arguments of the UFO crowd seem like peer-reviewed research.

Take, for example the article over at The UFO Iconoclast that says we have only one option for continuing our research into Roswell:

Remote viewing.

Because we all know how much more reliable a study becomes when you compound it with pseudoscience.  Not that that's the way they frame it:

The remote view protocol that we use at Spirit Rescue International is defined as ‘scientific’ and/or ‘coordinate’ remote viewing.  In order to apply it to the Roswell Incident there would need to be more monitor control, protocol modification, use of the correct data type and extended sessions.  The sessions would be conducted by remote viewers who have minimal knowledge of the Roswell Incident. We believe these objectives can be achieved.

Which brings up two rather thorny problems:

1. How do you guarantee "minimal knowledge?"  Anyone who can successfully navigate a Wikipedia page can find out all sorts of facts and speculation about the Roswell Incident.   Given the amount of play this claim has had on television and in movies, and the ubiquity of such information online, "contamination" of the "remote viewers" isn't just likely, it's a near certainty.
2. Since the US government is still denying anything paranormal happened in Roswell in 1947, how would you check the information the remote viewers obtained to determine if it was accurate?

This last issue is the hardest one.  Suppose a remote viewing team determined that the pieces of the Roswell crash -- incontrovertible evidence of a downed spaceship -- were being kept in a warehouse in Topeka.  Can't you just imagine the telephone conversation that might ensue?

UFO investigator:  We know the wreckage of the Roswell spaceship is in Topeka.  Can you let us have a look at it? 

Government official:  It doesn't exist, so no. 

UFO investigator:  Topeka does so exist.  My grandmother lives there.  Ha!  We've caught you in a bald-faced lie. 

Government official:  Not Topeka, the spaceship.  There's no spaceship parts, in Topeka or elsewhere. 

UFO investigator:  Your denial just proves that we're hot on your trail! 

Government official:  *click*

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter, from a variety of angles.

Understand, though, that no one would be happier than me to have undeniable evidence of alien intelligence.  Even if the aliens in question couldn't successfully land their ship.  Hell, I'm 53 and I still have trouble parallel parking, so I'm not going to judge.  But I'm with Tyson on one thing: the evidence thus far is unconvincing.  And that includes any evidence -- if I can dignify it with that term -- that comes from psychics.

You can't use one unproven thing to prove another unproven thing.  Sorry, but logic just doesn't work that way.

The sound of music

One of the most important things in my life is music, and to me, music is all about evoking emotion.

A beautiful and well-performed song or piece of music connects to me (and, I suspect, to many people) on a completely visceral level.  I have laughed with delight and sobbed helplessly many times over music -- sometimes for reasons I can barely understand with my cognitive mind.

And what is most curious to me is that the same bit of music doesn't necessarily evoke the same emotion in different people.  My wife, another avid music lover, often has a completely neutral reaction to tunes that have me enraptured (and vice versa).  I vividly recall arguing with my mother when I was perhaps fifteen years old, before I recognized what a fruitless endeavor arguing with my mother was, over whether Mason Williams' gorgeous solo guitar piece "Classical Gas" was sad or not.  (My opinion is that it's incredibly wistful and melancholy, despite being lightning-fast and technically difficult.  But listen to the recording, and judge for yourself.)

Which brings us to the subject of artificial intelligence.  Recently there has been a lot of work done in writing software that composes music; composer David Cope has invented a program called "Emily Howell" that is capable of producing listenable music in a variety of styles, including Bach, Rachmaninoff, Barber, Copland, and Chopin.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

"Listenable," of course, isn't the same as "brilliant" or "emotionally evocative."  As Chris Wilson, author of the Slate article I linked, concluded, "I don't expect Emily Howell to ever replace the best human composers...  Yet even at this early moment in AC research, Emily Howell is already a better composer than 99 percent of the population.  Whether she or any other computer can bridge that last 1 percent, making complete works with lasting significance to music, is anyone's guess."

And now, Ryan Stables, a professor of audio engineering and acoustics at Birmingham City University in England has, perhaps, crossed another bit of the remaining 1%.  Stables and his team have created a music processing software that is capable of recognizing, and tweaking, recordings of music to alter its emotional content.

"We put [pitch, rhythm, and texture] together into a higher level representation," Stables told a reporter for BBC.  "[Until now] computers represented music only as digital data. You might use your computer to play the Beach Boys, but a computer can't understand that there's a guitar or drums, it doesn't ever go surfing so it doesn't really know what that means, so it has no idea that it's the Beach Boys - it's just numbers, ones and zeroes...  We take computers… and we try and give them the capabilities to understand and process music in the way a human being would."

In practice, what this has meant is feeding in musical tracks to the program, along with descriptors such as "warm" or "dreamy" or "spiky."  The software then makes guesses from those tags about what features of music led to those descriptions -- what, for example, all of the tracks labeled "dreamy" have in common.  Just like a child learning to train his ears, the program becomes better and better at these guesses as it has more data.  Then once trained, the program can add those same effects to digital music recordings in post-production.

Note that like Cope's Emily Howell software, Stables is not claiming that his program can supersede music as performed by gifted human musicians.  "These are quite simple effects and would be very intuitive for the amateur musician," Stables said.  "There are similar commercially available technologies but they don't take a semantic input into account as this does."

Film composer Rael Jones, who has used Stables' software, concurs. "Plug-ins don't create a sound, they modify a sound; it is a small part of the process.  The crucial thing is the sound input -- for example you could never make a glockenspiel sound warm no matter how you processed it, and a very poorly recorded instrument cannot be fixed by using plug-ins post-recording.  But for some amateur musicians this could be an interesting educational tool to use as a starting point for exploring sound."

What I wonder, of course, is how long it will take before Cope, Stables, and others like them begin to combine forces and produce a truly creative piece of musical software, that is capable of composing and performing emotionally charged, technically brilliant music.  And at that point, will we have crossed a line into some fundamentally different realm, where creativity is no longer the sole purview of humanity?  You have to wonder how that will change our perception of art, music, beauty, emotion... and of ourselves.  When you talk to people about artificial intelligence, you often hear them say that of course computers could never be creative, that however good they are at other skills, creativity has an ineffable quality that will never be replicated in a machine.

I wonder if that's true.

I find the possibility tremendously exciting, and a little scary.  As a musician and a writer, who values creativity above most other human capacities, it's humbling to think that what I do might be replicable by something made out of circuits and relays.  But how astonishing it is to live in a time when we are getting the first glimpses of what is possible -- both for ourselves and for our creations.

Meet the "Crystal Children"

Last year I wrote a piece on the phenomenon of people labeling themselves or their kids "Indigo Children."  An "Indigo Child," it's said, is empathetic, sensitive, creative, and tends not to fit in well with regards to other people's expectations.  They are highly intelligent, and are especially gifted in areas that require thinking outside the box.

Oh, yeah.  They also have "indigo-colored auras."

So what we have here is yet another example of people trying to find an explanation and a label for something that really is best classified under the heading "People Are All Different."  Even, apparently, with respect to the color of their auras.

But "Indigo" is becoming passé, apparently.  As C. S. Lewis observed, "Fashions come and go... but mostly they go."  "Indigo Children" are now a dime a dozen.  So we have to move on to a new designation, an even more special kind of person.  One that shows up those silly Indigos for the bush-league posers that they are.

Now, we have "Crystal Children."

I'm not making this up.  In an opening passage that should win some kind of award for New Age Doublespeak, we read that the "empathetic and sensitive" Indigos better just step aside:

After discovering more about Indigo Children and the (often misunderstood) gifts that they possess, the question arose: now what?  The answer came in the form of the Crystal Children. 

The Crystal Children are the generation following the Indigo Children. Still thought to be relatively young, they have begun to be born from around 2000, though there is some speculation that they arrived earlier, around 1995.  Similar to their Indigo counterparts, these children are thought to be extremely powerful, with a main purpose to take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity.  Some things that make them unique from Indigo Children are that they function as a group consciousness rather than as individuals, and they live by the law that we are all one.  However, they are still are a powerful force for love and peace on the planet.

Yes, I have to say that when I read about the Indigo Children, my response was to shake my head and say, "Now what?"  But I don't think I meant it the same way.

And my goodness, those "Crystal Children!"  They're going to "take humanity to the next level in our evolution and reveal to us our inner power and divinity!"  Who could resist that?

We're then told the twenty-three ways to recognize a "Crystal Child," beginning with the first, that "Crystal Children" possess "large eyes with an intense stare."  I don't know about you, but that sounds vaguely terrifying to me.  If a large-eyed child was staring at me intensely, I wouldn't suspect that I was dealing with a child who was trying to "bring out my inner power and divinity," I would suspect that I was in an episode of The X Files and was about to have all of my blood removed via my eye sockets.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The rest of the ways that you tell if your kid is a "Crystal Child" are suspiciously like the rules for detecting "Indigo Children;" empathy, sensitivity, intelligence, creativity, and so on.  So once again this seems to me to be a way for gullible parents to find a way to feel better about having a child who might be experiencing trouble fitting in in school.  Not that this isn't an understandable goal; my younger son had a rough time in middle school, as many do, and it was a struggle sometimes as a parent to find ways to get him through the experience with his confidence and spirit intact.

But I'm just not convinced that making up a goofy label, and appending to it all sorts of pseudoscientific bosh, is the way to go about it.  Some good old-fashioned coping strategies are usually what's called for, not sticking a wacky name tag on your kid.  The latter, I'd think, would make it more likely the kid wouldn't fit in, especially if (s)he starts babbling to peers that they'd better be nice because you never know how a "Crystal Child" will react when provoked.

So that's our swim in the deep end for today.  I've got to wrap this up so I can go try and teach all of the various types of actual children out there.  I'll make sure to check out their auras.  That's bound to give me some valuable information about how to get them to understand science.

Stargates in my inbox

I get the weirdest emails sometimes.

I suppose it comes with the territory, given some of the stuff I blog about.  The problem is, not knowing anything about perhaps 80% of the people who email me with responses or comments, I often can't tell if the person was serious or not.

This leaves me in the awkward position of not being able to determine if an individual who has my email address is insane.  Take, for example, the email I got yesterday, from someone who signed it only as "A Devoted Reader:"

Dear Skeptophilia: 

Sometimes I like what you write but sometimes it just makes me mad.  Because I think you are determined not to see whats [sic] right under your nose.  I'm not calling it paranormal because that makes it sound made-up, infact [sic] it's science it's just science we humans don't know anything about.  That doesn't mean it's not real and there could be other civilizations that have that information and might be willing to share it with us if we would pull our heads out of the sand. 

Here are two websites that will hopefully make you think.  Keep an open mind when you read them and stop thinking that skeptic means a person who disbelieves everything and makes fun of what they don't understand. 

A Devoted Reader

The two websites turned out to be called "Saddam or Stargate?  What is Task Force 20's Main Objective?" and "2014 War for Men's Souls."   And I was going to say that these two websites read like a script for a movie on the Syfy channel, but that isn't entirely correct, because movies on the Syfy channel at least have to have some kind of plot.

Whereas these two websites make the random ravings of Alex Jones sound like a pinnacle of rationality.  Here are a couple of selections from "Saddam or Stargate?":

Imagine this scenario.  The U.S. government obtains intelligence that hidden somewhere in central Iraq is an actual stargate, placed there by the Anunnaki 'gods' of ancient Sumeria...  In this scenario, when Nibiru is closest to Earth, the Anunnaki will "take the opportunity to travel to Earth through that same stargate and will set up their encampment in Iraq." 

With time running out, President Bush invades Iraq.  American scientists raid the (Iraqi national) museum and close the stargate, thus frustrating the grandiose ambitions of the self-styled reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam Hussein, and making the world safe for the New World Order. 

Is this the sequel to the movie Stargate?  Is it a new episode of the TV series?  Is it a new Star Trek movie?  No, it is none of these.  According to Dr. Michael Salla, it is probably exactly what happened!

Probably exactly!  Spoken like a true scientist, Dr. Salla.  "We're probably almost kind of exactly sort of sure.  Maybe."

How do we know all of this for kind of definitely certain?  Our evidence includes seeing a soldier with wacky sunglasses in Baghdad:

As a U.S. soldier peered out of a passing tank, a young engineering student and a retired accountant contemplated one of the more common questions on the streets of Baghdad: Did the soldier's wraparound sunglasses give him X-ray vision? 

"With those sunglasses, he can definitely see through women's clothes," said the engineering student, Samer Hamid.  "It makes me angry. We are afraid to take our families out on the street."

So soldier with funny sunglasses = x-ray vision = being able to see what we look like naked = Saddam Hussein was in contact with aliens who gave him a magic stargate.

I can't see any flaw in the argument there, can you?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that website reads like a treatise on formal logic when compared to the other one.  A brief passage will suffice:

Some orbs appear to be the manifestation of the human soul after we die; only visible to ultraviolet and infrared non-filtered cameras.  To days [sic] cameras pick them up because it is much cheaper to manufacture them without such filters.  This is why both UFOs (who the ancients said were “spirit” gods who could take human form-cloaked in the UV and IR) and ghosts can be captured by today’s technology, when not visible to the human eye.  The ancient Mesopotamia bible spoke of both spirits and the soul.  Nearly every ancient civilization makes reference to the soul; Egypt built a technological civilization around them.  They were quite obviously doing something with high voltage; Tesla coils and particle accelerators, to harness and launch the soul.  From the Zoroastrians, to Mesopotamia, even the Maya and pre-Columbians, all had this knowledge.

So there you are, then.  And I don't know about you, but having my soul launched by a particle accelerator seems like a cool idea.  I'd go for that as a sendoff when I die, except that I'd pretty much already decided that I want a Viking funeral.  Lay my body out on my canoe, set it on fire, and shove it out into my pond, and then all of my friends and family throw a huge party with lots of alcohol and music and debauchery.  More fun than your typical church funeral, don't you think?

But I digress.

I live in hope that the people who send me these emails aren't serious, but I fear that this one was.  It seemed awfully... sincere.  And to A Devoted Reader, a personal message:  I tried to keep my mind open, I honestly did.  But I still don't believe in stargates and Annunaki and spirit orbs and so on.  I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool if this stuff existed; hell, I'd love it if Bigfoot and aliens and so on were real.  But I'm just not seeing it.

So thanks for the emails, and do keep them coming, even though some of them make me a little worried that you people might know where I live.  Toward that end, allow me to mention, offhand and in-passing-like, that I recently moved to a small uncharted island off the coast of Mauritania.  The view is lovely, and it even has wifi.  Drop by to visit any time.

Facts about a non-epidemic

Having participated in raising two boys who presented nothing more than the usual challenges of parenting a couple of rambunctious and strong-willed kids, I cannot begin to imagine the difficulties faced by parents of an autistic child.

Friends of mine who have children with autism spectrum disorder have told me that the experience is not without its rewards, and I am certain that it is true.  But the obstacles that those children themselves face -- not least in the realm of acceptance by the outside world -- must present their parents with a formidable and exhausting task, and one for which I have nothing but the utmost respect.

Such a diagnosis often leaves parents searching for a cause as well as a treatment, and in such periods of emotional strain people will sometimes grasp at straws.  Thus the completely discredited Andrew Wakefield "study" pinning the cause of autism on routine vaccinations.  The truth is that medical researchers still have not identified a single clear cause for autism spectrum disorder; a genetic basis is strongly suspected, with perhaps a variety of epigenetic effects contributing, along with possible environmental triggers as well.

That, of course, is still not enough for some people, and the vaccine myth persists.  It has been debunked roundly by more authoritative individuals than myself, and a quick Google search will provide you with all of the reputable information you need (and scads of specious and fear-laden pseudoscience, as well).  I want to deal with a different facet of the misinformation here -- the idea that autism rates have skyrocketed in the past few decades.

That we are in the midst of an "autism epidemic."

Such claims are rampant, and bolster the (unsupported) conjecture that autism is caused solely by some toxin in our modern lifestyle (once again, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal in vaccines is often named, although its use was discontinued in the USA and EU in 2003).  Take, for example, this article by Dan Olmstead, that not only refers to autism as an "epidemic," but claims that the "medico-industrial complex" is trying to hush the fact up.

The first problem is, Olmstead is trying to support his point using information that simply isn't true.  He claims, for example, that the first children with autism were identified in 1943, even though Houston and Frith's book Autism in History makes an excellent case that one Hugh Blair of Borgue, Scotland exhibited all of the classic symptoms of autism spectrum disorder -- way back in 1747.

But the difficulties run deeper than that.  If Olmstead and (many) others are correct, then there is not only a correlation between vaccination and other environmental toxins in the industrial west, there's also a causative link.

And a study just published in Psychological Medicine demonstrates conclusively that there isn't even a correlation.

This paper does an exhaustive analysis of the data, worldwide, of the incidence of autism in the last twenty years.  And not only does it indicate that the rates of autism haven't changed appreciably in the last twenty years -- pretty curious if it's an "epidemic" -- the incidence of autism in sub-Saharan Africa (30.0 affected children per 100,000), where very few children are vaccinated, is actually higher than that for western Europe (24.8 affected children per 100,000), where almost all children are immunized.

Kind of blows a hole in the idea of a human-induced autism epidemic being suppressed by the evil medico-industrial complex and "Big Pharma."  The authors of the study, of course, put it in more measured terms, stating, "After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010.  Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs."

And if you add that to a further study that found that in places where rates of autism diagnosis have risen, diagnosis of mental retardation has fallen, the situation becomes even clearer.  Consider this graph, developed by from United States Department of Education data:

[after Shattuck et al.]

It is evident that in times past autistic children were lumped in with those who suffered from other developmental disorders -- those unfortunates who were labeled in the US Census starting in 1850 as "idiots, imbeciles, deaf & dumb, blind, or insane" and who were often institutionalized in conditions so horrible that they defy belief.

In taking issue with the people who are publicizing false information about an "autism epidemic," I am in no way trying to minimize the struggles that autistic children and their parents go through, nor am I unsympathetic with their desire to understand the cause.  But no one -- least of all the children with ASD -- are helped in any way by fear-mongering, alarmism, and conspiracy theories.

As with anything: we are always best off knowing the facts, even if those facts still leave us in a state of ignorance regarding ultimate causes.  Recent advances in identifying the genetic underpinning of autism and related disorders leave me hopeful that we may soon have answers; in the meantime, what we need is compassion and understanding for ASD children and their caregivers, and some caution about promoting spurious and unscientific theories about the disorder's origins.

Trials of faith

The state of Tennessee is in a bit of a quandary at the moment.

Back in 2002, one Jacqueline Crank was sentenced to unsupervised probation for negligence in the death of her fifteen-year-old daughter Jessica from Ewing's sarcoma.  Jessica was not brought in for conventional medical treatment, but instead was subjected to a bout of "faith healing" on the part of the girl's "spiritual father," Ariel Sherman, and various family friends.

"Laying on of hands" in a Pentecostal Church [image courtesy of photographer Russell Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

Despite the light sentence, Crank hasn't been willing to let the matter go, and has pursued appeals all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court.  And the sticky part of the issue is that Tennessee has something called the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act, which allows parents to avoid medical treatment for their children if it would interfere with their religious beliefs.  Crank's claim -- and it's hard to see how she's wrong -- is that this protects certain established religious sects who don't believe in using modern medicine (e.g. Christian Scientists) but it didn't protect her, because she belongs to a sect that includes only her and about two dozen others, living "in a cult-type religious environment with many people... all of whom they consider 'family' although none of them are related."

Her last appeal, in which her sentence was upheld, was decided in June of 2013.  In the decision, the following provision of the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act was quoted:

Nothing in this chapter [Tennessee Code Annotated Title 39, Chapter 15, setting forth certain offenses against children, including child abuse and neglect] shall be construed to mean a child is neglected, abused, or abused or neglected in an aggravated manner for the sole reason the child is being provided treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone in accordance with the tenets or practices of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner thereof in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.

I have two issues with this.

First, how is denying a child medical treatment ever anything other than child abuse?  Allowing a child to remain in pain, or perhaps even to die, of a treatable illness is "abuse and neglect" no matter whether the reason is negligence or "deeply held religious beliefs."  You can't "provide treatment by spiritual means," because it doesn't work.  The list of children who have died in the hands of faith healers -- some from agonizing conditions like appendicitis -- is long.

Second, how do you become a "duly accredited practitioner" of faith healing?  Cf. my earlier comment about the fact that it doesn't work.  I suppose, of course, that there are also training programs for astrology, crystal energy healing, and homeopathy, so having a certificate in Latin on your wall saying you're an accredited faith healer isn't that much more ridiculous.

The problem is, of course, that this puts the Tennessee Supreme Court in the awkward position of either having to admit that the basis of their Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act is a flawed belief that systematizes child abuse, or siding with a woman who while her child was experiencing bone disintegration from a grapefruit-sized tumor, "decided to turn to Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, my Healer, Defender for her healing. That being a believer in the Lord, being a believer in this Word, that He was the only Healer. And through that belief we took it in our hands to pray for her, to heal her with prayer, to know that Jesus Christ is the Healer, is the Deliverer."

So the decision will either imply that all religious beliefs are equal, even the loony ones, or that some beliefs are more equal than others.  And either way, the justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court will have painted themselves into a legal corner that it's hard to see an escape from.

Brain on fire

When a new discovery in medical science is made, there's always the danger that gullible and/or hopeful people will misinterpret the results.  The danger is especially high when the discovery has to do with something simple and accessible, such as the find that trans-cranial electrical brain stimulation leads to higher cognitive function.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A year ago, some researchers at Oxford University found that a painless, non-invasive application of "electrical noise," delivered through electrodes attached to the scalp, improved attention, accuracy, and memory, and that the effect lasted for weeks or months.  The procedure is called TRNS (transcranial random noise stimulation), and shows great promise in helping individuals with cognitive impairment -- and perhaps even us ordinary folks who just want a boost in our thinking ability.

"Performance on both the calculation and rote learning tasks improved over the five days, and the former improvements were maintained until six months after training," study leader Dr. Roy Cohen Kadosh told reporters.  "Research has shown that by delivering electricity to the right part of the brain, we can change the threshold of neurons that transmit information in our brain, and by doing that we can improve cognitive abilities in different types of psychological functions...  Our neuro-imaging results suggested that TRNS increases the efficiency with which stimulated brain areas use their supplies of oxygen and nutrients...  Participants receiving TRNS showed superior long-term performance, compared to sham controls, six months later."

So far, pretty cool.  But of course, when a researcher discovers something like this, it opens the door for the greedy to take advantage of the gullible by creating their own electrical stimulation devices, and claiming that "research shows" that they'll help you to think better.

"A headset for gamers, take charge... Overclock your brain," claims one company that sells home electrical stimulation devices.  Another one states: "Can you learn 20-40% quicker, reduce pain, feel better, increase energy or reduce stress with tDCS?  Research studies say, YES!"

There's even a forum on Reddit devoted to the subject -- complete with claims that TRNS can treat everything from autism to schizophrenia.  Less publicized, though, are the accounts of people who have burned their scalps because of leaving the electrodes on too long, or using a unit that delivers a higher-than-recommended voltage.

Through all of this, there have been some voices calling for reason.  Dr. Hannah Maslin, also of Oxford, published a paper calling for regulation of these devices.  "It is becoming increasingly easy for individuals to buy brain-modulating devices online that promise to make the user’s brain work faster, or more effectively, or more creatively," Maslin writes.  "Such devices can involve passing electrical currents through one’s brain or using electromagnetic fields to penetrate the scalp and skull to make neurons fire.  Yet, when purchased outside clinical settings, these devices are unregulated, with no system in place to ensure their safety.  With the market for enhancement technologies expanding, and with devices already crossing international borders, controlling which products are approved for sale is a global issue, potentially requiring international regulatory harmonization."

Steven Novella, neurologist at Yale University, put it even more bluntly.  "Any device with medical claims that it's meant to affect our biological function should be appropriately regulated.  Regulation is the only thing that creates the motivation to spend the money and take the time to do the proper research."

Of course, I'm expecting that this will bring howls of anger from the alternative-medicine crowd, who get their jollies claiming that the medical establishment is actively trying to keep us all sick so that they can make more money.  The truth, of course, is that regulation is about protecting people from their own ignorance.  TRNS does show great promise in improving memory and cognition -- but putting those devices in the hands of people who don't know how to use them correctly is asking for trouble.

So if you're tempted by the hype, my advice is to put away your credit card and read some of the actual research.  It may be that eventually TRNS units will be available for use for ordinary folks, but right now they're (rightfully) in the hands of the medical researchers.  Heaven knows I'd like to think more clearly; but I'm not going to cave in to that desire and end up burning a hole in my scalp.

Call me a Nervous Nellie, but I'm just going to err on the side of caution in this instance.