Thread: Published in Nature Neuroscience: 77% induction rate with electrodes on the scalp at 40 Hertz

This was published in Nature Neuroscience today: lucid dreams were induced 77% of the time when electrodes placed on the scalp stimulate the frontal cortex at 40 Hertz two minutes after entering a dream.

Check out the latest research at the J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt: Brain Zaps Can Trigger Lucid Dreams | LiveScience!

Thanks for sharing! It's quite interesting that lucid dreaming is associated with an increase in gamma brain waves - the very same brainwaves that experienced meditators tend to produce in abundance during meditation as well as Non-rem sleep.

This is very interesting! There was an earlier research effort, that proved 40 Hz showed up in lucid dreams but not in ordinary dreams, and not in deep sleep. But this is actually constructive. A 40 Hz signal can be generated via loudspeakers, and would then - upon hitting the eardrums - generate an electrical 40 Hz signal in the brain.

40 Hz is a very low frequency, as far as sound is concerned, but it is not beyond reach; most HiFi-loudspeakers can easily generate that frequency. Many headphones can too.

Very, very interesting ...

Holy sh!. How can I conduct this experiment home?

Originally Posted by Voldmer

This is very interesting! There was an earlier research effort, that proved 40 Hz showed up in lucid dreams but not in ordinary dreams, and not in deep sleep. But this is actually constructive. A 40 Hz signal can be generated via loudspeakers, and would then - upon hitting the eardrums - generate an electrical 40 Hz signal in the brain.

40 Hz is a very low frequency, as far as sound is concerned, but it is not beyond reach; most HiFi-loudspeakers can easily generate that frequency. Many headphones can too.

Very, very interesting ...

Unfortunately though, sound frequency is unrelated to a brain frequency. Unless the sound vibration could actively cause electrical impulses of the same hertz through the scalp into the frontal lobe (which is highly unlikely) or that binaural beats actually work (still no evidence to back them up).
In this experiment they use a tcds device which delivers impulses throughout the brain identical to those their during lucid dreaming, but more importantly stimulates the frontal cortex. There is no evidence that the electrical impulses of converted sounds would cause a similar reaction.

Originally Posted by Nfri

Holy sh!. How can I conduct this experiment home?

Make a tcds device along with the eeg device you were planning on obtaining.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

Unfortunately though, sound frequency is unrelated to a brain frequency. Unless the sound vibration could actively cause electrical impulses of the same hertz through the scalp into the frontal lobe (which is highly unlikely) or that binaural beats actually work (still no evidence to back them up).

Binaural beats I very much doubt, since the physics doesn't really seem to support it. But sound and electricity are completely related. A loudspeaker takes an electrical signal (for example 40 Hz) and changes it into mechanical vibration. An ear takes a mechanical vibration, and changes it into an electrical signal. Although I do not know the exact process through which the ear functions, it seems to me that it would be highly unlikely if the 40 Hz mechanical vibration is not reproduced as an 40 Hz electrical signal but instead as another frequency.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

In this experiment they use a tcds device which delivers impulses throughout the brain identical to those their during lucid dreaming, but more importantly stimulates the frontal cortex. There is no evidence that the electrical impulses of converted sounds would cause a similar reaction.

That's true, and that's why it is an obvious idea for research.

Originally Posted by Voldmer

Binaural beats I very much doubt, since the physics doesn't really seem to support it. But sound and electricity are completely related. A loudspeaker takes an electrical signal (for example 40 Hz) and changes it into mechanical vibration. An ear takes a mechanical vibration, and changes it into an electrical signal. Although I do not know the exact process through which the ear functions, it seems to me that it would be highly unlikely if the 40 Hz mechanical vibration is not reproduced as an 40 Hz electrical signal but instead as another frequency.

That's true, and that's why it is an obvious idea for research.

But the point is that when we talk about the electrical impulses running through the brain, we focus on how the impulse propagates throughout the entire brain, while hearing something will send it down a specific pathway reserved for analyzing sounds.

I don't doubt that there is potential there, but what you propose is like sending the information down a hallway and hoping it will reach the right room , while a tcds device is closer akin to throwing it straight through the window you want it to be in.

Though speculation will probably get us no where. I'd say time to try it out and experiment

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

But the point is that when we talk about the electrical impulses running through the brain, we focus on how the impulse propagates throughout the entire brain, while hearing something will send it down a specific pathway reserved for analyzing sounds.

I don't doubt that there is potential there, but what you propose is like sending the information down a hallway and hoping it will reach the right room , while a tcds device is closer akin to throwing it straight through the window you want it to be in.

That may well be; I certainly don't know enough about the way electrical impulses travel across the brain to say much of value about that. It just seems to me, that EEG measurements can be taken anywhere on the scalp whilst still maintaining their general characteristics, and maybe a signal generated near the ears will travel enough to resonate in the right place. But this is of course speculation on my part.

But it raises another interesting possibility ; a 40Hz signal generated in a HIFI-system could be taken out - in electrical form, before it reaches the loudspeakers - and applied to the scalp directly ...

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

Though speculation will probably get us no where. I'd say time to try it out and experiment

Yup!

We're going to get there in my lifetime, I know it. Dreams-R-Us. Can't wait. It will be the end of civilization, however. Land of the Lotus Eaters. Larry Niven predicted something similar to this in his sci-fi novels, there they had "wireheads," people addicted to a trickle of current directly connected to the pleasure center of the brain.

Gimme!

Originally Posted by FryingMan

It will be the end of civilization, however.

Good.

Ha!!
Phantastisch!!
And Frankfurt is not far away for me, even!
Land of the Lotus Eaters - been thinking this as well of course - even made a thread a while back on addictive potential etc.
Another thing - what happens when you do that to an awake person??
Extremely fascinating!
This very much looks like a break-through especially for science - the activities to "decipher LDing" are boiling around here anyway - but now the test-subject scarcity might come to an end finally!
That's what holds them all back from doing their work.



Edit: It's a nice idea, Voldmer - but unfortuntaly it won't work.
When soundwaves enter the ear, they get first of all amplified over the membranes and bones, and then they follow the ear-snail along, till they end at the point, where exactly this frequency of sound gets detected.
Fascinating, because that is the geometric purpose of that snail (cochlea) - the further a soundwave can travel up it - the higher it's frequency is.
Once it gets detected - what happens is that a normal nerve impulse gets triggered exactly there, devoid of the actual frequency, and only holding the information, from where the excitation came, which corresponds to the frequency, but is not it. This impulse is then running up the auditory nerve to chime into the concert.

Originally Posted by StephL

It's a nice idea, Voldmer - but unfortuntaly it won't work.
When soundwaves enter the ear, they get first of all amplified over the membranes and bones, and then they follow the ear-snail along, till they end at the point, where exactly this frequency of sound gets detected.
Fascinating, because that is the geometric purpose of that snail (cochlea) - the further a soundwave can travel up it - the higher it's frequency is.
Once it gets detected - what happens is that a normal nerve impulse gets triggered exactly there, devoid of the actual frequency, and only holding the information, from where the excitation came, which corresponds to the frequency, but is not it. This impulse is then running up the auditory nerve to chime into the concert.

As mentioned I don't know the exact details of how electrical signals move across the brain, but if a nerve carries an electrical signal, then this signal has a frequency. If that frequency, in a nerve connected to hearing, actually differs from the frequency of the vibration, then this implies a transducing metod of greater complexity than needed (a loudspeaker is really very simple). Maybe the human body is actually like that (this would mean that we humans have actually beaten evolution at something ), but do we really know what the frequency-spectrum of the signals in the acoustic nerves are like?

However, if brainwave entrainment is a reality, then there must be some way to translate the acoustic signal to an electrical one. The Monroe Institute has been preaching for thirty years that this is indeed possible.

Anyone with an EEG-device should be able to test this easily. Put a 40Hz signal on the stereo, and measure then EEG at the same time. If the 40Hz signal shows up in the EEG, then it would be a strong indication that entrainment took place. Next, try with other frequencies.

Originally Posted by Voldmer

As mentioned I don't know the exact details of how electrical signals move across the brain, but if a nerve carries an electrical signal, then this signal has a frequency. If that frequency, in a nerve connected to hearing, actually differs from the frequency of the vibration, then this implies a transducing metod of greater complexity than needed (a loudspeaker is really very simple). Maybe the human body is actually like that (this would mean that we humans have actually beaten evolution at something ), but do we really know what the frequency-spectrum of the signals in the acoustic nerves are like?

However, if brainwave entrainment is a reality, then there must be some way to translate the acoustic signal to an electrical one. The Monroe Institute has been preaching for thirty years that this is indeed possible.

Anyone with an EEG-device should be able to test this easily. Put a 40Hz signal on the stereo, and measure then EEG at the same time. If the 40Hz signal shows up in the EEG, then it would be a strong indication that entrainment took place. Next, try with other frequencies.

This isn't exactly what you were asking for (it's about binaural beats specifically, and is rather limited in range-tested/scope), but it's similar: Do Binaural Beats Really Affect Brainwaves?*

EDIT: Oh wow. I read the first page, and thought that was the second most-recent post. My apologies for responding to a post 12 pages back. : P (though I'll leave it up since it's somewhat related anyway)

Originally Posted by IAmCoder

Yeah, I started exploring completely non-invasive methods after my attempts at trying to reproduce the findings, even shying away from vanilla electrodes for EEG. My uneducated guess is that the myelin sheaths can't regenerate.

Hi Michael,
so, you didn't manage to replicate Jeff's success with tACS - if I understood correctly. That's one more with zero results, correct?
I am not sure why you guess though, that the myelin sheath can't regenerate.
Can you expand a bit in that - what do you mean?

@Venryx: yea, the thread has gone a looooong way since then! Actually none of the original posters (including Voldmer) is active in the thread anymore. But yes, that was an interesting research. It confirmed for me my observation that binaural beats are ineffective. Thanks.
The problem is that tACS also appears to be ineffective - and perhaps dangerous - despite the initial hope to the contrary...

Hopefully somebody will make in future tutorial for creating home-made lucid dreaming machine


Edit:

Oh wait
People might actualy start to design and sell lucid dreaming helmets like remee but they might actualy be slightly high success rate and effortless aswell
1. Wake up after 6 hours of sleep
2. Put on helmet
3. Set it to activate for 30 sec in 5 mins
4. Fall quickly asleep
5. Lucid?

This is a huge lift for EILD believers, to whom i belong !
I've always thought that only through physiology interventions ( not purely mental exercises ) will humanity have access to LDing on a regular basis.
I am not denying the importance of psychology interventions - but that job is mostly for the motivated people. Of course, EILD can lower the treshold and put more people actively believing and pursuing LDing.

Let's wait and see !

It's very early doors, but can anyone start to give me an idea of how I might (affordably) create and experiment with a device similar to the ones used in the research without, y'know, frazzling my brain?

Originally Posted by Bobblehat

It's very early doors, but can anyone start to give me an idea of how I might (affordably) create and experiment with a device similar to the ones used in the research without, y'know, frazzling my brain?

The project would run into the hundreds of euro's/dollars.

A TCDS device and EEG device would be required, and you would have to link them and make them co-operate, which probably means getting an extension to the EEG device
The TCDS device would probably cost around 80-200 dollars depending on where you get it, and the quality of the components. I believe there is a nice self development kit flying around but it would have to modified to get this to work.
The eeg will cost a similar amount depending on whether you make it or not.

Making an EEG device is pretty easy when you look into it, there sites like these Building an EEG at home

Go to the /r/TCDS subreddit to learn about making a TCDS device, those guys know a fair deal about it.

And then you would need to have a software (or hardware, but this would again run up the costs. Perhaps by using arduino) interface between the eeg and TCDS so that the tcds device is pulsed a few times each time you enter a dream after perhaps three hours of sleep. So you would need to know/learn a programming language, or get a redditor etc to write it for you.

All in all not a very easy project, you need to acquire a good understanding of electronics, the programming language at play, what part of the brain you are trying to activate (DLPFC, or just the frontal cortex in general etc) and you need the money to buy high quality equipment you know will not fail.

A single milliamp over 1.5-2.0 millamps, and you are putting yourself at risk for brain damage. The main risk lies in that you will be asleep, you can't actively change anything on the device or check it's status.

Just to be sure, you'd want multiple redundancy checks, and a competent program running.

EDIT: Actually it seems that allan hobson and his crew used a tACS device (alternating current, not direct current TCDS). So you will probably run into difficulties there, if I understand correctly they use this device because it can modulate brain frequencies in the frontal lobes better than a tcds device. I'm not sure about this but a tcds device might require that brain region is already lit up, while a tACS or TMS device can light up a region regardless.

As demonstrated, my knowledge on the subject is actually quite shallow. That's surprising considering how long I've been following it, it takes a very significant amount of time and interest to get anywhere.

Since I know, how it is with people clicking and reading - or rather not doing that - I'll put the text from the OP's link on over:

Brain Zaps Can Trigger Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams, in which people are aware of and can control their dreams, are rare. But now scientists have found they can induce this weird state of mind in people by zapping their brains with a specific frequency of electricity.

"I never thought this would work," said study researcher Dr. John Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard University. "But it looks like it does."

The results showed that when the inexperienced dreamers were zapped with a current of 40 Hertz, 77 percent of the time these participants reported having what were described as lucid dreams.

"They were really excited," said study researcher Ursula Voss, of J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt, who designed the experiments. "The dream reports were short, but long enough for them to report, 'Wow, all of the sudden I knew this was a dream, while I was dreaming.'"

Dream waves

A lucid dream can be thought of as an overlap between two states of consciousness — the one that exists in normal dreaming, and the one during wakefulness, which involves higher levels of awareness and control.

"If I'm aware, if I'm self-reflective, if I'm thinking about myself, about my past and future, that's normally a waking function," Voss said. In lucid dreaming, we transfer elements of waking consciousness into the dream, she said.

Such overlap is also reflected in the brain waves that researchers can detect using electroencephalography, or EEG. Normal dreaming has its own specific brain wave patterns. However, when people have lucid dreams, they show gamma waves, an activity pattern that is linked to consciousness but is nearly absent during sleep and normal dreaming. The gamma activity in the brain of lucid dreamers is especially seen in the brain's frontal cortex.

In the study, the researchers placed electrodes on the scalps of 27 participants, who were not lucid dreamers, to stimulate the frontal cortex, and recreate the gamma wave activity that has been seen in lucid dreamers.

Over four nights, they applied the 30-second bolts of electrical currents to the participants' scalps, two minutes after the participants had entered the dreaming stage of sleep, as shown by their brains' activity patterns. The frequency of stimulation varied from 2 Hz to 100 Hz, and sometimes the researchers didn't actually deliver any electrical currents. The participants were then immediately woken up to report their dreams to an interviewer who wasn't aware of which stimulation they had received.

The EEG data showed that the brain's gamma activity increased during stimulation with 40 Hz, and to a lesser degree during stimulation with 25 Hz; stimulation with other frequencies didn't lead to any changes in the brain waves, and it didn't increase the likelihood of people having lucid dreams.

The researchers also found that after stimulation, if people did experience a lucid dream, the gamma activity increased even more.

"We were surprised that it's possible to force the brain to take on a frequency from the outside, and for the brain to actually vibrate in that frequency and actually show an effect," Voss said.

Science of consciousness

Lucid dreams represent a unique opportunity for scientists to observe the brain change from one state of consciousness to another, and the new results suggest it may have become easier to study such changes.

"Instead of waiting for things to happen, you can actually now do experiments, deliver stimulus and see what happens. It gives you much more classical stimulus-response handle on consciousness itself. It's amazing," Hobson said.

Beyond advancing the understanding of what happens during lucid dreams, the new findings may add insight to the broader research on the nature of consciousness, and how it comes about.

"It lets us see that consciousness is clearly a brain function," Hobson said. "We knew that anyway, but the mechanisms are not clear, and this puts a new spin on it."

Scientists have previously proposed that gamma waves are related to widespread synchronization of brain activity and an important aspect of consciousness. The new findings add to the evidence that gamma activity is related to consciousness, and make it more likely that such activity is actually causing consciousness, Voss said.

The study is detailed today (May 11) in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

A link from the above article to the paper's abstract and several diagrams:
Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity : Nature Neuroscience : Nature Publishing Group

Originally Posted by StephL

A link from the above article to the paper's abstract and several diagrams:
Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity : Nature Neuroscience : Nature Publishing Group

In case someone is still looking for the article. Great discussion btw ^^

Thanks for posting, Steph. It's Always nice to receive your input.

Bla bla bla the consciousness talk though. I dont' care about their speculations
(especially that last line ruffled me the wrong way, in no way does this indicate Gamma causing consciousness. )
They just edited that in to make the article appeal more interesting. Thus spreading unfounded rumors.
But the relationship is interesting.

I think if we can somehow reach the frontal cortex with another medium. Eye-flashes perhaps. Brief resonance of 40hz might be achieved

Thanks for your detailed response, dutchraptor. Would I be able to get it off the ground? Probably not, but I'll make a fun project of researching the terms you speak of and go from there.

Originally Posted by Bobblehat

Thanks for your detailed response, dutchraptor. Would I be able to get it off the ground? Probably not, but I'll make a fun project of researching the terms you speak of and go from there.

You would, if you have the time.
Mot of the redditors over at /r/tcds built there own device, or are using one of the few commercially available ones, they learned from the ground up (though most of them seem not to bothered with safety)

It's a brilliant project to work up to over a year or two, and if you got it working the pay off would be unreal.

Besides that, both EEG devices and TCDS devices are massively interesting anyways on their own. So it's always a cool investment.

Good luck

This is great stuff. Id love to see a device worth a damn on the market. I'm always looking for easier ways to get lucid!

Future conversation:
"Kids when I was your age we didn't have all these fancy dreaming devices to get lucid. We had to actually work hard for it."

Already LDing headbands are on the market that can detect REM sleep. All that needs to be done is replace the mechanism for flashing lights with on that applies the 40 Hz directly to stimulate the critical thinking part of the brain. If someone were to find a way to mass produce such a device, and come up with a good way to market it to the masses and not just current LDers, I think that person could make an incredible amount of money. Also such a device would make all current inconsistent and unreliable LD techniques obsolete. An immersive virtual reality world/playground for hours a night every night! Who wouldn't pay good money for that? Someone develop this and use Kickstarter or something to get it funded.