The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy Page B

study—and further studies that will surely follow this one—it’s impossible to say whether DC stimulation can in fact enhance the plasticity of damaged brains.

    â€œAll of our good results to date have been in healthy subjects. I haven’t seen convincing evidence that you can do much to help a brain that is badly damaged. It may be that there’s no point in trying to polarize busted tissue,” according to Eric Wassermann, the chief of brain stimulation in the Office of the Clinical Director at NIH’s NINDS and one of the designers of this study. Despite inconsistent results so far, he and other researchers continue to explore DC stimulation for patients with widespread brain degeneration.
    Such patients have been bypassed by recent advances that have helped, for instance, sufferers of Parkinson’s Disease. In the past few years, surgeons have begun to use a technique called deep brain stimulation (DBS) to quiet the tremors and stiff gait that become debilitating during a Parkinsonian decline. After drilling small holes in the scalp, the surgeon threads wires deep into the brain to implant a chip near the cluster of cells that is sending out errant signals. For Gabriel, such a focal intervention would not work. In cases such as his, where disease sprawls across a lobe, tDCS could offer an edge. And, too, a cheapo electrical thinking cap, if it works, would offer a huge advantage over other stimulation techniques: No drills bore through the skull. No wires snake through brain tissue. No pacemaker-like machines get implanted under the skin.

    I ask Wassermann what the tDCS machine might look like, if it ever hit the market—would it resemble an iPod?
    â€œThe brain-pod!” Wassermann jokes. “It should play music, receive calls and…shoot like a gun.” Then he grows serious. “It could be very simple and wearable.”
    Wassermann believes that if we’re ever to have a Brain-Pod in the United States, it would likely be tested and developed by the military first. But he doesn’t rule out the chance that a private company would bankroll tDCS, if it continues to perform in the lab. “It is unlikely that any [company] would do this unless they were guaranteed a market share, and the only way they could be guaranteed a market share would be if they had a patent on some important part of the process. I think we know so little about it at this point that there may be patent-able parts.”
    However, Wassermann is not eager to put this device into the hands of consumers; he’s concerned about the ethical problems it poses. “I would not be in favor of this being an iPod. Not yet. Not until the issues of safety and fairness have been resolved.”
    A while ago, someone suggested to Wassermann that he take some tDCS machines to a nearby university and wire up half the students in a classroom before they took a test. Would the battery-powered
kids do better? “I thought the ethics of that sort of application were questionable because you don’t want to advantage people who can afford something that others can’t,” Wassermann says.
    Of course, these machines could be as cheap as clock radios or coffee makers. So arguing about the ethics of Brain-Pods might be an exercise in futility; if tDCS turns out to produce strong effects, the machines will pop up everywhere, whether we like it or not. “It’s an interesting phenomenon, if this were an effective treatment, to have it get completely loose,” Wassermann says. “I’m not excited enough about [tDCS] as a panacea or a great social evil at this point to be very worried. But if it were very potent, it will be all over the place. The Chinese would flood the market with gizmos. This could get completely out of control. It could be like blogging. Everybody could be a brain manipulator.”

    In October, a group of researchers gathered around a conference table at the