Metaphorically and analogy wise: If you think as genes as the holes on a flute, gene expression as the music then environment is what determines "bad" music. But there is no one specific gene that is known or corellated specifically for adhd symptoms.
ADHD is likely genetically caused but the genes are in everyone just expressed in specific environmental circumstances impossible to know for sure in a lab(cause they mostly look at outward behavior in lab settings and fmri blood flow).
But I've been doing meditation(45mins 3-4 days a week) I've also learnt for myself that 30 mins of power naps does wonders for my mind. The medication's effectiveness AND gated on the former two; SNRI, Dopamine reuptake inhibition is like carpet bombing and only makes you ready for rewiring: you still need to rewire with therapeutic and Behavior Therapy techniques.
But I know for a fact that my brain waves are different on days I do meditation and power naps.
I really do want to know if deep brain neural activity detection data can detect bad waves and possibly close the loop by providing corrective waves.
Alternatively, it can be chemically shutdown/reset, the basic principle of neuroleptics. That is a coarser action though. When things hit the fan. Not nearly as much as the usual recommendations from clinicians.
For ADHD, they prescribe stimulants which make sense if we consider that the brain is searching for triggers of dopamine.
Some other conditions seem to require the opposite but this has a lot of side effects.
I think that in fact, the dopamine modulation require more fine grained handling and this is two sides of a same coin.
You’ve experienced all mental illnesses?
Articles can be weird sometimes in the details they include/omit.
The RNS succeeded as a tool for capturing orders of magnitude more detailed data about how my brain functions and how medication impacts it. It also had some success in reducing the the severity of the fairly infrequent clinical seizure I do have. But, not only did it fail to live up to its promise of getting me off medication, it didn't even prevent me from needing to start taking one that's effective but has some pretty strong side effects (Xcopri).
Titrating onto Xcopri is a long, slow process. I started over the summer, and my doctor could see immediately see the degrees at which subclinical seizure-like activity stopped. Then, as the titration continued and the side effects started to become noticeable, my doctor could see how adjusting my other meds to reduce side effects impacted activity and could do so comfortably with a much finer tooth comb than he would otherwise.
Without the information the RNS provides, I would likely be unable to tolerate the Xcopri and the next step would be another brain surgery (although without the RNS, my epilepsy would appear to be much better controlled than it is. Because I rarely have a clinical seizure.)
So it seems to me that while these implanted devices have real power in their ability to collect data, their ability to reliably alter the brain function is questionable. But that data itself is huge . Hope you keep working in the space!
(glad to answer more questions; feel free to ask or DM me. I'm a bit more informed about this than the average bear)
Other than a slightly worse-than-normal memory, I live a pretty normal life. Most people don't realize even I have epilepsy, let alone a computer in my skull with wires running deep into my brain sending electric pulses.
If I didn't live when I did and where I do (NYC) my life would be very different. And relative to many others, my seizures are not so bad.
I dunno, really need to see the comparative performance of other classifiers and the base rates in these datasets to know whether these performance metrics are anything we should care about, and whether e.g. a classifier on simple verbal probes to the subjects might simply yield better predictions than going through the EEG signals. You can do some really interesting EEG biofeedback stuff, so maybe this is useful, but I would think the full EEG head-gear would also provide much richer and more useful information than a measurement based on a single chip. Presumably this would be for psychiatric disorders or brain injuries where the core dysfunction we know is limited to a very specific region(s).
I would post a link, but the only standalone topic page is on a Fandom site, which counts as doubly morbid.
Great writer.
I have been looking for sources that can list human cognitive states. It's visible when people switch from one state to another, like going from creative focused thinking to conforming group think
I can identify quite a few from the outside when talking to people, but I would love to have a list so I can connect my observations with technical terms.
Joy, Trust, Fear, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, Anticipation.
A start.
I went to a harbor master to pay for my berth.
1. First state is social, we had a quick chat.
2. Then he went to enter my details into a computer, which is a more focused task oriented state.
3. Then we had a chat again, a more social state.
So there were 2 cognitive states switching, a social, a task oriented and then another social one.
Most importantly, you rarely have "cognition-free" emotional states, because emotions always involve some mental model or representation of the self / world / self and world, i.e. they involve a cognitive state. Only in very extreme cases (drugs, perhaps some cases of persistent depression, etc) might you be able to have emotions that are largely uncorrelated with any kind of particular cognition.
Likewise, the same is almost certainly true for cognitive states, in that we tend to think about / model things because we need to evaluate those things. Evaluation too seems to rely heavily on emotional processes, in that damage to emotional processing tends to make rational / logical decision-making severely impaired (e.g. Damasio's work in the 90s, or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2396787/). Regardless, you can't remove evaluation / valuation from most thinking, and that is fundamentally linked to emotion.
Doesn't mean you couldn't potentially build a machine / thing that detects mental states, mind you. But it likely won't be very useful if it is just using simple folk-psychological terminology and concepts (or using such concepts will likely not result in much insights into the machine outputs).
I feel like many mental disorders would be fixed by just doing sports. I know some can't do sports, but most people can, and all of these solutions are actually bandaids because of living in the current world environment (where you scroll through social media, etc.)
The brain is harder for us to understand than a femur, but that doesnt warrant dismissing its malfunctions. Exercise, good sleep and similar stuff is healthy for everyone, but suggesting healing OCD with that is just as ascientifical as suggesting to tough it out for a broken bone.
For example, if you have depression, doing sports most certainly help you get out of depression. If your body image makes you depressed somewhat, sports fix that. (Put aside cases where people have a burned face or some other irregular case.)
For OCDs, you may get your obsessive thoughts/actions to be replaced by sports activity. You exert energy, you work and it helps.
That said, physical activity, when carefully engaged in, is a great clearing agent for brain fog. Get to the gym, or go for a hike, jog, swim, or bike ride, if nothing else.
See how that sounds?