What We Think We Know and Don't Know About tDCS

“Don’t Lose Your Head Over tDCS,” I warned last time. Now the infamous cadaver study has reared its ugly hot-wired head in Science News (Underwood, 2016).

The mechanism of action of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) had been called into question by Dr. György Buzsáki during his presentation at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting.

…Or had it?

To recap, my understanding was that an unpublished study of transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) in human cadaver heads showed a 90% loss of current when delivered through the skin vs. through the skull. This implies that a current of at least 5 mA on the scalp would be necessary to generate a 1 mV/mm electric field in the human brain. Based on his personal experience, Dr. Buzsáki reported that 4 mA was hard to tolerate even with anesthetized skin. For comparison, 2 mA is the maximum current recommended by an international panel of experts.

But Dr. Tiziana Metitieri left a comment on my post saying this is nothing new. She translated the remarks of Dr. Carlo Miniussi, who said:

…but what is reported appear to me not so “new” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Miranda+PC+2006). Of course, if the findings obtained by Buzsáki are confirmed, you may think that tDCS has an effect nearly homeopathic on the brain. Certainly, these type of research is the most needed: systematic studies of animal and human models, comparable in terms of the amount of current that stimulates the brain. Luckily, they are coming out, or, well, we know they exist and we are waiting to read them, as for Buzsáki. [read more]

Why is this important to cognitive neuroscientists? Because the behavioral effects of tDCS have been vastly overstated, according to some investigators (e.g., Horvath et al., 2015), and the “homeopathic” level of brain stimulation is one likely explanation.

http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-we-think-we-know-and-dont-know.html

I tried tDCS a couple months back, nothing happened. Except for some skin burns…

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