Unclear yet if it works, but here comes Thync–the first mainstream, consumer-focused brain stimulation device

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Hands-On With Thync’s Mood-Alter­ing Head­set (Techcrunch):

“Thync is launch­ing its mood-alter­ing head­set today, let­ting you find a state of calm or boost your ener­gy with con­trols on your smartphone.

…Once you begin, you can dial the inten­si­ty of the expe­ri­ence up or down, giv­ing you con­trol over just how mel­low or excit­ed you’ll be at the end of a session.

Dur­ing the demo, Thync co-founder and CEO Isy Gold­wass­er explained that the mod­ule wasn’t direct­ly stim­u­lat­ing neu­rons in my brain (that would be too damn weird for me to try, to be hon­est). Instead, it uses tiny puls­es of elec­tric­i­ty to stim­u­late the skin at your tem­ple, which then acti­vates the instinc­tu­al fight-or-flight response in your brain to indi­rect­ly affect emo­tion­al response…While I may have cranked the set­tings too high for my first go, the impres­sion I got was that it would be great for falling asleep, not de-stress­ing at the office.”

Learn more:

• Arti­cle: Tran­scra­nial Direct Cur­rent Stim­u­la­tion (tDCS) as depres­sion treat­ment: much promise, some DIY risks
• Book: The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness: How to Opti­mize Brain Health and Per­for­mance at Any Age
• Mar­ket report: Per­va­sive Neu­rotech­nol­ogy: A Ground­break­ing Analy­sis of 10,000+ Patent Fil­ings Trans­form­ing Med­i­cine, Health, Enter­tain­ment and Business