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Transcranial Focused Ultrasound to the Right Prefrontal Cortex

phreeza 2021-08-16 17:33:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Not super related but note that the Frontiers group of journals has recently been criticised for somewhat dodgy peer review practices, where if a reviewer (or even an editor?) suggests rejection of a paper, their review will be removed and another reviewer called in. See e.g. https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1234247737476030465, there are several such threads now.

SubiculumCode 2021-08-16 19:07:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You are slandering a journal and only provide a tweet as evidence for systematic problems at Frontiers? It is not that uncommon for an editor to request the input of an additional reviewer if they they themselves think the paper is strong...although not listing the original reviewer is suspect.

javert 2021-08-16 19:13:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"Slandering" would be spreading a potentially untrue assertion without evidence.

Providing precisely the evidence you have, as OP did, is perfectly intellectually hygenic, and is not slandering.

Anyway, my personal sense, as a former scientist, is that most journals have systematic problems.

colechristensen 2021-08-16 18:11:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Small effect, tiny sample size, not double-blind because more than half of the experimental group could tell when it was being done.

This is the kind of study you could very easily do 20 times with 20 different "Ultrasound to the X" experiments and then publish the 1 which has p>0.05 results.

Maybe interesting if you're a researcher, but not at all something that should have any public attention.

newbamboo 2021-08-16 23:31:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I find this really interesting in light of reports of Havana Syndrome theorized to be the result of sonic weaponry in American government workers overseas.

“ Experiments investigating tFUS in rodents have recently found that induced excitability changes in the brain can be, at least partially, due to an indirect effect of auditory stimulation, which was eliminated by removal of the cochlear fluid (Guo et al., 2018). Additionally, Sato et al. (2018) found that temporary chemical deafness could reduce the effects of tFUS on the brain. These studies show that important confounds can lead to brain activation through indirect pathways, but do not negate the notion that tFUS can also influence the brain directly. Experiments with organisms that lack auditory systems, like Xenopus oocyte (the “clawed frog”), show the effects of tFUS on neural activity (Kubanek et al., 2016), and ultrasound also influences neural activity and causes spike trains in slice preparations (Tyler et al., 2008). In humans, tFUS has produced tactile sensations (Lee et al., 2016a) and visual phosphenes (Lee et al., 2016b) with corresponding focal tissue activation that is hard to explain by activation through ascending auditory activation. Future experiments will need to better control unconscious and conscious auditory effects for ultrasound neuromodulation experiments on mood.”

wantsanagent 2021-08-16 17:53:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

"From an introductory-level psychology class, 51 volunteers (27 female, mean age 19.7 years) participated and received class credit."

I was going to go into detail about how absurd this intervention is in terms of scale of number of impacted neurons but really this sentence tells you everything you need to know about the quality and rigor of this work.

_Microft 2021-08-16 18:24:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Would you mind expanding anyways because in this form it reads like a shallow dismissal.

Why do you consider the composition of the participant group important and therefore insufficient? Stimulating the brain by ultrasound sounds like such a low level intervention that it is hard to believe that age or sex could matter a lot.

jschwartzi 2021-08-16 19:27:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Well for starters it’s a tiny sample.

At my school volunteers were recruited for course credit. So it could be due to the elation of getting it over with.

I could also argue that the effect is due to the excitement of participating in a study. If the declared interest of the students is Psychology they might simply be excited to do the study.

There may also be a novelty component where the change in routine produces arousal.

Someone 2021-08-16 20:36:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As long as the statistics are good, any sample size suffices.

Even n=1 can give a statistically relevant result (for the hypothesis that a given event never happens)

I haven’t read the paper, but n=51 can be more than high enough to get significant results for more realistic null hypotheses, if the effect is large enough.

Having said that, effects rarely are large. If you have a weaker effect, you need more subjects (picking a somewhat random paper from a google search: https://www.journalofcognition.org/articles/10.5334/joc.72/)

I’m surprised by the fraction of male subjects they managed to recruit. A well-known joke is that the typical experiment in psychology is either done with mice or with teenage girls as participants.

_Microft 2021-08-16 19:32:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The control group was similarly composed but did not show the mood effect.

2021-08-16 18:16:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

henearkr 2021-08-16 19:09:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I would not lightly send ultrasounds to the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex...

The magnetic method seemed much safer.

rscho 2021-08-16 19:09:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm sure putting one's head in the microwave oven at the right settings would be even more efficient.

chromaton 2021-08-16 19:00:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Maybe not the greatest, most rigorous scientific experiment ever, but you have to start somewhere.