This is potential Darwin award material: I watched a YouTube video and know about Ohm's law, time to zap my brain!
This guy has the right idea:
> Dennis Eckmeier
> Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience Consulting, and Advocacy
> As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3. don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about to hit the switch: don't. :P
Yeah... reading it in further detail, he applies current across his head between the mastoid processes. I thought it was local stimulation between two surface electrodes under the ear. A quick look at the literature shows that the targeted structures are too deep for an approach like that, so they have to go across the head.
Style points for bravery, I guess, but I certainly wouldn't want to pump over a milliamp of direct current right underneath the squishy mass of goo that contains my conscious self. Especially not with an uncontrolled source like a battery - any sort of stimulator really ought to be current limited.
A milliamp is an awful lot, IEC 60601 specifies a 0.1 mA patient leakage current and I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting even that small leakage current to be applied to the head.
It's still cool, but yeah, nobody try this at home.
Can someone explain to this non-EE how current alone, as specified in milliamps in the absence of a specified voltage, can be used to specify a lethal condition? In other words, from here and other sources I'm inferring that 100mA can stop the heart, but does it not matter if it's from a (at?) 9V battery vs 1.5V AA battery?
Incredible that this guy is building is own electrodes and sending electricity to his body, but what you are noticing is that he might, potentially, get a head injury because he was standing!
I'm sure some injuries were to be counted on in this case.
> Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, was among 18 people who entered the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition. They tried to drink as much water as they could without urinating in a bid to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console....
"It's just water. Relax."
> "Can you get water poisoning and, like, die?" asked the female disc jockey.
> "Not with water," a male disc jockey replied. "Your body is 98 percent water. Why can't you take in as much water as you want?"
> "Maybe we should have researched this before," the female disc jockey added....
> Strange drank nearly two gallons of water in over three hours on Jan. 12, 2007. During the contest, she could be heard complaining about pain to disc jockeys at 107.9 "The End."
> "Oh, it hurts," Strange said, while one male disc jockey remarked that she looked pregnant and another, a woman, said "That is so funny."...
> Strange left after taking second place, winning a pair of concert tickets. She then called in sick at work and died in her bathroom just hours after the contest.
> Your example doesn't show why a 9v battery used in this way is dangerous.
So? It's part of a more general argument against assuming household items are safe when you're using them in highly unusual ways or far outside of normal parameters.
But if you need a specific example of someone killing themselves with a 9V battery to get the message, a sibling comment actually linked to a Darwin award where someone did just that.
No one is advocating intentionally sticking electrical probes into your body. So, again, it doesn't show that a 9 volt battery used in the way described by the article is dangerous.
> No one is advocating intentionally sticking electrical probes into your body. So, again, it doesn't show that a 9 volt battery used in the way described by the article is dangerous.
You're asking the wrong question. If you don't want to be a dumbass, the question that should be asked isn't "has this been shown (to me) to be dangerous?" Answering no then proceeding is a good way to harm yourself out of ignorance.
The right questions are along the lines of "has this been shown to be safe?", "if not, do I have actually have a full enough understanding to find out?", and "if I die doing this, am I in the running for a Darwin award?"
>it doesn't show that a 9 volt battery used in the way described by the article is dangerous.
Then again, it doesn't have to show that - since the person in the article didn't come to use it in "that way" after serious study, research and precautions, but by assuming its harmeless in general and using it in an ad-hoc manner.
They could quite easily, with the same assumption, which is what the parent warns against, use it in a dangerous way.
My concern with doing this with more than a demo setup would be elecrolysis injury due to long-term exposure to direct current. Humans are basically big bags of electrolyte solution, so applying DC for long periods of time results in ions bunching up at the electrodes and all sorts of nasty chemical effects. This is the main danger when children inadvertantly swallow coin cell batteries: it's not actually the heat that causes GI damage (heat generation from a shorted coin cell is minimal), it's the electrolysis-induced chemical burns that result when the battery pumps a few tens of mA through GI tissue.
Is it possible to achieve the same effect using an AC waveform? That would likely be safer since it won't result in polarization.
EDIT: also, I wouldn't do this to myself, at least not with a 9V battery and a couple of pieces of aluminum foil...
Going on a tangent but upon reading about vestibular reflexes I recalled something I used to do as a kid:
When in bed, ready to sleep, I could condition myself to believe the bed was tipping over to the side, up to the point where I would have the reflex of grabbing the sheets to keep myself from falling, similar to jolting awake up after falling in a dream.
I wonder if something could be done to manipulate these perceptions without actually zapping the brain.
I'd love to understand the brain's capacity to fool itself.
Sometime in my 30s I discovered I could "make my ears retract involuntarily". I'll think about pulling them back without actually trying to do so, and at some time in the near future that I can't anticipate, they'll retract.
Slightly OT, but since the focus shifted to safety: is that battery really dangerous? I'm really asking.
I remember, as a kid, testing for charged 9V batteries touching the bare electrodes with my tongue. It was a funny feeling, but that was way before the "little chemist" became the dumbed down shadow of itself and everyone was screaming "safety".
For science, ladies and gentlemen, I'm now measuring the resistance of ~5mm of my tongue: it's 90kOhms, that should be a lower bound regarding the experiment.
This guy has the right idea:
> Dennis Eckmeier
> Academic Writing, Science Communication, Neuroscience Consulting, and Advocacy
> As a neuroscientist, I want to strongly advice everybody against experimenting with electrical brain stimulation. If you really need to, please follow these steps: 1. get a medical engineering degree or at least help from an expert 2. use professional equipment, don't build electrodes etc yourself 3. don't be alone when you are about to try it 4. When you are about to hit the switch: don't. :P