If I could get something that could measure exact interaction response times of synapses then perhaps that might be a starting point. The equipment exists but doubt I could even afford the grey-market gear nor do I have a place to put it.

One might ask why I take these molecules if I can not measure efficacy. For me it's simple. They are relatively cheap and there are enough studied benefits that even if the gains are marginal I will find that an acceptable net gain in the big picture of my overall health.

I skimmed the article. It's from 2016 so it's outdated and doesn't include comments about Elon Musk's Neuralink

The really sad part of it is that with fairly minor changes it could have been a landmark dataset IMO. Having better recording equipment, a lower noise floor environment for data collection (e.g. don't run fluorescent lights while recording), having precise timestamps integrated into the recording, better temporal separation between recording of various phrases, adding simultaneous EMG/EEG, etc would have resolved quite a few data related issues. It's a unique situation (for good reason), but bad data...

From seeing the data, I suspect the electrode placement was in a good enough location that novel things could have been done with a cleaner data source. I guess the major limiting factor is that absolutely no one would want to be involved with the project at that stage. What sort of IRB would approve any of this? Better data would answer some key questions that could generalize to lock-in patients (theoretically) and worst case it would provide a strong indicator that no significant BCI can be made for the task given the electrode placement.

Yes, i got that from your post the first time. Like i said, brainswelling from the surgery. It read to me as if the article wanted to create another picture. The author not mentioning up front that it was only the probes that got implanted left to me the impression that the speech problems were due to an error with the implant. Which it wasnt.

>Unfortunately as others have pointed out, his dataset is pretty worthless and the claims around it have been largely unsubstantiated.

One said the approach was worthless, because there exist better (less invasive and cheaper) approaches using eye movement tracking apps today. It was also as the reason given why nobody else researched into this. That wasnt however aimed at the dataset. The feedback to the dataset started at

>When Kennedy finally did present the data that he’d gathered from himself ...

Notably >By taking on the risk himself, by working alone and out-of-pocket, Kennedy managed to create a sui generis record of language in the brain, Chang says: “It’s a very precious set of data, whether or not it will ultimately hold the secret for a speech prosthetic. It’s truly an extraordinary event.”

>IMHO he had, and if you ask literally any neurosurgeon or anyone working in neuroscience I'm willing to bet that they would say the same.

He was 66 and was first left hanging waiting for a willing subject who could still talk to validate earlier results. He then couldnt afford recertification of his invention and was faced with nobody else working on this approach.

You are skipping over the fact that it worked. His lifes work and deep obsession turned out to work. He did it, what more is there to say other then good for him? Even if the dataset would turn out to be without practical implications, you can see at his pondering at the very end, whether to put an implant into the other site, that he would have regretted it deeply to have it sit there and stare at him for the rest of his life.

(Though a Wired article is even better)

This is somewhat circular logic - it's only 'unfair' because you've defined it that way. IMO the idea that there is a level playing field is somewhat of a myth to begin with, there are plenty of other ways to gain "fair" advantage like better training and nutrition, and access to those things is clearly not equal across all competitors. I think you could probably argue the current situation is less fair than just allowing them considering how many top athletes likely use steroids anyway and just haven't been caught.

That's not to say that I think we should allow steroids in sports, just that "a level playing field" doesn't seem like much of a justification to me. I think the simpler reason is that lots of sports already have rules to make the sport safer for their athletes, and banning steroids/drugs simply falls into that same category because it has a clear risk of spiraling out of control. Yes, sports are unsafe, but they're also generally designed to not be so unsafe that competitors are dying all the time due to going to extreme lengths to try and win.

If (big if, but it is the topic of the discussion at hand) self-experimentation is increasingly normalized, and through normalization attracts funding, one can imagine the competition for said funds incentivizing researchers and labs to take extreme measures to garner attention and acquire support.

Money, the same motivation that pushes athletes to extremes, is not something scientists are immune to, even if the ultimate utility of the money serves different purposes.

Specifically, erinacines and hericenones.

Wikipedia's job isn't to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. It's to summarize the stuff you can look up elsewhere.

Wikipedia prioritizes verifiability over completeness. Are there downsides to that trade-off? Absolutely. But i would rather that over trusting random people on the internet to know what they are talking about.

Personal experience is hogwash. Everyone is convinced their personal experience is an accurate view of how things really are, and everyone is wrong. I have no idea if the "world's best coconuts pickers first hand experience" is as laughably wrong as my first person experience of American demographics, and I have absolutely no way to find out. Wikipedia standards exist for a reason.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, which had articles exclusively written by experts, was also outcompeted by Wikipedia.

It's unlikely that Wikipedia is going to change its model to give experts a greater say than they already do, but it would be interesting to see if another expert-curated encyclopedia could eventually compete. Maybe if some incredibly well-funded company like Google or Apple got behind it it could work (though that reminds me of Microsoft's Encarta, which also failed).

Ah, young and halcyon days!

Wikipedia follows different standards. Not everything have to be Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/HN.

Because people don’t really want a public wiki to publish original research, they just want to vandalize Wikipedia because of its social impact and use their claims of personal expertise as an excuse to evade Wikipedia’s existing content policies.