but then I checked to see what the research said about tDCS. And there have been some major recent breakthroughs.
But then they flipped on the tDCS. And on her next run though, she hit every single target.
The lab had managed to flip on the state of “flow” in her brain, that feeling you get when you are utterly engrossed in a difficult task. Tennis players report it, expert video game players know it well. It is a state in which you are utterly focused on the task, one in which you learn faster and perform better. With the flip of a switch, Adee had become a superwoman of reflex.
It normally takes 10,000 hours to learn how to perform a task. Research on tDCS has, so far, shown that it can cut that number in half. In theory, you can learn twice as much as you could before in any given period of time.
The best part about tDCS? The only reported side effect from the treatments has been a slight skin rash at the contact point in a tiny fraction of the patients.
But all tDCS machines are expensive. Because the research is really just getting warmed up, most labs use proprietary, custom built rigs. This makes scientific rigor hard and replicating results even harder.
Which brings us back to GoFlow. They are attempting to build a $99.00 device that can be comfortably worn while doing whatever it is you do. In doing so, they are trying to crowdsource tDCS research and provide a single hardware design to work with. That will help reduce the number of variables in tDCS research and help maximize the return on the research.
If GoFlow succeeds, we might soon have a device that is capable of putting us “into the zone” on demand. So far they have made several hardware prototypes and are trying to finalize the design. They hope for their product to hit shelves within a year.
And then? Who knows.