Högskolan i Skövde

If a technology being used by elite athletes to gain a competitive edge marks some sort of coming of age for said technology, then I suppose electrical and magnetic brain stimulation has now, it would seem, finally come of age. Gone are the days of debilitating One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoo's-Nest-style electroshock jolts, replaced by sleek and sexy marketing for low-current "cognitive enhancement" devices, promising everything from improved focus to - as revealed by a quick traipse through Google and Reddit - increased creativity and intelligence, as well as helping you both win competitions and quit smoking while you're at it! And with this development, an attendant fear of its misuse, for creating unfair advantages - not least among elite athletes, with their federations' obsessive focus on (certain specific forms of) fairness - to the point that the journal Neuroethics recently dedicated a special issue to this topic of "neurodoping". But, perhaps not too surprisingly, reality doesn't really live up to the hype. While various individual studies can be found to support the view that brain stimulation might enhance performance, this takes place against a broad backdrop of serious issues within empirical neuroscience and psychology more generally, relating to all manner of problems with sample sizes, methods, assumptions, etc., along with some plain old ignorance about how to properly deal with all of these. In this talk, I will therefore give the briefest of introductions as to why essentially all existing claims about the purportedly performance-enhancing effects of transcranial electric stimulation (TES) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are claiming far too much, far too soon. As far as we really know, based on what robust evidence actually exists today, "neurodoping" of this sort gives no more a competitive advantage than does rubbing your lucky rabbit's foot.