First response from my interests post... geek_girl writes, So... tell me about these homemade EEGs... Electroencephalography, as you know, means applying electrodes to the scalp to monitor brainwaves. A homemade EEG means you don't have to shell out for an FDA approved device, or go to a clinic and see Dr. Volpe, who will probably burn incense and design a new custom herbal remedy for you during each session while educating you on your new diet in his ambiguous European accent, and then forget not to charge you the additional $200 "I'm a yuppie who will pay it" fee. This opens up the device to a wider audience and a wider variety of applications; even if one had 5 grand to spare for one with a "The Surgeon General Loves You" sticker, one likely couldn't justify spending it on a device that they would use to quit smoking. The project The OpenEEG project is an open design hardware project to create and improve plans for building EEGs at home, and it seems to be the hub of the homemade electroencephalograph community. I like the project not just because they are doing EEGs, but also because I am interested in the application of open design outside of the realm of computer software. I see a lot of potential in open design vehicles, for example. grepmaster has already acquired the boards for an OpenEEG device, and I believe soldering has been done. Last I checked, the electrodes were the last major step in construction, and we know a guy who can help us set that up well. I am already looking forward to shaving the lower back of my head along with the forehead region, and claiming that my haircut is that way because I'm a real transhumanist, unlike all those imitators who just talk and don't do anything, in accordance with mycroftxxx's suggestion. Don't worry though, I won't stop telling some of the people that it's because I'm a Buddhist monk for hire, others that I'm in a Maoist industrial band, and still others that it's the haircut of a practitioner of Joshjitsu. Applications I am interested in both the proven applications and the potential applications that have not yet been tried. The greater part of these applications would fall under the general heading of neurofeedback, but there are any number of other possibilities as well. For example, one could reproduce the work of Masters and Johnson, who used EEGs to study the stages of sexual excitement. One could even expand upon work like theirs. The obvious place to start would be by studying the progression of neurological states in multi-orgasmic scenarios. After that, perhaps research into how extreme sexual excitation is used in certain tantric schools to reach enlightenment. One could get technical data on multi-sensory vs. single sense arousal. (In other words, one could do a blow job study.) Since the field is still somewhat taboo in the mainstream, the potential for breakthroughs by amateur researchers would be high. How I came to be interested I first became interested in electroencephalography and the openeeg project when researching therapies for ADHD. The norms in the church of psychiatry classify me as having 'Adult ADD, primarily Inattentive Type.' I acknowledge that their system is based, somewhat arbitrarily, around identifying and treating variations from the norm, and if it was based around identifying and treating variations from people like me, then the majority of the population would get diagnosed with something like 'Severe mental retardation with particular deficiencies in mathematics and language, an irrational obsession with particular viewpoints, and a strong tendency for herd thinking,' which would be called Stupid Syndrome in children and Adult Stupid Syndrome in adults, or just ASS for short. So I figured if they actually succeeded in producing a pill that would make me normal, it would be the last drug I would want to take, right after that bad batch of synthetic heroin that basically gives you an instant case of Parkinsons. Also, I didn't want to depend on some drug for the rest of my life, at least not the kind of drug that gets produced in a corporate oligarchy at tech level 7. I'm optimistic about future drugs produced by people who intend to use their new drug on themselves initially, and who actually know how the fsck the drug works and what the fsck the drug does. So I looked around for a while and found neurofeedback. With neurofeedback, the symtoms being treated go away permanently, and one stops the treatment. No more temporary patches for long term issues. Why neurofeedback for ADHD isn't more common Here's my current working hypothesis on the lack of popularity of neurofeedback for treating ADHD. The profit margin on an EEG is probably not all that great. I mean I'm sure the guy that owns the company that makes brand X EEGs buys a new SUV every 18 months, but he's not having extinct animals for lunch and sending his laundry off to Finnland to be cleaned in Scandinavian spring water. He's got to pay a battallion of ambulance-chasers on top of the usual pencil-pushers and bean-counters, and nobody really wants to buy the damn things anyway. They especially don't want to buy a second one unless the first one breaks, in which case they'll go with his competitor. Even if for some reason demand increased for EEGs, the price would just go down because the initial cost of getting into EEG production is comparatively low. Since the profit margin per each probably isn't the kind of thing you write home to your Viking grandparents about, and one device is enough for a fairly large number of people, EEGs have probably not enjoyed the kind of investment money one would get for marketing drugs. I don't think that it's an evil plot by the pharmecutical companies to suppress alternative treatments, or at least I don't think that today. The method of science... Once I've adjusted my attention to where I want it, I expect the research will begin. I am guessing that if you can use it to get out of a particular mental state, you can probably use it to get into that state. Anyone want to try out OCD for a month and see what it's like? But once we've checked out our friends' "disorders," it will be time for even more unorthodox uses. One might even use neurofeedback in conjunction with yoga meditation practice to achieve success in the same "with an ease and speed that was previously impossible"

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