Four Challenges for the NIBS Community

I spent some time thinking about the field of non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) and came up with the following four challenges we need to urgently and thoroughly discuss and address as a community:

• Lack of Neuroscience: Still most of the studies in the field are quite remote from any neuroscience (measuring target engagement, anyone?!). Without neuroscience, my prediction is that the field will be soon in very serious trouble. Most studies (including some of ours, I am responsible for this too) are based on very simplistic notions that barely make the cut as neuroscience-based. How about we stimulate left dl-PFC for anything under the sun? Let's work hard to move to more specific, neuroscience-based targets and make sure to measure a ton of (neuro-)physiology before and after, and ideally during stimulation.
• Gender: As discussed elsewhere, the last few conferences in the field featured a line-up in which women were clearly underrepresented relative to the gender distribution in the field. This is not good. Let's make sure when we design conferences, plan meetings, and choose collaborators, we pick from the pool of outstanding people, both men and women. Here is a great starting point, a database of women in the field.
• Study design: I still see many, many studies which are not double-blind in design. Please stop doing that since we know for a fact that we cannot trust such results.
• Conflicts of interest (COI). Western medicine is full of unacceptable situations where financial and other types of conflict of interests have harmed research participants and patients. Industry has an important role (my regular readers will know about my COIs, in particular my ownership of Pulvinar Neuro LLC), but we need to be clear and obvious about this. No need for any kind of COI histeria, but let's make sure we mention our COIs not only when we are forced to do so, but also in other situations. Let's be a model for how we can ethically and effectively collaborate with industry.

That's it! Are you ready to collaborate to address these challenges? We have something special in the planning, more details later, but for now please hold May 21-23 2018 in your calendar, I promise it will be worth it!

Take care,

Flavio