Not super related but note that the Frontiers group of journals has recently been criticised for somewhat dodgy peer review practices, where if a reviewer (or even an editor?) suggests rejection of a paper, their review will be removed and another reviewer called in. See e.g. <a href="https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1234247737476030465" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/bmwiernik/status/1234247737476030465</a>, there are several such threads now.
Small effect, tiny sample size, not double-blind because more than half of the experimental group could tell when it was being done.<p>This is the kind of study you could very easily do 20 times with 20 different "Ultrasound to the X" experiments and then publish the 1 which has p>0.05 results.<p>Maybe interesting if you're a researcher, but not at all something that should have any public attention.
I find this really interesting in light of reports of Havana Syndrome theorized to be the result of sonic weaponry in American government workers overseas.<p>“ Experiments investigating tFUS in rodents have recently found that induced excitability changes in the brain can be, at least partially, due to an indirect effect of auditory stimulation, which was eliminated by removal of the cochlear fluid (Guo et al., 2018). Additionally, Sato et al. (2018) found that temporary chemical deafness could reduce the effects of tFUS on the brain. These studies show that important confounds can lead to brain activation through indirect pathways, but do not negate the notion that tFUS can also influence the brain directly. Experiments with organisms that lack auditory systems, like Xenopus oocyte (the “clawed frog”), show the effects of tFUS on neural activity (Kubanek et al., 2016), and ultrasound also influences neural activity and causes spike trains in slice preparations (Tyler et al., 2008). In humans, tFUS has produced tactile sensations (Lee et al., 2016a) and visual phosphenes (Lee et al., 2016b) with corresponding focal tissue activation that is hard to explain by activation through ascending auditory activation. Future experiments will need to better control unconscious and conscious auditory effects for ultrasound neuromodulation experiments on mood.”
"From an introductory-level psychology class, 51 volunteers (27 female, mean age 19.7 years) participated and received class credit."<p>I was going to go into detail about how absurd this intervention is in terms of scale of number of impacted neurons but really this sentence tells you everything you need to know about the quality and rigor of this work.