Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of those things that seems too wacky to be true. Depression not responding to treatment? Let’s smack you upside the head with strong magnetic fields! As odd as it sounds, it’s actually very well studied and works often enough that it has been approved by regulatory agencies as real evidence based medicine.
It’s also now open source, thanks to the OpenTMS project by [Zach McGinty]. Though since its not approved by the FDA or your local authority, be very aware of [Zach]’s disclaimer that this is not a medical device and if you do build something based on the extensive data on his GitHub, you do so at your own risk.
He’s got plans for the coils that go next to your head — made of hollow copper pipe to carry coolant, just like the pros do it — and the power supply to pulse them with mind-altering amounts of electricity. That might be literal in this case, but it’s also a hefty power supply: a pair of microwave oven transformers, switched through IGBTs in a flyback configuration. We’re talking kiloamps here, so make sure you know what you’re about before you try putting that kind of power right next to your skull.
[Zach] did, and he’s still here. Though to be fair, we’re not sure if he’s a very good engineer or just very lucky. Given he’s isolated the IGBT gate controls with fiber optics, and seems to follow other best practices, we’re going to guess the former, but it might still be both.
Either way, this one is going firmly into the “don’t try this at home” bucket. Even so we’re happy to see more medicine go open source, be it assistive sip-and-puff pointing devices, or ESP32 electroencephalograms. If nothing else, it keeps the big boys on their toes, and that’s what hacking is all about.
Reminds me of the “shakti coil” https://www.god-helmet.com/wp/shakti_magnetic.htm
And the perplexed face of the customs officer when I had to get it in person from the customs office. “What is THAT?” “oh it´s just a headset” “aha. OK”
Yes, there’s been lots of solid science about trans-cranial magnetic stimulation; there was also Dr. Persinger.
Of the god helmet
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sxuP9o1utpI&t=10s&pp=2AEKkAIB0gcJCY8Co7VqN5tD&ra=m
Didn’t Jeffrey Combs play him?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Beyond_(film)
I mean—we are starting to see quantum stuff in the microcosmic scale now:
https://phys.org/news/2026-10-quantum-shifting-centimeter-scale-lab.html
https://phys.org/news/2026-10-levitating-glass-sphere-entangled-room.html
Diamond stolen from evil statue…check…
This reminds me of a great line from the film “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”.
Wallace is working on his Mind Manipulation-O-Matic, a machine to reprogram the rabbits’ brains so they don’t eat vegetables. He tells Gromit, “Don’t worry. It’s just a little bit of harmless brain manipulation”
Actually the biggest risks with such harmless brain manipulation are related to heating of coil and potential self-destruction caused by extreme magnetic field. Which was demonstrated, when this one guy connected 400 car batteries in parallel just for fun…
Styropyro, one of the closest living approximations to a Universal Studios mad scientist. Unlike them, though, he’s a thoroughly nice guy.
To judge the safety of such contraption, it probably should be compared to ECT, which is still routinely used an updated. (a search that includes “up to date” will bring you to a paywall at uptodate-dot-com. I’m still trying to make up my mind if this web presence for electro-convulsive therapy is clever or quite devious) The dangerous portion of ECT isn’t the amps or volts, but the pharmacological sedation. A patient I talked with asked one ECT doctor about the use of ketamine in the mix of sedatives and anesthetics used, and he babbled about maximizing therapeutic results. I happen to know the difference between ketamine dosages used for anesthetic use vs antidepressant use (EMT training), and I’m certain his choice of ketamine is “throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks,” rather than maximizing therapeutic results. I couldn’t help but share my bit of knowledge here after reading 𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘬𝘶𝘭𝘭, when there’s treatments which including electricity going right through the skull!
PS for anyone considering trying to improve their pet’s quality of life with such experimental devices, the penalties for using unapproved treatments on animals is actually often higher than use on human beings -you probably don’t want this as your welcome to the bizarre world of American law.
ECT -electroconvulsive therapy is still used and still being updated. I tried a quick search that included “up to date”, and hit a paywall at uptodate dot com. I think a lot of people think this treatment was discontinued, but it’s still used with newer techniques: optimizations of stimulus waveform, electrode placement, pulse width and amplitude. This is probably not the place to discuss it, but I bring it up for awareness’ sake.
As someone who has had a partner go through ECT…. it should be outlawed. SO many bad stories out there also.
ECT is markedly different to TCM therapy. Electroconvulsive therapy involves using electric shocks to induce a seizure. It’s the seizure that’s therapeutic, not the electricity. Previous to the invention of ECT, it was known that you could sometimes treat serious mental illness by inducing a seizure. At the time this involved the administration of insulin, and was considered unacceptably dangerous even then.
The images of people screaming and thrashing from movies just don’t happen. The procedure is performed when the patient is under general anesthetic and they don’t experience it at all. The protocol is actually kinda neat. They attach a smaller electroshock device, a TENS unit, to the forearm to generate a regular twitch in the hand that’s easily seen. They also attach a tourniquet to one leg. When the general anesthetic is administered, the doctors wait until the patients arm stops responding to the TENS unit, showing that skeletal muscle activity is completely suppressed. Then they start applying electricity to the skull of the patient in slowly-increasing voltages until the tourniqueted leg begins to twitch, indicating that a seizure has been induced.
As you might guess, I’ve undergone the therapy. It unfortunately did not improve my symptoms. There are side-effects to ECT. Brain fog and memory issues are apparently not uncommon during the early stages of the treatment where you’re being induced multiple times a week. Considering that I already had brain fog and memory issues, the increase due to the ECT was minimal, but noticeable. I also found thrice-weekly general anesthesia to be very impactful on my day-to-day life. The initial run was on M-W-F and I generally needed a full day to recover from the anesthesia, so I didn’t get much done for three months.
In spite of not seeing any improvements, I still recommend it for people who have treatment resistant depression and other compatible mental illnesses that are not fully responding to medication.
As you might have guessed my very limited “knowledge” of the procedure was highly influenced by an old Hollywood movie, so I would like to thank you for sharing your story here with us. And that you’ve explained clearly in what’s done today, how it works and the ideas behind it. Thanks.
A significant challenge of building and using DIY-TMS is not having it become an accidental-ECT.
That’s some pretty serious hardware. And I have people telling me my airpods are too much.
Hope it helps with the depression though
In the 80s, my granddad had a video tape eraser. When you put it on your head and pressed the switch, it got interesting real fast lol. Swirls blackouts. No, think I’ll pass lol. Might be why I have a bit of tech still 😜
A very incautious way to try it out, and the wrong way to de-gauss a tape. On first away then move to tape and over again and not to turn off whilst anywhere near the tape, or brain. The transient spike is the worst thing to happen with sudden current to a coil. The tape will be magnetized instead, or tape head, tools, etc.
If anyone wants some more related content, Applied Science made some videos on the topic a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW7dQ92yDU
Seeing that video definitely inspired me…. hahahaha. Love his videos!
Just a couple of comments on TMS base on my daughter’s experience with trying to battle crippling anxiety:
1) It was administered by an MD/PhD.
2) Insurance covered it.
3) It made her extremely nauseous after the 1st 25% of the sessions.
From memory (before reading the article here): University psych video tutorial…we watched (I think) The God Machine. A subject reported that his passed-away Grandfather was standing behind him with his hands gently on his shoulders. Spooky to some, spiritual to others.
There’s also those videos of a guy doing transcranial stimulation and showing how little time it took him to solve the cube.
I’ve been meaning to do this to myself, I just can’t find a good enough friend to unplug me if I seize up. Maybe one of those helper dogs could be trained to switch me off.
I wouldn’t trust a helper monkey.
It’s not ionising radiation, it’s not even 2.4Ghz water resonance, so nothing can go wrong.
yeah, at least nothing that could go wrong if it were ionising radiation or 2.4GHz water resonance….
This is more like randomly sticking (albeit wireless…) electrodes into your brain and apply random voltage differentials…