Stimulating Brains Without Touching Them: A Story of Magnets, Hype, and Open Science (emf2026)

For over 100 years now, being able to take an image of brain activity has been a really useful approach to understanding how brains work. But, more recently, we’ve learnt how to change brain states. Non-invasive Brain Stimulation (NiBS) does just that; temporarily interfere with normal brain activation without having to anaesthetise, cut, drill or otherwise violate the skull! The plan for this talk is to tell you a bit about brains and what we can learn from stimulating them using electromagnets and weak electric currents. As well as some sophisticated science, this approach has also seen some crazy claims about what brain stimulation can do. To separate the signal from the noise, open science has had a massive role to play. The lab that I co-lead has used open science approaches to explore brain activity using NiBS and found… not much. But, by using an open science approach, and systematically experimenting using NiBS, the how and why of ‘not much’ can be particularly useful and hopefully interesting. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/79-stimulating-brains-without-touching-them-a-story-of-magnets