Picture your brain as an intricate road map, networks of well-worn streets and highways laid out in every direction for wherever you want to go. Every time you book an Airbnb, figure out the tip on a bill, or laugh at a meme, nerve cells in your brain pass electrical messages along these networks of roads. When the signals move smoothly, they help you do all these things—get you excited about the trip, remind you to sign the receipt, stop you from laughing too loudly at the coffee shop, and so much more.
But if you have a mental-health condition like depression or PTSD, the networks of neurons that keep your brain running get weaker and less functional, as if part of the roadway has been washed out. To help people with depression realign the brain’s firing patterns and get traffic moving again, scientists are looking at new forms of a type of brain stimulation called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Also known as TMS, it can be administered in an outpatient clinic by trained health-care pros. TMS relies on a key concept in physics, which is that magnets can crank up electrical signals from a distance—in the case of TMS, the centimeters between a magnet positioned outside a skull and the lobes and folds encased inside it. TMS sends magnetic pulses to specific areas of the brain to fire up neurons in the vicinity. This helps those neurons connect and sync with others in the network, restoring the pathway and improving symptoms, says Joshua Berman, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who works with various forms of brain stimulation. In other words, magnets help get the signals traveling properly along the network again.
Making Magnets Even Better
In-office treatments involving TMS were first cleared by the FDA in 2008 for depression that hadn’t responded to other therapies, and they were life-changing for the people they helped. Research in 2021 from Stanford recently jolted the field with news that higher-intensity, more-targeted doses could take TMS’s success rate as high as 79 percent. In 2020, TMS also gained FDA clearance for treating nicotine addiction, and in 2022 a new device was green-lit for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Other investigations are testing TMS for PTSD, chronic pain, epilepsy, sleep disorders, migraines, traumatic brain injuries, and more.
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Scientists are just starting to match up particular patterns of brain activity with symptoms of different disorders. So, for example, to treat depression, a clinician directs the magnet—often housed in a space-helmet-sized headpiece—to a spot in the front of the brain affected in depression. “When we do TMS, it’s almost like we are forcing cortical neurons to exercise,” Dr. Berman says. Advances in brain science and the devices around it will enable clinicians to precisely tweak brain circuits to very specific ends, says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, M.D., a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
Now a company called Wave Neuroscience says that some more-commonplace woes, such as trouble sleeping or focusing, may also be helped by magnetic therapy. This year, Wave is launching Sonal, a helmetlike at-home device that uses magnets to help sync errant electrical activity in the brain. By wearing it for about 30 minutes five days a week for a month, company researchers say, you can generally get your brain to work better, the idea being that networks that control everyday performance might, in some people, have become a little disrupted, too. “We’re helping people to restore function,” says Erik Won, D.O., Wave Neuroscience’s president and chief medical officer.
Wave wants to give everyone the power to reap the benefits of TMS at home. It takes an EEG of your brain at rest to figure out where its waves might be out of whack. The company’s device then delivers magnetic pulses to realign your waves—a move that has been shown to reduce symptoms, says Dr. Won. “People tend to feel better, really, in a matter of days to weeks.”
So far, a small 2019 study in the journal Brain Stimulation reported that Wave’s approach and device reduced PTSD symptoms in a group of military veterans. The company is working with Texas A&M University and the U. S. military to do more studies and explore the technology’s use in addiction, Covid-related brain fog, and traumatic brain injury. And Wave is hoping it will be beneficial for people who just feel their brain could work better. “There’s a demographic we call ‘the silent sufferer,’ ” Dr. Won says—those who are struggling but don’t feel unwell enough to seek medical care or who fear the stigma of doing so. Wave’s Sonal magnetic therapy offers stimulation that’s about one 100th the strength of in-office TMS devices; in lieu of power, they’re aiming to be more precise and personalized.
Should You Stimulate Your Brain This Way?
While brain stimulation has been used in clinics for a while, Dr. Pascual-Leone points out that nobody fully understands what it means to reshape or optimize brain activity, especially on your own at home. It’s possible that optimizing the brain to do one thing might make it worse at doing something else. The risk may be worth it for issues like some forms of depression or PTSD that don’t respond to other treatments, but your calculation may differ if you simply want to sleep better or sharpen your focus at work. All of these question marks should probably give you pause, since this is your brain we’re talking about. Until we know more, you might want to stick with the arsenal of well-known ways to help your mind. A few: stress reduction, 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, and prioritizing sleep.
Marty Munson, currently the health director of Men’s Health, has been a health editor at properties including Marie Claire, Prevention, Shape and RealAge. She’s also certified as a swim and triathlon coach.
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