This seems like a big step forward for TMS technology. Without this fancy interference based method it was previously impossible to stimulate deep brain regions without a significant focality tradeoff.
Just a reminder: it's electric, not magnetic. So I guess it revolutionizes more the DCS (direct current stimulation) technology, more than the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). ;)
Actually - if you were able to figure out how to do this - it would be better to develop it far as possible, in secret, then release the information (schematics, code, etc) public domain under an alias - probably to one of the wireheading communities, maybe to a newsgroup or something.
Because once it got out there, things might just come down hard on anyone trying to monetize it.
As an aside, there is a researcher out there who claims (and has written papers on it - which can be found if searched for) to have come up with a form of "digital heroin", using ultrasonic stimulation of the brain. He claims it worked so well, that students he worked with begged him to allow them to continue to use the machines. I was able to find his archive of papers and grab them all a while back. There was more than a bit of interesting stuff in there. From what I recall, the ultrasonic stimulation system was a fairly high-power system - to replicate it, one would likely need to repurpose (at a minimum) a fish finder sonar (or other larger transducer and amp).
None of the papers (from what I recall) talk about this finding - at least directly. But in various interviews with him, and reading "between the lines" of the various papers, I found that there was just enough information available to (at a minimum) begin to research and re-implement it. He became kind of notorious and reclusive after this was brought up a few years back. Last I looked into it, he was teaching at ASU, and had moved on from the brain stimulation research.
I won't give out his name; I've given enough information that if one wanted to, his information and such could all be found.
I asked a friend who does DBS research about this. She said that she hasn't seen any case where it made someone high, but that their implant does sometimes cause "acute mirthfulness". I was very disappointed that the best they'd found was uncontrolled laughter.
The interesting thing is that the patterns that recur (known as "form constants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant ) in these geometric visual hallucinations are pretty similar to those obtained by taking hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD). As one might expect, these "form constants" don't directly originate from the flickering light nor the LSD molecule -- there's certainly no way to encode a description of those swirling geometric patterns in a small molecule or in diffuse light -- the information for those hallucinations has to reside in the brain somehow. Fascinatingly enough, these trippy geometric hallucinations are generated by the exact same brain structures and mechanisms that the visual system uses to process edges/contours, surfaces, and textures: http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf ! Certain operational modes (that LSD or diffuse flickering light can help create) in the edge/contour/surface/texture-detection machinery -- once transformed to the visual field's coordinates -- look exactly like the form constants. These geometric visual hallucinations -- the imagery fed to a conscious mind whose visual system is temporarily malfunctioning -- have a deep correspondence with the normal mechanisms of vision, in much the same way that the "glitches" produced by feeding a H.264 decoder with a slightly corrupt video file let you immediately appreciate the motion-compensating machinery of the codec.
There is sublime beauty in seeing these "form constants" in images that look like geometric visual hallucinations appear in machine learning research. The universal adversarial perturbations (which, when added to an image, are said to cause misclassification) in page 6 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf were striking to see, as they strongly resemble the same beautiful swirly colourful geometric visual hallucinations that humans experience when taking a hallucinogenic drug (or staring at diffuse flickery lights with the hallucination goggles).
