These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.
It looks like independent hackers with a strong technical background and little regard for decorum.
Their methodology seems reasonable, and their results are plausible.
I’m reserved about the final part of the post where they moot about applications, but the core result seems solid. They elicited osmosphenes like one can elicit phosphènes by targeting the visual cortex.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_focused_ultrasoun...
There's quite a lot of research in this direction (stimulation, be it ultrasound or otherwise) to tackle exactly things you mention. Not completely sure but probably stimulators to suppress epilepsy are the most common. It has been proven in animal research stimulating the right area induces visual stimuli - IIRC this has been tested and confirmed in humans as well, i.e., make people see again. And there's more going on.
In the end: everything in the brain is electrical current. Meaning that in theory stimulating the right bits can do pretty much everything.
This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.
I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.
I think this is cool, plausible and warrants investigation, but not suspension of disbelief. There needs to be a better way to go about this than responding "what about Galileo!?" to any principled application of critical thinking.
One has to set prejudice to the side and examine the claim being made to apply criticl thinking.
These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.
If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.
To be frank the reason that make me question it the most is how repetitive the redaction is. Seems LLM-like.
However, that's not a valid reason to discard an interesting result.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this finding to be replicable, it would be pivotal as what other nerves could we stimulate to change perception (think pain, mental health issues, loss of senses).
Also, I wonder if this could take us closer to understand a little bit more of how the brain works. Like this could be a great way for normalizing 'inputs' and see how different brains react to it.
Very very exciting news, but I will hold on my hype until someone else can replicate this result.