They only tested each condition once (twice with no stimulation), they had a sample size of 20, and there was no control group. You can't call something a proof of concept and also claim significance at the same time. This is not how science should be done.
Were there any other side effects observed besides an increase in creativity? Poor quality of the study aside, there are various studies [1] that have shown assorted links between creativity and mental illness.
Why is it poor quality? It's not the strongest result ever but it seems interesting enough to justify continuing the work.
As far as greater creativity being a risk for mental illness, I havent seen anything supporting that kind of concern. I think a bigger concern is its long term safety in general, which hasn't been proven.
While the scoring was done in a double-blind fashion, it's still completely subjective. Maybe the person scoring the tests had just eaten a meal before scoring the tests with the alpha-wave frequency stimulation (which has been shown to increase scores that people give in general). Maybe the grader was hungover for the tests with the bad scores. Maybe the grader was being paid $9/hour and just assigned scores at random out of apathy. Maybe the participants just happened to be in better moods on the day they did the alpha-wave frequency test.
Having only 20 participants and doing a single trial of each frequency leaves the study vulnerable to small effects like the ones I just mentioned. Do you believe that all of those things, plus all of the factors I haven't even thought of combined couldn't result in just a 7.4% variance in scores? If the study had a control group we might know. Or if they had a much larger sample size we could rule out random variation. So it's not that 7.4% is a small but interesting result, it's that it's not a result.
There are lots of people trying brain stimulation on themselves at home using parts or kits bought online.
This kind of bio-hacking seems more difficult than average to do outside of a research or clinical setting.
Besides the normal concerns around placebo and biological differences between people, you've got brains that differ in physical size and shape which can affect electrode placement. Most of the equipment used is not standardized or FDA approved.
Even the body of research that's out there hasnt been widely repeatable.
I really want this to work, maybe this team is steering in a good direction.
Soon another research paper will report that taking a mind altering drug while subjected to alpha waves in the form of psy trance increases creativity "even more, like way more"!
