As someone who works in neuro lab who occasionally reads about &quot;Neurohacking&quot; I could easily dismiss it as 100% hype, but I won&#x27;t (although I do call out when someone talks to me about any of the devices on the market having seen manufactures come through our lab and try to peddle their… stuff).<p><i>&quot;A lot of biohackers (even PhD level biohackers ensconced in academia) are basically script kiddies – cut and paste these bits of DNA and cross your fingers and hope the result you expect pops out.&quot;</i><p>Same is true of Neuro phds: &quot;scan brains in fmri&#x2F;eeg that i have no idea how it works from a physics perspective&quot;, run this matlab script here, use this proprietary software there, calculate &quot;connectivity|power|correlation&quot; - &quot;does this look good for my paper? yes, shiny grant coming right up! Will it move the field forward? Not anymore than the thousand other papers out there but the university pr office is on it!&quot; (in no particular order).<p>I say this because if all this was more out in the open (methods, software, caveats on every level on a git repo) and more available to people in other fields&#x2F;expertise to look at and source materials and parts, a lot could be moved forward in general from what I&#x27;m observing going on in academia now along the lines of:<p><i>&quot;As I worked on insulin in grad school, I risked my job as a lowly postdoc, chiming in and pointedly telling him (in front of the program manager) why it wouldn’t work. Some of my coworkers speculated that I might not show up the next day, but I survived to tell the tale.&quot;</i><p>I see some well intentioned people fumbling around, being derided in private by academics (who play the same human status games in different ways) who are still willing to talk with such people (because $$$, and maybe because some other academic they &quot;collaborate&quot; with is talking with them), who are pretty smart in their field (who are finding alternative funding sources!) who I secretly hope burn a fire under the ass of what goes now, so I won&#x27;t write it all off.