Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
sciencealert.comOriginal paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w The manipulation part is what fascinates me. They didn't just correlate alpha wave frequency with ownership perception. They used transcranial stimulation to artificially speed up or slow down the waves, and the subjective experience changed accordingly. That's a pretty direct causal link between a measurable brain state and something as fundamental as "where does my body end?" I wonder how those with multiple identities (DID), would affect this measurement. I know there are direct biomarkers in folk with it having to do with the frontal cortex and amygdala, and some neuroimaging being able to note vast differences in processing: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9045405/ I wonder what kind of physics hides in interactions between waves and neurons (I know it's a cursed topic). Like the large scale, nearly speed-of-light continuous electrical field fluctuations that influence long-distance discrete neural firing and may be the basis for conscious experience? Curses! Original Paper: Parietal alpha frequency shapes own-body perception by modulating the temporal integration of bodily signals, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w I wonder if this can be used to cure or alleviate phantom pain in amputees. More likely it will be used to brain control the population FTA: > With a third group of participants, they used a non-invasive technique called transcranial alternating current stimulation to speed up or slow down the frequency of a person's alpha waves. And sure enough, this seemed to correlate with how real a fake hand felt. I know this is largely orthogonal to the article, and I know what “non-invasive” means and why it’s used in this sentence, but it made me chuckle - “this technique that changed the subject’s brain waves sufficient to literally impact their sense of self - but don’t worry! It’s non-invasive!” “...it's not out of the question that you might have a very minor case of serious brain damage. But don't be alarmed all right...[it’s non-invasive]” i guess putting your head in a microwave would also be considered "non-invasive" according to this logic. makes sense! It’s not an invasion, it’s just a “special operation”! If invasive means using surgical tools to open up the skin and organs, then non-invasive means all things that don't require surgical tools. OTH nearly all brain experiments are non-invasive. Did they mean to use the word to downplay how seriously impacting the experiment was? Many types of brain stimulation require electrodes placed inside the skull. The term was likely chosen to differentiate this technique from those. I do wonder how far they would get with the phantom limb stuff. We know phantom limb stuff is encoded before birth so would alpha waves adjust something so fundamential? Wasn’t this phenomenon already described by VS Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain? So, how far does the human electric field extend outside the body? May be only picovolts or in that range... But can we measure that? Does the field exist past our skin? Can things like meditation modify that? Or how about stuff like OOBE's like what some folks call astral projection? What do those practices to to the body's electric field? It extends far enough for some use. There are some capacitive sensors (Electric Potential Integrated Circuit or EPIC) that can work through clothing fabric (which is a resistor). Within a few millimeters they are good enough for a diagnostic EKG. It's also used for stress monitoring, and can be embedded in a mattress or seat back. There are also magnetoencephalography, magnetocardiography, magnetogastrography, and magnetomyography systems in use, which use superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID). Those are orders of magnitude sensitive enough (10^-18 T sensitivity vs 10^-6 T to 10^-9 T for some body processes or 10^-15 T for neural activity). There is something like the heart field, about 3 to 4 feet according to the article. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20664147/ Meditation can alter a lot of “you” , and there is a reason you learn the advanced stuff under a guru (yoga mostly) or monk (buddhism). This has me thinking of Pluribus We're here for you, Carol. So maybe tin foil hats can be useful after all? The idea of "ownership of a body" made me think about a quote I heard a long time ago, while talking amongst musicians while waiting to get up and perform. It felt like some secret knowledge that I gained privilege to, while somewhat inebriated and it hasn't left me since. > I _have_ a body, I _am_ a soul. Maybe what they're identifying is the first half of that statement, how we interpret the former, through the presence of the latter. Dualism is almost always unhelpful as a model. Your soul is a process your body runs, they are indistinguishable. You introduced dualism yourself by making distinction between body / process. I heard Michal Levin talk about dualism recently. He has an interesting point:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0rCU49lMs&t=6210 Maybe. Nah. You can do that with mental phenomenon too - eg, having memories, feelings, consciousness, thoughts. All aspects of "I" that might be present or not - so they can't really be said to be you as much as possessed by you for a moment. Insofar as a soul exists for you to be ... it is quite small. > You can do that with mental phenomenon too - eg, having memories, feelings, consciousness, thoughts. But once you carry that reasoning to its full conclusion, the original argument for a "soul" or "self" that can even be meaningfully called "I" vanishes entirely. There still is some sort of underlying "true" subjective awareness that's felt to be ontologically basic in some sense (just like the "soul") but now it's entirely impersonal (the traditional term is "spirit", or "the absolute") since anything that's still personal is no longer comprised in it: an ongoing phenomenon and perhaps an inherent feature of existence itself, not a "thing". Wow, that’s really interesting! It seems like alpha waves are the ‘tick rate’ of this system, and some set number of ticks are required to update the body model? I don’t think the study claims alpha waves are literally the body model’s clock. What they show is that the speed of alpha cycles influences how precisely the brain binds sensory signals to generate the feeling of body ownership. It's waves all the way down! Interesting. Now run the same kinds of tests while listening to music, meditation, sleep, orgasm, psychoactive substances (including caffeine/alcohol/nicotine), during simulated stress event (hard slap in the face?), on different age groups, genders, races. Perhaps there are more than one version or definition of "You" that arises in certain circumstances. I don't exist and that's okay Flips switch How about now? Have you tried turning your sense of self off and on again? shh the buddhists are sensitive (got dunked on by Ram)