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 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?
> 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!”
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
That's a pretty direct causal link between a measurable brain state and something as fundamental as "where does my body end?"
https://news.ki.se/how-brain-waves-shape-our-sense-of-self
> 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!”
OTH nearly all brain experiments are non-invasive. Did they mean to use the word to downplay how seriously impacting the experiment was?
> 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.
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?
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).
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).
How about now?
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.