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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
mohas wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
although our internet is whitelist-blocked and I can only read the
comments here, this reminds me of something my friend said some years
ago, he said my car is the extension of my limbs and I can feel the
limits of my car similar to my hands and feet
arnejenssen wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
Some years ago I played a car game with Virtual Reality (VR). I noticed
that it felt like the car was a part of me.
I wonder if the brain can experience if clothing, tools, bikes are part
of the body?
roywiggins wrote 3 min ago:
I actually think drivers routinely experience this, which explains a
lot of road rage.
Sharlin wrote 21 min ago:
Yes, I think itâs a well-known phenomenon that the brain extends
its concept of the body to tools, vehicles etc that you learn to use
well.
woliveirajr wrote 47 min ago:
A cell phone vibrating in your pocket: in the first days, after some
days of use, many people would feel it vibrating as a muscle
sensation, not as external thing vibrating.
roywiggins wrote 3 min ago:
I experience "having something in the copy/paste buffer" as a
distinct sensation in my Ctrl-V hand.
BrtByte wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
What they seem to have identified isn't "the limits of you" so much as
a timing parameter the brain uses to decide whether two sensory streams
belong together
avadodin wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
Could possibly be applied to enhance performance in sports.
You always hear about how something is an extension of the body to the
best athletes.
BrtByte wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
On the flip side, the paper also suggests a tradeoff - slower alpha
made people less sensitive to timing mismatches
polytely wrote 3 hours 50 min ago:
I wonder if having a feel for musical timing works similarly where a
brain wave frequency determines how 'thight' your sense of timing is.
Would be sick if you could improve that aspect of musicality with
stimulation
krzat wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
I wonder what kind of physics hides in interactions between waves and
neurons (I know it's a cursed topic).
dr_dshiv wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
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!
spiritplumber wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
I wonder if this can be used to cure or alleviate phantom pain in
amputees.
coldtea wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
More likely it will be used to brain control the population
taurath wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
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:
(HTM) [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9045405/
shippage wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
I have DID and am also curious how it would affect the measurement.
I'm just waking up so I've only skimmed the paper so far, but I
suspect the results would differ depending on which of us was
fronting.
We've noticed that each of us integrates not just sensory information
differently, but we also seem to be "wired" differently.
For instance, we are AuDHD, and I, the primary host, lean strongly to
the autism behavioral side, my co-host is somewhere between, and a
secondary host leans strongly to the ADHD behavioral side. Things
that are easy for me can be hard for another.
We also experience senses very differently. There have been many
times where one of us can smell something strongly, switch, and the
other can't smell it at all.
This affects other senses as well. When I watch a 24 fps movie at a
theater, for about the first 10 minutes, all I see is a strobing of
still images before I finally adapt and see motion. My co-host sees
continuous motion right from the start. This may relate to the
temporal binding window discussed in the paper as a motivation for
their research.
Our working hypothesis since we were finally diagnosed has been that
identity is, at least in part, an integration of both sensory
information as well as how strongly various brain regions are
activated by whichever identity or identities are most active at a
particular time.
Lastly, we have the ability to "take control" over just part of the
body. For example, for whatever reason, the motion of stirring a
sauce is difficult to me, but it's trivial for another, so sometimes
they'll take control of our arms to stir the pot while cooking. To me
it feels like my arms have disappeared and someone else's arms are
now attached and stirring the pot. This may be temporal binding
window related because we do seem to experience sensory information
at different speeds and this might cause us to get that alien hand
feeling, which is sort of opposite of the rubber hand illusion.
So, I suspect that each of us would react differently to the rubber
hand illusion test.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
I don't have words for how fascinating your post is. Thanks for
sharing!
BatteryMountain wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
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.
patann wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Wasnât this phenomenon already described by VS Ramachandran in his
book Phantoms in the Brain?
eat_lemons wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
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?
BurningFrog wrote 9 hours 52 min ago:
So maybe tin foil hats can be useful after all?
mystraline wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
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?
meindnoch wrote 4 hours 21 min ago:
>So, how far does the human electric field extend outside the body?
Electromagnetic fields extend infinitely.
>Can things like meditation modify that?
Anything you do with your brain changes the electric field. Reading
this comment changed the electric field generated by your brain by
some tiny amount.
da_chicken wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
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).
prox wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
There is something like the heart field, about 3 to 4 feet according
to the article. [1] Meditation can alter a lot of âyouâ , and
there is a reason you learn the advanced stuff under a guru (yoga
mostly) or monk (buddhism).
(HTM) [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20664147/
meindnoch wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
Let's see this article! The abstract begins with:
>Recent health research has focused on subtle energy and
vibrational frequency as key components of health and healing.
*ding ding, crackpot alert, ding ding*
mystraline wrote 17 min ago:
"Subtle energy" and "vibrational frequency" are dead giveaways of
metaphysics instead of science.
I'm not adverse to that, as I do believe that much of metaphysics
does have real physical backing that we haven't uncovered yet.
But I also asked a strong scientific question. First, with the
human electric field, how far does it extend outside the body and
at what strength? Secondly, can drugs or practices modify this,
and how so?
reg_dunlop wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
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.
ajuc wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
I think of it this way:
Person me = new Person {
body: { ... },
personality/soul: { ... },
emotionalState: { ... },
memories: { ... }
}
The "me" is very small - it's just the structure that holds the
pointers to everything else.
Tarq0n wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
Dualism is almost always unhelpful as a model. Your soul is a process
your body runs, they are indistinguishable.
ajuc wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
It's useful to have a word for cumulonimbus and models based on
that even if you know it's just a particular configuration of the
wave function.
Whether personality is entirely based on laws of physics or not -
is a separate question.
hackinthebochs wrote 4 hours 51 min ago:
It doesn't have to be a reference to dualism. We can draw a
distinction between specific patterns of brain activity and the
body that realizes it. "I" exist only when the characteristic
property of neural activity that realizes the self is present. I am
the realization of this second-order property. Here the "soul" is
this specific pattern of dynamics realized by my body's neurons.
krzat wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
You introduced dualism yourself by making distinction between body
/ process.
I heard Michal Levin talk about dualism recently. He has an
interesting point:
(HTM) [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0rCU49lMs&t=6210
phito wrote 6 hours 59 min ago:
Maybe.
kilpikaarna wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Nah.
roenxi wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
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.
zozbot234 wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
> 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".
ajuc wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
Yes. That's the point? Your personality might change and you're
still you.
jszymborski wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
This has me thinking of Pluribus
rcarmo wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
We're here for you, Carol.
taneq wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Wow, thatâs really interesting! It seems like alpha waves are the
âtick rateâ of this system, and some set number of ticks are
required to update the body model?
rambojohnson wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
I donât think the study claims alpha waves are literally the body
modelâs 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.
dleeftink wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
It's waves all the way down!
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 11 hours 25 min ago:
I don't exist and that's okay
hcs wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
Flips switch
How about now?
taneq wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
Have you tried turning your sense of self off and on again?
braaileb wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
shh the buddhists are sensitive (got dunked on by Ram)
augusteo wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
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?"
BrtByte wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
It also makes the self feel uncomfortably fragile
cogman10 wrote 43 min ago:
That fragility is something you have to come to grips with if
you've ever known someone that has a brain injury.
The self changes rapidly when dementia, alzheimers, a car crash, or
a concussion which rocks someone's world the wrong way.
Who we are is incredibly fragile. You are just one bad infection
away from being a different person.
judahmeek wrote 1 hour 6 min ago:
This technique is likely to be utilized in some government
interrogation methods now.
An excellent example of research that maybe shouldn't have been
pursued, although it's possible that there are a large number of
potential recuperative applications as well that I'm not aware of.
tehmillhouse wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Buddhism has bad news for you
bamboozled wrote 7 min ago:
I once read âThe Joy of Livingâ by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
It should come with a warning. It broke me for a year. Iâm
actually grateful for the existential crisis it caused me. But it
was a brutal experience at first.
roughly wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
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
ânon-invasiveâ means and why itâs used in this sentence, but it
made me chuckle - âthis technique that changed the subjectâs brain
waves sufficient to literally impact their sense of self - but donât
worry! Itâs non-invasive!â
SlightlyLeftPad wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
â...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...[itâs non-invasive]â
dmos62 wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
Yes, the good old minor majority.
nashashmi wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
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?
devmor wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Many types of brain stimulation require electrodes placed inside
the skull. The term was likely chosen to differentiate this
technique from those.
marcd35 wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
i guess putting your head in a microwave would also be considered
"non-invasive" according to this logic. makes sense!
taneq wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Itâs not an invasion, itâs just a âspecial operationâ!
raincom wrote 11 hours 53 min ago:
Original Paper: Parietal alpha frequency shapes own-body perception by
modulating the temporal integration of bodily signals, [1]
(HTM) [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w
(HTM) [2]: https://news.ki.se/how-brain-waves-shape-our-sense-of-self
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