Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

It also makes the self feel uncomfortably fragile

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I think this is still important. How do you define a system? By boundary of communication, where inside system communication is fast, communication with outside is slow and limited. Think ( ( ((CPU) Memory) ((GPU) memory) PC ) Internet ). Your PC is a hierarchy of systems split on boundaries of communication speed. So, it would be proper that a brain identifies what's "inside" the brain in similar way.

So, ping>1 = that part is outside.

This was kind of my take too. It was like speeding up or delaying the refresh rate of the experience.

This is how these kinds of articles always go.

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?

“...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!

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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.

Yes, I think it’s a well-known phenomenon that the brain extends its concept of the body to tools, vehicles etc that you learn to use well.

I actually think drivers routinely experience this, which explains a lot of road rage.

Yes. I think the concept you’re describing is proprioception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception

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.

Some overlap with ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Media as extensions of man.

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).

>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.

More likely it will be used to brain control the population

"The researchers say that the findings could lead to new understanding of or treatments for conditions where the brain's body maps have gone askew, such as schizophrenia or the sensation of 'phantom limbs' experienced by amputees."

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!

Dualism is almost always unhelpful as a model. Your soul is a process your body runs, they are indistinguishable.

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.

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.

>are visual only or psychological and not tactile at all

I think for a visual only test you'd need something to the effect of a neuralink that gave control over the robot arm.

Otherwise we're dealing with a set of signal mixing where your brain is attempting to take the strongest/what it deems the most important signals and give an effect based on that. The eyes give us far more data than we can actually process so the has to filter down this data to a usable stream. This can also happen with tactile response, but the number of situations this occurs in is rather rare.

I guess what I'm trying to say, at the end of the day all observed effects (except maybe reflexes) are psychological as the brain is trying to create an accurate virtualization of the input data it's receiving and that more data doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes.

On the flip side, the paper also suggests a tradeoff - slower alpha made people less sensitive to timing mismatches

We're here for you, Carol.

Flips switch

How about now?

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!