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

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?"

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

https://news.ki.se/how-brain-waves-shape-our-sense-of-self

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?

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!”

Wasn’t this phenomenon already described by VS Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain?

This has me thinking of Pluribus

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.

So maybe tin foil hats can be useful after all?

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?

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 exist and that's okay

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.