In college I tried to participate in a rubber-hand-illusion while wearing an EEG, but the stimulation was done by the researcher manually and I never felt the illusion. This does show an interesting twist, using a robot arm for repeated and accurate stimulation.
Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
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Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#72Some 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?
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.
Yes. My rifle feels like an "extension" of my body. Also, when I drive my car I will focus on how the car feels like an extension and the scale of objects feels different. Like if I am walking down a long street it feels big, in a car it feels small.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also makes the self feel uncomfortably fragile
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.
I agree with you and I think we're changing at every moment, all the time, but it's usually gradual enough that most people don't notice or care until it manifests as new behavior.
My life is materially the same as it was on Friday but I definitely feel different after events this weekend.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#74> participants had a robotic arm tap the index finger of their real and fake hands, either at the exact same time or with a delay of up to 500 milliseconds between each tap. (...) Those with faster alpha waves appeared to rule out fake hands even with a tiny gap in taps, while those with slower waves were more likely to feel the fake hand as their own, even if the taps were farther apart.
That's the limit of "you"? Sounds more like a sampling rate/processing speed of the sense of touch.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#75What 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
This is how these kinds of articles always go.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#76What 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
This was kind of my take too. It was like speeding up or delaying the refresh rate of the experience.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#77Some 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?
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.
Which can lead to phantom ringing syndrome.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#78The 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 pre…
Dualism is almost always unhelpful as a model. Your soul is a process your body runs, they are indistinguishable.
You make it sound like we are flesh robots : sensors and motors, with a central "CPU" that channels between the two. But a robot has no first-person experience, it's just smart electron flows.
That we have first-person experiences shows the soul is definitely not "a process your body runs" : it's where your whole experience "registers".
That we are not flesh robots is also why we have free will. You could coherently argue that free-will is an illusion, but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#79Some 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?
Yes. I think the concept you’re describing is proprioception:
Re: Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'
#80This is interesting but i find it strange than there is no tests with a controls groups with closed eyes. Maybe some of the observed effects are visual only or psychological and not tactile at all.
>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.