Original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w

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!”

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 don't exist and that's okay