Electromagnetic experiments on consciousness?

In the YouTube comments section of a video covering evidence for consciousness not being produced by the brain, there were several comments that caught my eye. The usual cynical, uninformed lot of course, but then there were also commenters who claimed that consciousness is produced by the brain because there have been experiments conducted showing how electromagnetic waves can affect a person's behaviour and mindset to the point of 'altering their morality and memories'. I'm not sure if this has been discussed here before and has anything to do with the materialist 'feedback loop theory' that argues that the brain can achieve complex levels of consciousness, among other things, via feedback loops. 

What are your thoughts on this and has anybody heard of such examples?

Disclaimer:
As noted here there's a good reason to reject this is proof materialism/physicalism is true, given these skeptical parties that continue to doubt the physicalist/materialist faith.


Additionally, whatever is shown by parapsychology or neuroscience, here are four good reasons to reject the religion of physicalism/materialism.

In the YouTube comments section of a video covering evidence for consciousness not being produced by the brain, there were several comments that caught my eye. The usual cynical, uninformed lot of course, but then there were also commenters who claimed that consciousness is produced by the brain because there have been experiments conducted showing how electromagnetic waves can affect a person's behaviour and mindset to the point of 'altering their morality and memories'. I'm not sure if this has been discussed here before and has anything to do with the materialist 'feedback loop theory' that argues that the brain can achieve complex levels of consciousness, among other things, via feedback loops. 

What are your thoughts on this and has anybody heard of such examples?

I think I can safely say I wouldn't be having this experience without my brain. But in my opinion, it's virtually impossible to come up with a way to claim that my experience is exclusively occurring in my localised brain... and by that, I mean my localised brain in spacetime.

As a single example of that, and of the sort of problems we start straying into when talking about these things from a naive position, are issues about my brain now, in the present... but also my brain in the past. When we read a sentence, our understanding of the sentence as we finish reading it, is being influenced by what we read at the start of the sentence (which is now in our the past). These past influences can be stretched out, further and further, over my lifetime... and very specific influences from the past, are even shown to jump quite specifically over multiple generations, in the case of epigenetic inheritance studies. So when people say experience is produced in the brain, they tend not to consider the brain over time.

There is just an assumption that we carry everything with us in an isolated way, everything that we need, to make up the whole of our experience... but this really is just the naive starting position... which is the experience of separate me, a separate/independent 'I', moving around in a separate/independent external world... but even the most conservative position (if a person believes it's all happening in their brain) has to accept that they are just having an experience of 'I', moving around in a separate external world... and if they don't accept that... then their beliefs 'it's all in their brain' and of an 'independent I, in an independent external world' really seem to be in conflict with each other.

But the naive position, that experience of a separate me, moving around in a separate external world... could be more acceptable - in my view - if my whole experience is not just created exclusively in my brain... but is created by shared processing... processing which is actually taking place outside (beyond) the 'result' of the processing... the 'result' I'm talking about here, being our everyday (spacetime) world which is experienced with every observation. In my view, this is very much the sort of idea physics seems to be pointing us towards...

We might all be experiencing walking around, in what we experience as everybody else's brains... and our everyday experiences of the world, could be just our way of understanding how we all experience together... but what actually lies behind my experience, behind the processing which results in our everyday spacetime world, is anybody's guess? Perhaps it's not even logical to ask such a question.

I really don't have the right words, or the right way to express this stuff...

As nbtruthman mentioned in another post, the only example I can think of for these 'experiments' is the controversial (and arguably flawed) God Helmet experiment. I haven't seen any recent articles claiming that consciousness/the self can be affected by electromagnetism either. They don't cite their sources so I'm very confused as to where they're coming from.

As nbtruthman mentioned in another post, the only example I can think of for these 'experiments' is the controversial (and arguably flawed) God Helmet experiment. I haven't seen any recent articles claiming that consciousness/the self can be affected by electromagnetism either. They don't cite their sources so I'm very confused as to where they're coming from.

Better than me spoon feeding you...

Go to

 -   Google Scholar

Type specific keywords for potentially relevant papers into the search box... I used these words to start the process of investigation...

 - electromagnetic effects behaviour

Once you find a paper with positive results... then use it's references to other papers (at the end of the paper) to explore new related papers which may give new insights...

Straight away I found this article... which could be a useful jumping off point...

-  "Effect of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiations (RF-EMR) on passive avoidance behaviour and hippocampal 
    morphology in Wistar rats"

But the idea that EM effects somehow proves Experience is isolated in a self-contained brain... is based on naive assumptions... as I explained.

Sorry if I'm annoying you Max, I don't tend to go looking for things that may upset or confuse me for one reason or another. 

I found that article too but not much else. The only study I found which indicated that electromagnetism can affect morality was this one from 2010: 
http://news.mit.edu/2010/moral-control-0330

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

One commenter noted: 'That magnets affect the organism, that's a triviality. EM fields can affect any human cognitive dynamics, of which moral judgment is just an example. Insistence of "neuroscience" upon the reduction of the organism to the brain, a single organ, is unscientific, a replication of a bad Cartesianism. Any judgment, by its nature, involves the whole organism, in relation with the environment/world, independently of the brain region mobilized at the moment.'

What are your thoughts on this and has anybody heard of such examples?

When you experience things like shared dreams, telepathy, precognition, all verified and therefore veridical, there are only a few explanations that make any sense.

Of course we have localized consciousness and local memories. And, of course the brain is easily manipulated by everything from chemistry to forms of radiation energy. We can easily show this using brain studies where damage or disease disrupts or destroys local abilities, how the brain and brain consciousness reacts to drugs. Plenty of feedback loop data as well. Sometimes it adds abilities, as you see with brain damage causing savant syndrome. The brain is a physical mass, and it changes, and it dies. Everyone has an individualized set of neural networks, with many of them using similar network highways and brain regions for the same tasks. It has form and function just like a muscle or specific cells. Some of these neural networks or areas of difference/damage can make certain people more susceptible to EM affects and intrusion. Since the brain and the forces at work maintain awareness like a cup full of liquid, any and all changes have to be adapted to on-the-fly to maintain homeostasis and focus, with a safety system keeping the focus and all available energy on the standard senses. The brain has a local memory system that can be disrupted or destroyed, and areas that can be temporarily shut down with strong magnetic pulses, thus changing everything associated with that brain area and the local consciousness that uses this physical system daily. One of the more interesting studies was shutting down the frontal lobe and finding out people can then do a form of psychokinesis while it is offline, showing that particular regions are likely filters or blocks. To me, it is more likely that the energy that is now free is being utilized to power the exteroception system involved in reaching out and causing PK events. Different but same subject...

Some people react to magnetic North, or to EM fluctuations more than others. Some people can dowse water or other things. Some people can retrieve information from distant locations while they are awake, or get data about deceased people, or heal across vast distances. So we have interactions that make it appear like the brain is doing these things. The brain is simply processing data and we are organizing and repeating this data in a useful format.
 
This physical brain doesn't rule out other formats of awareness, or consciousness. The physical brain just supplies a standard format that fits this environment, this dimension, and linear time and space.
Altered states, collecting data from other people, or data from other places, distant healing intent that has been measured and proven to exist, all show that there is more to human ability than our local awareness and our standard senses. These special things we can do don't have to be housed in our brain, or be any part of the chemistry or electrical charges, or electromagnetics. But if the brain were like a pond, we can often see the ripples in the surface of the brain pond, showing that we are interacting with something more than neurons and cells... things that don't have the power or ability to reach past the surface of your skull. We know this from physics, so it is not the brain doing these things.

Personally, I call it "On the borders of this dimension" because the physical is the physical, and has sets of skills and limitations, a form of consciousness/awareness, and this is all with purpose and function. It is a complete stand-alone system. Many people go their entire lives without any format of conscious awareness but that supplied by the brain. 

Our sleeping brain is suddenly a completely different form of awareness, with dreams and sometimes lucid control. It floats back and forth between nonsense, memory consolidation, and supplying shared dream content between people, or even precognition. It isn't a fixed format of consciousness/awareness, or one size fits all. Since we have plenty of evidence of shared dreams, showing that awareness or consciousness can be shared, or extend beyond the brain, then there is something more or Meta. Consciousness isn't just one thing or the other, but it has to be fluid. It exists as a predictable regular thing based on chemistry and neural networks, and it exists in extended formats that can perceive across space and time. 
Having a physical brain doesn't rule out the fact that we can and do operate in ways that go beyond standard physical skills and limitations. These extra special perception skills can and do interact with the physical brain and awareness/consciousness, and the physical brain can interact with the skills of that which is beyond the physical. Consciousness doesn't need to be one or the other. It is often a multi-way, multi-time, multi-location event. 

What I believe is happening, mainly from my own experiences, is that there are exteroception systems with other consciousness, or multiple types of consciousness. These can take routes into time and space that reach beyond our physical systems, and these systems can stand alone without the brain or the body. When you move a magnet, or a magnetic field, close enough to the brain or body, our exteroception system can be stimulated by it, and if it takes notice of it you may experience something special. The more capable you are of switching over to your exteroceptive system, the easier it is to focus and use these systems with a separate consciousness and awareness that applies to whatever route it is taking. If you don't switch consciousness or awareness over, you end up with a sensed presence or parasitic consciousness format where it can appear as a foreign entity, telling us that this consciousness or awareness format doesn't need your brain or your input to function. 

Creating tulpas, egregores, or servitors shows that these substance(s), or the field(s) of operation where these exist, can be interwoven into the fabric of this time and space, but can be temporary or ethereal. Poltergeists would be an example of the fleeting but real possibilities. Reaching out and getting data using RV is an example of real time and space exteroception. 

There are plenty of examples that fit the concept that our brain has a form or forms of consciousness, in and of itself, with memories and all the trimmings. There are also plenty of examples with veridical evidence showing that consciousness/awareness doesn't need the brain and is not limited to the confines of the brain.

What is interesting is that being physical, alive, and having a brain appears to allow us to return to a timeline and continue on as a linear being with a specific personality, and continue to experience all the things we are capable of. Once that physical body ceases, our anchor is gone, we may likely have many options, or we are no longer linear and untethered and fly off into the unknown. We just don't have enough data about that state to be certain, but it would appear that many people are incapable of contact, or their personalities related to the brain chemistry and memories are gone?

So, as Buddha's little instruction book states, "There is one simple thing wrong with you—you think you have plenty of time. If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change? You don't have time for this display, you fool".

As nbtruthman mentioned in another post, the only example I can think of for these 'experiments' is the controversial (and arguably flawed) God Helmet experiment. I haven't seen any recent articles claiming that consciousness/the self can be affected by electromagnetism either. They don't cite their sources so I'm very confused as to where they're coming from.

Biological Effects of Magnetic Storms and ELF Magnetic Fields

Effects of geomagnetic activity variations on the physiological and psychological state of functionally healthy humans: Some results of Azerbaijani studies

It is experimentally established that weak and moderate geomagnetic storms do not cause significant changes in the brain’s bioelectrical activity and exert only stimulating influence while severe disturbances of geomagnetic conditions cause negative influence, seriously disintegrate brain’s functionality, activate braking processes and amplify the negative emotional background of an individual.