What do you make of this? Electromagnetism can effect faith?

This study is from 2015, I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here before, but it may be relevant to the God Helmet debate:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien...1.html?amp

The study, published in the journal [i]Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience[/i], saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain.

The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression. However, researchers have now found that by targeting the part of the brain that deals with threats, they can temporarily change people's beliefs and views.

The team, comprised of scientists from the University of York and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), used 39 politically moderate students as test subjects.

The two were split into two groups - one, the control group, was given a sham dose of magnetism that was not strong enough to influence brain activity. The other got a strong pulse of TMS that was strong enough to temporarily shut down their posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC), a part of the brain that "plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behaviour to resolve such conflicts." In other words, this part of the brain processes threats and conflicts, and decides how to respond to them...

...Amongst those who received the strong magnetic dose, 32.8 per cent fewer had decreased beliefs in God, angels and heaven compared to the control group who received no dose. And 25.8 per cent more of those who had received TMS had a more positive response to the immigrant who had written a negative letter about their country. In other words, those given the magnetic treatment were found to have decreased beliefs in God and more positive views towards immigrants.

Dr Keise Izuma, of the authors of the study from the University of York, said: "As expected, we found that when we experimentally turned down the posterior medial frontal cortex, people were less inclined to reach for comforting religious ideas despite having been reminded of death...When we disrupted the brain region that usually helps detect and respond to threats, we saw a less negative, less ideologically motivated reaction to the critical author and his opinions."

What does this imply for conciousness pertaining to the self, and its relationship with the brain? Or is it even releavant at all?

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.

So I actually found a recent paper by some of the same people.

https://psyarxiv.com/n2w8u/

There is a difference in this experiment: apparently the original tested reductions in belief after priming people with the idea of death (introducing a threat) so they also included a neutral option this time too. They replicated the effect from the original study for the already threat primed stuff, but this effect wasn’t seemingly present in the neutral option. While they note a lack of statistical power (suggesting the need for a larger sample size) they suggest that the TMS could be interpreted to be effecting an alarm effect as opposed to directly effecting religious belief, due to the lack of effect in the neutral option.This paper also answered a question I had on the strength of the participants beliefs: they apparently specifically avoided people with strong beliefs.

So honestly, after checking this out, this doesn’t seem to have to do with consciousness, but moreso the ego.

I will say that I think their method for determining religious belief is fairly weak, basically a short survey of rating particular aspects of a Judeo Christian afterlife. Other than the clear Judeo Christian focus, it’s kinda hard to determine the level of a person’s actual beliefs solely from a number, might do some good to have them actually briefly write out their beliefs.

People change their beliefs when drunk, depending on how much sleep they've gotten, whether they're on DMT...

Thinking the Self as "calling in" to use the brain as a sort of VR headset is almost certainly the wrong way to ultimately think about these things.

The David Russo NDE paper I recently posted gets into this, that the soul/body would have to be an integrated system...or as the Irreducible Mind guys put it the soul and body are mixed like water and salt.

People change their beliefs when drunk, depending on how much sleep they've gotten, whether they're on DMT...

Thinking the Self as "calling in" to use the brain as a sort of VR headset is almost certainly the wrong way to ultimately think about these things.

The David Russo NDE paper I recently posted gets into this, that the soul/body would have to be an integrated system...or as the Irreducible Mind guys put it the soul and body are mixed like water and salt.

I don't think the "mixed like water and salt" analogy has much traction. For this to be at all accurate, somehow the leaving the body to move to another spacial location, then visiting other realms, then returning to the body experiences reported in deep NDEs would have to be analogous, like somehow the salt under some conditions can spontaneously reverse its entropy and come out of solution into a crystalline form. And the water/salt mixture doesn't have any specified complexity, while the mind-brain system must be an extremely complex integrated system.

And I don't think this research is fundamentally anything new as to its implications in the mind-body debate. We already well knew that all kinds of chemical and electrical and mechanical impingements on neurological structures in the brain can cause big changes in consciousness. As you point out, witness the obvious changes in personality under the neural effects of alcohol. Why should it be any different in principle, with magnetic instead of chemical impingement on brain structures? 

Certainly in life the brain structures are finely intertwined with immaterial mind and form an integrated system whose finely tuned operation is altered or disrupted in a multitude of different ways by all these different types of interference with the brain's processing operations. There is no really good analogy, but though it is very rough I think the TV set analogy is still more accurate - messing with the set's millions of transistors and other electronic components during its operation will disrupt or distort the picture and sound, but certainly the drama being displayed is unaffected since it consists ultimately of a large amount of immaterial specified information whose source is definitely not the TV set and its structure.

There is no really good analogy, but though it is very rough I think the TV set analogy is still more accurate - messing with the set's millions of transistors and other electronic components during its operation will disrupt or distort the picture and sound, but certainly the drama being displayed is unaffected since it consists ultimately of a large amount of immaterial specified information whose source is definitely not the TV set and its structure.

But then who is the drunk person with differing opinions tha[n] the sober one?

I can't affect the TV station showing the broadcast by tinkering with my TV after all.