I’ve known or been doing most of what he says in this. 2 days ago I thought, “Elon should not call his company Tesla because he’s not doing it the Tesla way. He’s doing it his way. @Musk, not @Tesla. Mindmeld with Dr. Greer.
The abilities of our minds are not difficult. But be careful what you ask to see. I’ve said this a lot, but I choose not to see most of what I could. This planet is too awful, and I would get too upset. 😢 I’m very sensitive to others’ suffering. It’s the healer in me, although I’ve learned to be very rational in my work with humans who are super needy. They need to learn to take care of rhemselves.
A new study hints that humans have magnetoreception abilities, similar to some other animals.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM Like birds, bacteria and other creatures with an ability known as magnetoreception, humans can sense Earth’s magnetic field (illustrated), a new study suggests. vchal/Shutterstock
A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism.
Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation (SN: 6/14/14, p. 10). Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.
These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.
“The first impression when I read the [study] was like, ‘Wow, I cannot believe it!’” says Can Xie, a biophysicist at Peking University in Beijing. Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.”
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During the experiment, 26 participants each sat with their eyes closed in a dark, quiet chamber lined with electrical coils. These coils manipulated the magnetic field inside the chamber such that it remained the same strength as Earth’s natural field but could be pointed in any direction. Participants wore an EEG cap that recorded the electrical activity of their brains while the surrounding magnetic field rotated in various directions.
This setup simulated the effect of someone turning in different directions in Earth’s natural, unchanging field without requiring a participant to actually move. (Complete stillness prevented motor-control thoughts from tainting brain waves due to the magnetic field.) The researchers compared these EEG readouts with those from control trials where the magnetic field inside the chamber didn’t move.
Joseph Kirschvink, a neurobiologist and geophysicist at Caltech, and colleagues studied alpha waves to determine whether the brain reacts to changes in magnetic field direction. Alpha waves generally dominate EEG readings while a person is sitting idle but fade when someone receives sensory input, like a sound or touch.
Sure enough, changes in the magnetic field triggered changes in people’s alpha waves. Specifically, when the magnetic field pointed toward the floor in front of a participant facing north — the direction that Earth’s magnetic field points in the Northern Hemisphere — swiveling the field counterclockwise from northeast to northwest triggered an average 25 percent dip in the amplitude of alpha waves. That change was about three times as strong as natural alpha wave fluctuations seen in control trials.
ROTATION REACTION When downward-pointing magnetic fields were rotated counterclockwise, from northeast to northwest, researchers saw a significant dip in participants’ alpha brain waves (left). Alpha waves are similarly dampened when someone receives sensory input like a sound or smell. This response was not seen when downward fields rotated clockwise (center) or were held steady (right).
Curiously, people’s brains showed no responses to a rotating magnetic field pointed toward the ceiling — the direction of Earth’s field in the Southern Hemisphere. Four participants were retested weeks or months later and showed the same responses.
“It’s kind of intriguing to think that we have a sense of which we’re not consciously aware,” says Peter Hore, a chemist at the University of Oxford who has studied birds’ internal compasses. But “extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, and in this case, that includes being able to reproduce it in a different lab.”
Questions raised
If these findings are able to be replicated, they pose several questions — such as why people seem to respond to downward- but not upward-pointing fields. Kirschvink and colleagues think they have an answer: “The brain is taking [magnetic] data, pulling it out and only using it if it makes sense,” Kirschvink says.
Participants in this study, who all hailed from the Northern Hemisphere, should perceive downward-pointing magnetic fields as natural, whereas upward fields would constitute an anomaly, the researchers argue. Magnetoreceptive animals are known to shut off their internal compasses when encountering weird fields, such as those caused by lightning, which might lead the animals astray. Northern-born humans may similarly take their magnetic sense “offline” when faced with strange, upward-pointing fields.
This explanation “seems plausible,” Hore says, but would need to be tested in an experiment with participants from the Southern Hemisphere.
The brain’s attention to counterclockwise but not clockwise rotations “is something surprising that we don’t really have a good explanation for,” says coauthor Connie Wang, who studies magnetoperception at Caltech. Some people may respond to clockwise rotations, just like some people are left-handed rather than right-handed, or clockwise rotations generate brain activity not captured in the alpha wave signal, she says.
Even accounting for which magnetic changes the brain picks up, researchers still don’t know what our minds might use that information for, Kirschvink says. Another lingering mystery is how, exactly, our brains detect Earth’s magnetic field. According to the researchers, the brain wave patterns uncovered in this study may be explained by sensory cells containing a magnetic mineral called magnetite, which has been found in magnetoreceptive trout as well as in the human brain (SN: 8/11/12, p. 13). Future experiments could confirm or eliminate that possibility.
With this first compelling evidence that humans are subconsciously processing magnetic signals, “we can [try to] identify the brain region it originates from and try to identify the nature of the cells” responsible, says Michael Winklhofer, a magnetoreception researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “This is really the first step.”
Previously the staff writer for physical sciences at Science News, Maria Temming is the assistant managing editor at Science News Explores. She has bachelor’s degrees in physics and English, and a master’s in science writing.
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What do birds and bees, worms and wolves, fruit flies and fish all have in common? The answer: a magnetic sense that helps them navigate. Now it seems we might do as well.
Joseph Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology in the US and colleagues found that altering the directions of nearby magnetic fields caused temporary changes in human brain activity.
While sitting still in a dark room, participants’ brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG), while electromagnetic coils were used to create magnetic fields.
The experiment mimicked the magnetic field changes we are subject to when we move about in the real world, says Kirschvink.
The direction and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field varies by geographical location. For example, at the magnetic north pole, one of two poles where the magnetic field is the strongest, the direction of the field points vertically downwards, into the ground.
In the wider northern hemisphere, this vertical angle changes but the magnetic field is always skewed downwards – meaning that when you hold a compass horizontally, the end pointing north is slightly pulled down. The south-pointing end of some compasses in the northern hemisphere are weighted to compensate for the pull.
Brain change
When the team exposed people to a downward-pointing magnetic field, they saw changes in brain wave patterns when they rotated the field horizontally in a counterclockwise direction .
The team measured alpha waves – present when we are awake but relaxed and with closed eyes – before and after a 100 millisecond change in magnetic field, and found a drop in amplitude in the waves in some people following the rotation.
But no participants showed brain changes when the magnetic field was rotated clockwise, a finding the researchers can’t explain.
Rotating an upwards-pointing magnetic field didn’t cause a change either, which the team speculates may be because the participants’ brains were attuned to the magnetic field of the northern hemisphere, where they conducted the study. Earth’s magnetic field always points up in the southern hemisphere.
“One interesting way to test this hypothesis would be to reproduce our experiment in the southern hemisphere,” says team member Isaac Hilburn.
Claims that humans can detect magnetic fields has long been a source of controversy, but other researchers are cautiously optimistic about the new work.
The team’s approach parallels studies of magnetoreception in animals, says Nathan Putman at LGL, an ecological research firm based in Bryan, Texas. Putman, who studies marine animals including turtles, says the strongest evidence for a magnetic sense is when animals change their direction of travel in response to an altered field.
The possibility that humans could have a magnetic sense is exciting, but the results will need to be replicated, he says. “A sceptic could argue that there’s a lot of reasons why brain waves might change and it may not have anything to do with orientation.”
It is possible the EEGs could have picked up disruptions from the surrounding environment, says Can Xie at Peking University in China, although the study tried to eliminate this, he says. “It is hard to interpret the EEG signal precisely, which makes it difficult to further explore the underlying molecular mechanism at this stage.”
If the results hold up, it may mean that a magnetic sense played a role in the nomadic lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, says Hilburn.
Synchronicity is the Source of Consciousness 
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