Okay they're about to lock me in here
and then use these electric coils to make magnetic fields that rotate. They're
roughly the strength of Earth's magnetic field and we'll see if my brain is
picking up on the fact that the magnetic field is changing. The whole time I'll
have my eyes closed it'll be pitch black in here, basically
no stimuli except for the changing magnetic field and I'll keep my head
perfectly still facing forward. that sound good?
-yeah gonna take about eight
minutes eight minutes perfect okay I'm ready when you are but before we do this
let's meet the researchers. Can you introduce yourself?
-introduce myself? ah my name is Shin Shimojo. I'm a professor in neuroscience and experimental
psychology at here Caltech Biology Connie you are the first
author here and your paper has just been published, when this video goes out. So what is the setup of the paper how do you set this up? So basically we wanted
to see if humans have any brain response to a magnetic field. it has long been recognized that certain bird species have a remarkable ability
to find their way home, hence the use of homing pigeons to carry messages for us. their impeccable sense of direction is owed in part to their ability to sense
the Earth's magnetic field but they are not the only animals that do this certain bacteria, bees, salmon, turtles rats, dogs, whales, cats in all of them are
known to have magnetic compass. Dogs, known to poop with their bodies oriented
preferentially north-south have even been trained to locate bar magnets Given a choice between three containers they were much better than chance at
identifying the one containing the magnet. In fact, they were much better at
finding a magnet than finding a food treat under similar conditions Given all
these examples it seems more likely that humans should have the ability to detect
magnetic fields. And if you're wondering how humans could physically pick up the
magnetic fields, consider that magnetite crystals have been found in the brain
that closely resembled those of magnetically active bacteria Myy colleagues
in neuroscience said 'wow this is hard to believe you know this is impossible'
but lots of biologists and geophysicists said well it's a matter of course humans
are not, you know, exceptions among all those mammalian species. But up till now the
evidence has been contradictory and controversial. So in the early 80s
Robin Baker did some studies where they took groups of students and drove them
around in very convoluted routes around the English countryside. And they were
blindfolded and then they would stop the bus and ask the students to identify
which direction they came from. So basically 'home' and they got a pretty
significant results from that. Shortly afterwards maybe a few years afterwards
this study was attempted again at Princeton University and they did just a
very similar experiment there and they couldn't get significant behavioral results
there. that's a controversy, lots of positive reports and the failure of the
duplication, negative data in neuroscience as well so let's step back and then see
if there's any systematic, selective response from the brain to the magnetic
field itself not anything associated like vestibular thing or visual scene, swinging and stuff like that. So this is the test chamber, I'll turn on the light so this is um our magnetic... is that the way we get in
yes that's the way you have to crouch in So I'm gonna I'm gonna crawl under there.
-Yes and you sit down there... hang on a sec hang on this is too cool I really like it. What.. whose
chair is that? It just happened to be...
Joe's chair Joe's reclining the chair and not used for this purpose but it
turned out it's very relaxing and the main reason of this cage is to shield the
outside effect for one thing and also have a good control over the modified
Faraday cage where electricity is running okay, so and then there's no sound or vision
or tactile or any other additional stimulation because we are tapping into
very subtle response of the brain at the subliminal subconscious level. It doesn't
block the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field goes straight through
this and that's actually sort of what we want because inside the chamber we're
not trying to override the Earth's field we're just trying to redirect it just to
add a little bit of field here and here remove a little bit there and by doing
that we can smoothly move the field back and forth and move it in a way that
relates to how someone might experience the field as they're sort of moving you
know around outside so that's essentially what you're simulating in
here yes
-is you're making it as though my head is swiveling around in the
Earth's magnetic field yes except that if you actually doing it in the real
world then your vestibular system is also sending signals. We are not
interested in contamination from vestibular signals so we would like to
generate artificially that kind of situation like this, however eliminating
any other sensory modalities such as vestibular. Can I hop in there and just
have a look? oh yeah, go ahead
of course - okay I mean I feel like for my job I have been in more weird
soundproof boxes than most people These black coils here, do these create
the magnetic field? No, so those are for a different experiment so the magnet coils are actually these
things. Those are the magnetic coils And you can see there's four of these square
coils -yeah- in all three directions and this is a nested three axis coil set and
it's designed to create a magnetic field in any direction inside the chamber
and in the center of the chamber where your head and torso is going to be.
mm-hmm it's designed to create a uniform field so a field with no gradients or
curves in it. I've brought a compass and so I can just see if the magnetic field
is changing, what's gonna happen when I sit in this room. okay that was a pretty
dramatic shift. So there will be two kinds of rotations one is clockwise and
one is counterclockwise and as a control on some trials the magnetic field won't
change at all. So we can compare on trials what happens after the field
rotation versus trials where no field rotated. so this is the sort of thing
that I'll be experiencing but in the dark? Yep. Now we're gonna want you to use
your left hand to hold it here 'cause it's easier than the front the cap yep. On this cap there are 64 electrodes which will pick up the electrical
activity of my brain and you're sure this isn't just to make people look
stupid? - Oh, no, no, no When you're awake with your eyes closed the dominant signal is called the
alpha wave. In most people it occurs around 10 Hertz. These little squiggles
right here they're happening at around 10 times per second, these are the alpha waves We are measuring your alpha wave which is known to be an indicator of relaxing and sometimes even
drowsy but not sleeping and then when you notice something like in vision or
audition or touch your alpha wave is suppressed and that is the signature of
a brain detecting sensory signal and moving attention towards it. So the goal of
this experiment is to determine if a magnetic field rotation causes the
amplitude of alpha waves to drop. I'm about to go into the cage I'm gonna turn off the light. And then we
just do this with a stool turn off all the lights in the room and we close the
doors. and throughout the experiment I'll be listening in and watching the video
for safety reasons Can you hear me? Yes I can. I'm setting up
the experiment. Um, we'll be starting shortly. Just wait for the 'ding dings' The experiment is starting, you can see that's our starting point. In terms of
direction, it will vary from
two preset values yeah, so you can see there, that was a field rotation This is like one of the more
glamorous ahhhh...there we go. That's what I was not meant to hit. Thank you. Sorry about that.
I could see that happening. You could see that coming. Man, I was thinking about saying something to the camera. I can't wait to see
the results though. this is a section of my raw EEG results. You can see that
every three seconds the field was rotated either clockwise counter
clockwise or it was fixed, meaning it didn't change. Now it's impossible to
draw conclusions just by looking at this so the scientists average over all the
trials in the different conditions and plot the alpha power over all the
electrodes. This is a recording from someone who is particularly sensitive to
changes in the magnetic field. As I play this, watch how the clockwise and
counterclockwise responses compare to the fixed field result. the recording
starts before a rotation. The magnetic stimulus takes place, and now observe the
post stimulus response, particularly for counterclockwise for this subject the
counter clockwise rotation resulted in a clear decrease in alpha power of at
least three decibels shown by the dark blue color. This corresponds to a
decrease in alpha power by around 50% Now, here are my results. After the
magnetic stimulus my response to counterclockwise is clearly not as
pronounced. But over time for clockwise rotations my alpha power is reduced. I was told I was neither the most
sensitive to magnetic fields nor the least sensitive, I was somewhere in the
middle. So the conclusion is that our brains have ability to sense magnetic field
change but it's implicit and subliminal it's non-conscious part of the brain. This is just the first step to make sure that it's not theoretically impossible
that our ancestors might have utilized this ability for their navigation. Even the
modem people like ourselves may potentially have it. This will open up
the window for the next stage research as to how we could bring
it to the consciousness, how could we strengthen them, and how could we utilize
it. As yet it's unclear if anyone can actually make use of this sense
consciously or subconsciously to help them navigate, but the study's authors
point out that a surprising number of human languages lack terms like front
back left and right and instead use cardinal directions, North, South, East and
West. Native speakers of such languages would refer to a nearby tree as being to
their north rather than being in front of them. Individuals who've been raised
from an early age within a linguistic social and spatial framework using
cardinal reference cues might have made associative links with geomagnetic
sensory cues to aid in daily life. In other words, people from such cultures
may be conscious of their magnetoreception. They would be very
interesting to test. But if it turns out that this sense is no longer functional
in humans, just a relic from our ancestors, it would be interesting to
consider why we lost it. Maybe modern world humans don't need it - that's
one explanation. Another explanation is we are surrounded so much and exposed so
much to artificially created strong magnetic fields, starting from the
airplane cabinet, headphones, some younger people are wearing this for 10 hours per day.
including MRI scanner too. So it's possible our internal compass may be a
victim of our modern technology. This study does not show that magnetic fields
have some kind of special influence on you, that they don't cure disease, they
don't make you smarter. you can't communicate telepathically or something
through them So these are the types of emails that Connie does not want to
receive just so, just so everyone's clear in case you've got sort of a crazy
idea. my hair still looks stupid, In case you have a crazy idea for what to do
with magnetic fields and the human brain this this study does not support that. no
it does not support that. It only supports that the human brain
and pick up on the physical stimulus of the Earth's magnetic field yup Which, in itself is a super cool finding. it is a super cool finding, it's like the
basis for for future research because you know you can't have any behavior
without some kind of something going on in your brain.
A lot of studies say we do have it. I have an old book in my house called The Compass in your Nose and Other Astonishing Facts. It seems like an old bathroom type book with little scientific blurbs to read about humans and how our bodies work. In it he says that all humans have a trace amount of iron in their noses, “a rudimentary compass found in the ethmoid bone (between the eyes) to help in directional finding relative to the earths magnetic fields. Studies have shown that many people have the ability to use these magnetic deposits to orient themselves- even when blindfolded and removed from external clues such as sunlight- to within a few degrees of the North Pole, exactly as a compass does.” It is a book about human physiology, written in 1989 so while it’s outdated- it’s not that outdated.
Most animals have it, so why we lost it in the process of evolution? Interesing topic.
It's possible for anyone to know where north is without having to possess a magnetic sense or a compass.
You just need to pay attention to where the sun rises (it's always in the East) or sets (it's always in the West). Once you know one direction, you know all four.
Regardless of physical compass or not, the language we use has a large affect on ability. https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k
Or maybe because ancient people actually knew about magnets, and like everything else the mystics threw it in with the rest of their nonsense.
For reference, both the ancient Greeks and Chinese knew that if you put a lodestone in water, it pointed in a particular direction. They didn't know why it did that, but they knew about it. Fast forward to 1600 CE, and the first time someone actually measured the horizontal direction of the earth's magnetic field.