Living beings. including humans, can feel magnetic fields, scientists have proven
The "secret life" of the geomagnetic field has become the subject of special study in one of the laboratories of the University of California at Berkeley. It turned out that it is subject to chaotic and rapid changes in both the absolute value and the direction of the induction vector. However, these changes are so rapid that the lightest magnetic needle does not notice them.
The Earth's magnetic field has existed for billions of years and arose long before the appearance of life on it. All biological evolution on the planet took place in the presence of this field, so it is quite logical to assume that there must be biological species on Earth that are able to detect it and use this advantage in the struggle for existence.
Indeed, since the mid-70s of the XX century, many such animals have been discovered, including even some mammals. However, until now remains open, perhaps, the main question: is magnetic sensitivity possible in humans?
At first glance, the assumption of the possibility of discovering a new type of sensory sensitivity in humans seems strange and fantastic, since it would seem that all the senses have long been studied and described. However, there is reason to suspect that sensory sensitivity is still not well understood. One of them is the relatively recent discovery of the vomeronasal system. Since 1813, it has been known that animals have a special sensory organ that allows them to respond to pheromones and other aromatic substances that are not perceived either by smell or by taste. It was only at the very end of the 20th century that it was finally discovered that humans also have a vomeronasal organ in the nasal cavity.
Dowsers
Who of us has not seen, at least on TV, the so-called dowsers - eccentric people who twist a wooden stick (vine) in their hand and determine by its movement where underground water sources or metal deposits are underground. Of course, some of them are scammers or mentally unhealthy people, but maybe there are still those among them who can really use such a strange way to determine what is under the ground? And if this is possible, how?
Back in 1852, the English psychologist William Carpenter explained the phenomenon of vine movement with the help of unconscious ideomotor reactions. In other words, the dowser learns about the waters buried under the ground not due to the movement of the vine, but on the contrary - the vine in his hand moves due to the fact that he unconsciously perceives and recognizes a set of signs indicating shallow waters. The question will then be reformulated: what are the signs of the dowser unconsciously guided?
A separate engraving is dedicated to dowsers in the famous book by Georg Agricola "On Mining and Metallurgy", published in Basel in 1556.
Promotional video:
Although the phenomenon of dowsing has been known since the Middle Ages, it has practically not been studied scientifically. All attempts to check whether dowsers could find underground metals and water were carried out by enthusiasts, as a rule, with little idea of what a correct scientific experiment is. Therefore, most of the experiments carried out on dowsers could not provide indisputable evidence of their ability to sense changes in the geomagnetic field. In particular, in most of these experiments there was no control group at all, and if there was one, there was no double-blind control (when neither the subject, nor the experimenter knew about the presence of a target to be detected). In addition, these experiments usually had a very small sample of subjects (1–2 people), and it was impossible to statistically assess the probability of a random guess.
However, in 1978, Zaboj Harvalik published an article on magnetoreception of dowsers, devoid of these obvious disadvantages. In one of the series of experiments, 14 dowsers participated in 694 experiments in which they had to cross the "beam" created by a low-power high-frequency generator (from 1 Hz to 1 MHz). Double-blind control was carried out using a special "randomizer" that randomly turned on or off the generator. It turned out that in 661 out of 694 experiments, dowsers were able to detect a "magnetic anomaly."
In another series of Garwalik's experiments, 300 randomly selected subjects crossed an artificial magnetic field, which was generated by connecting a current source to two electrodes located 20 m apart. 80% of the subjects found a "dowser reaction" when passing a current, and none of them gave an answer in the absence of a current.
I must say that although Garwalik's article was enthusiastically received by lovers of parapsychology, in the scientific community it caused rather skepticism. In subsequent experiments conducted by other researchers over the course of 20 years, it was not possible to confirm that dowsers had not only sensitivity to magnetic fields, but, in general, their declared ability to find underground sources of water and metal deposits.
It is difficult to say why Garwalik's experiments were not confirmed. Either his subjects, for example, felt the hum and vibration of the generator, or other researchers had dowsers that were not so capable … However, the main thing that Garwalik's controversial experiments did was spur scientists' interest in the study of magnetoreception in humans.
Sense of direction
In 1980 in Science magazine
An article by Robin R. Baker, professor at the University of Manchester, published an article on the ability of a person to find his way with a blindfold (Goal orientation by blindfolded humans after long-distance displacement). The article described several experiments showing that humans have the ability to sense magnetic fields.
One of Baker's experiments was particularly beautiful. The blindfolded subjects were seated in a wooden chair that was rotated in different directions. They were then asked to indicate the direction in which they were facing after stopping the chair. A similar operation was repeated nine times for each subject. In order to prove that the subjects guessed precisely because of the sensitivity to the magnetic field, conditions were created when distortions were introduced into the geomagnetic field. To do this, the subjects were either put on special helmets that create an electromagnetic field, or metal bars were fixed on their heads. Moreover, the experiment was carried out under double-blind control - neither the subjects nor the experimenter knew whether the helmets were "on" or whether the bars were magnetized.
Due to the simplicity of the experiment, it was possible to conduct it on a huge sample of 875 people. It turned out that in the series, when the magnetic field was not distorted, the subjects indicated the direction quite accurately - their error averaged only 7 °. When the geomagnetic field around their head was distorted, they already made a significant error of 166 °, pointing in almost the opposite direction.
Illustration from Baker's article explaining the details of his experiment with a swivel chair
Baker also described a second experiment in which 31 blindfolded people, 15 of whom had magnets attached to the back of their heads, were put on a bus and, in a complicated, roundabout way, taken away 6 km from their home. After that, each of them was asked, without removing their glasses, to show in which direction their house was. It turned out that the subjects without magnets did it much more accurately.
Baker's work caused a huge resonance in the scientific community. Many researchers began to analyze and double-check them. Alas, it was shown that Baker's calculations were wrong, the experiments were carried out incorrectly, and in control experiments no one was able to obtain the same results.
As a result, Baker lost his scientific reputation, and Western researchers began to perceive experiments on the search for magnetoreception in humans as a scientific curiosity, and for almost a quarter of a century such studies were no longer carried out.
However, in our country, such studies continued.
Feeling magnetic field
In 1982, the publishing house "Science"
released a monograph by Yuri Andreevich Kholodov "The Brain in Electromagnetic Fields". This monograph described several experiments in which subjects tried to determine without looking whether a magnetic field was on or not.
Thus, in one of the experiments, the subject had to determine the presence or absence of a magnet under a wooden cover located on a table in the room. An assistant who did not observe the guessing procedure randomly (tossing a coin) placed or did not place a permanent magnet under the lid. The experimenter, who did not know what was under the lid, asked the subject to put his hand on this lid and say if there was a magnet there. It turned out that some subjects (two people) can reliably determine whether there is a magnet under the wooden cover or not.
In another experiment, it was decided to look at how the subjects react to an alternating magnetic field (at frequencies of 1, 10, 100 and 1000 Hz). The experiment was carried out in a similar way, but in order to exclude the influence of accompanying factors, the electromagnets were placed in a closed box, where they were rotated with the help of an electric motor, thereby masking noise, heating and vibration. It turned out that the highest percentage of guessing (85.7%) was observed at a frequency of 10 Hz.
In both experiments, the subjects described their sensations of the magnetic field as a feeling of heaviness, tingling, “creeping creeps”. This sensation arose a few seconds after the source of the magnetic field was turned on and continued for several seconds after it was turned off. For a constant magnetic field, Kholodov determined the minimum value of the magnetic induction at which it arose, 5 mT, that is, approximately 100 times more than the induction of the Earth's magnetic field.
Girl with magnetic breasts
Despite these rather curious results, Kholodov's experiments did not receive much fame and were soon forgotten. Perhaps this was because the new "magnetic feeling" did not have to be recognized to explain the results. They could be fully explained with the help of already known physiological mechanisms. Apparently, the magnetic field changed the vasospasm, which, in fact, caused all these unusual sensations in the subjects. As you know, the discomfort when you "lie down" your hand or "sit" your leg is just described as goosebumps and tingling.
However, another domestic researcher still managed to attract the attention of the scientific community with his experiments. So, more than ten years after the experiments of Kholodov and Baker, in 1995 in the very authoritative journal "Moscow University Bulletin" there was an article "Electromagnetic phenomena in extrasensory perception", written by the head of the Department of Computer Methods of Physics at the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University, Professor Yuri Petrovich Pyt'ev et al.
This article described a girl who allegedly could see objects illuminated by a magnetic field with her temples, crown and her chest (the article specifies, "near the chakras of Anahata and Manipur"). The authors explained this phenomenon by the fact that the girl's forehead "emitted" a special radiation (not registered by any physical device), which, after interacting with magnetic fields, was recorded by her crown and chest … It's funny, isn't it?
It is strange, but the authors of this article, describing such a sensational discovery, for some reason did not even bother to conduct control experiments with a double blind method to make sure that this mysterious girl with "magnetic vision" really sees something unusual, and not just tells the experimenters what they want to hear. Also, the article did not contain any statistical assessment of the results obtained. Soon there were many devastating reviews of this article, written by leading specialists of the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University.
As a result, Pytiev's article, like Baker's article in the West, completely compromised the very topic of research on magnetoreception in humans. More articles on this topic in serious scientific journals, as far as I know, have not been published, and this topic itself in our country was discussed only by lovers of esotericism and parasciences.
The latest evidence
Years passed. It seemed that only animals can feel magnetic fields, and this ability, alas, is inaccessible to humans. However, last year, the journal Neuroscience unexpectedly published an article by American scientists from Louisiana State University), in which the existence of magnetoreception in humans was confirmed using objective methods.
The authors of the article recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) in 17 subjects, and at the same time the computer accidentally turned on and off the electromagnet, which creates a weak electromagnetic field, the induction of which was only twice the induction of the geomagnetic field. Then the segments of the EEG recording, synchronized with the inclusion of an artificial magnetic field, were averaged and calculated, the so-called evoked potentials, that is, the brain's responses to this stimulation.
The effect of a magnetic field on the human body has been known for a long time. This sign, placed near Stanford Medical Center, reads: “Stop! Strong magnetic field. Passage with a pacemaker or other implanted electronic devices and metal implants is prohibited! The health of persons with pacemakers or metal implants in the designated area is in serious danger. " Photo (Creative Commons license
): Eric Chan
Such methods are traditionally used to objectively identify subthreshold stimuli, that is, stimuli that the brain perceives but is not aware of. If the subjects did not react in any way to the inclusion of a weak electromagnetic field, then after averaging the segments of the EEG record, all the "noise" would be averaged and the record would look like a straight line. And if we assume that the encephalograph reacted precisely to the switching on or off of the electromagnet - that is, to the resulting electromagnetic fields - then the peak should appear almost instantly. A certain delay in the appearance of a peak clearly indicates that it is precisely the brain's response to a stimulus that is involved.
In 16 of 17 subjects, the brain response was observed 109–454 ms after the electromagnet was turned on. Moreover, interestingly, the greatest peak was observed in them in the occipital lobe of the brain, which is known to be responsible for visual perception.
These results indicate that a person can still feel a magnetic field, although he is not aware of it. Of course, it remains to wait for control experiments in other laboratories in order to consider this fact unambiguously established, but it is very likely that there will be no refutation here. And then we will have reason to congratulate each other on the appearance of a new feeling. All that remains is to figure out how to develop and use it.