Kind: captions
Language: en
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 will 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 yep it'll take about
eight minutes eight minutes perfect okay
all right i'm ready when you are but
before we do this let's meet the
researchers can you introduce yourself
interest myself ah my name is
shinshimojo i'm a professor in
neuroscience and experimental psychology
at here called tech 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
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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 dog where cats and 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
resemble those of magnetically active
bacteria and my colleagues in
neuroscience said wow this is hard to
believe you know it's impossible but a
lot of biologists from the office said
well it's a matter of course humans are
not you know exceptional 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 to
basically home and they got 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
there's a controversy lots of positive
reports and failure of 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 a visual scene swinging and
stuff like that so this is the test
chamber and i'll turn on the light
yeah
so this is um our
is that the way we get in
yes exactly that's the the way you have
to crouch in so i'm gonna i'm gonna
crawl under there yes can you sit down
there
hang on this is too cool
i really like it
what whose chair is that it's uh it just
happened to be you know i just said yeah
joe's reclining chair not used for this
purpose but it turns 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 and then there's no
sound or vision or tactile or any other
additional stimulation because we are
tapping onto 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 festivities can i hop
in there and just have a look oh yes
okay oh yeah just yeah
i mean
i feel like for my job i have been in
more weird
um
soundproof boxes
than most people these black coils here
do these create the magnetic field no 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
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 the chamber and in the center
of the chamber where your head and torso
is going to be
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
going to 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 um 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 going to want you to
use your left hand to hold it here
because it's easier on the front yeah
just hold it 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 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 imagine 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 envision or
audition or touch your alpha will be
suppressed
and that is the signature of 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 going to 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 ding
the experiment is starting you can see
that's our
starting point
in terms of direction it will
vary from
two preset values
so you can see there that was a field
rotation
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okay this is like
one of the more glamorous ah there we go
that's what i was not meant to hit thank
you
sorry about that i could see that
happening you can see that coming
i was thinking about saying some of 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
counterclockwise 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 counterclockwise
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 percent
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
a molecule to change but it's implicit
in 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 disability for their navigation
even the modern 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 studies 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
headphone some young 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
um they don't make you smarter
um
you can't um 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
the 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
can 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
just 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
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you