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.