Name: Can Humans Sense Magnetic Fields?
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T18:39:15.000Z
Duration: 13 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Okay they're about to lock me in here and then use these electric coils to

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

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

but before we do this let's meet the researchers. Can you

introduce yourself?  -introduce myself? ah

in neuroscience and experimental psychology at here Caltech Biology

Connie you are the first author here and your paper has just been

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

bird species have a remarkable ability to find their way home, hence the use of

owed in part to their ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field

but they are not the only animals that do this

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

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

Given all these examples it seems more likely that

humans should have the ability to detect magnetic fields.

how humans could physically pick up the magnetic fields, consider that magnetite

crystals have been found in the brain that closely resembled those of

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

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

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.

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 I'm gonna I'm gonna crawl under there. -Yes and you sit down there...

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

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

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

my head is swiveling around in the Earth's magnetic field

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.

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.

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

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Can Humans Sense Magnetic Fields?

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