currentsinbiology:Humans—like other animals—may sense Earth’s magnetic fieldA study published today
currentsinbiology:Humans—like other animals—may sense Earth’s magnetic fieldA study published today offers some of the best evidence yet that humans, like many other creatures, can sense Earth’s magnetic field. But it doesn’t settle other questions that have swirled around this contentious idea for decades: If we do have a subconscious magnetic sense, does it affect our behavior? And does it arise from an iron mineral found in our brains, as the authors believe?“I think this paper will make quite a splash,” says Peter Hore, a physical chemist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. But, he adds, “Independent replication is crucial.”The new study, published in eNeuro, found that the rotating field sometimes elicited a marked drop in waves of the α frequency, which are typical of a brain that is awake but at rest. Many EEG studies use α to track responses to visual information, says Mary MacLean, a neuroscientist at the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the work. A change in α, she says, “is generally a good indicator of the degree to which people are engaging in sensory processing.” -- source link