This reminds me of Dr. Adrian Thompson's interesting findings from the mid-1990s on the influence of electromagnetic phenomena in evolvable hardware on FPGAs.
Reminds me of a study I read once on binaural beats[0], that found the effect disappeared when they used pneumatic (non-magnetic) headphones.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
My hypothesis for both this and most of the things stated in the article: the EEG machine itself is picking up the fluctuations in its EM environment.
I mean, what's more likely - that the binaural beats retune brain, or that someone forgot that any straight-ish piece of wire is a radio antenna, and the signal being seen comes straight from headphones? Using pneumatic headphones would make it go away too.
Not necessarily - I think it works like Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Your conscious system is System 2 - when it's not working correctly, you just fall back to System 1.
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
This feels just north of conspiracy theory logic. It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields, so how about if they can also sense extremely finely detailed fields in a way that solves long-standing philosophical and medical problems? Here are some supporting coincidences that have any number of alternate explanations, but it would sure be cool if this whole tower of conjecture was true, right? If you've seen conspiracy-theory debunks, the resemblance is rather strong.
This paper starts to go downhill around "The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness".
The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing,
in a rather approximate way.
The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.
This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."
That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?
> It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields
It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.
But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.
> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness
There was a comment years/decades ago on slashdot about someone walking under a malfunctioning ceiling-hung security CRT TV, and feeling like they were hit on the head when they walked under it. The assumption was that the TV had an abnormally large magnetic field (or the person was particularly sensitive).
I’ve tried to replicate it, but my chances have become slim-to-none with CRTs going out of fashion.
Then how can we exist around large magnetic fields without them affecting us mentally - no forgetting, no dropping unconscious, no trippy psychedelic experiences - seemingly nothing at all? How come our mains electricity does not not act on our minds analogously to a blowtorch on our skin, or a hydraulic press on our bones?
MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...
(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )
Hmm this leads me to recall a bunch of ancient pseudoscientific sounding beliefs and see whether or not they might be plausibly explained by this mechanism:
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.
I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.
I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
> * Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
If any of it was possible, it would be easily scientifically provable by very simple experiments. The fact that it hasn't been proven while people would have very high motivations to prove it, suggests it's very probably not happening.
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:
1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).
2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
Contrast this with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and claims this can induce the feeling of religiosity in people: you may believe in god, because your ferromagnetic particles align to believe in god in the right magnetic field..
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
Then why aren't we totally losing it when immersed in incredibly powerful magnetic fields inside an MRI machine? I'm pretty sure, that 1.5-3T field will totally down ANY useful signal.
I agree. It’s an inversion of the usual pattern: AI-generated “thoughts”, written up by a human.
I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.
The brain could be using the weak magnetic field to glean info on what the brain is thinking...or you know, the brain could use the fact that its electrically connected to...the brain.
“Wouldn't” is being used in the logical-conditional sense, not in the sense of willingness, requesting, nor opinion.
It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).
whenever I remind about mind reading - I get down voted and called schizophrenic. it's worse - tech is being actively used to sway large groups of population
Well how far do these fields propagate and do you need to read them from different directions to make sense of them? Think you’d want to answer those questions first. The sensors from the study are very close and all around the head. Also demonstrate there is some phenomenon to explain in the first place.
I’ve long thought it would be unsurprising if we eventually found evidence of certain kinds of telepathy. It would just be too damn useful, and tuning up one exquisitely complex magneto-electro-chemical instrument in close proximity to another similar one seems like a good way to at least get resonance. Who knows?
Borrible|2 months ago
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Of course, the substrate being researched back then is different from human wetware.
RobotToaster|2 months ago
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
boomskats|2 months ago
Do you have a link to the pmeumatic headphones study you mention?
bamboozled|2 months ago
TeMPOraL|2 months ago
I mean, what's more likely - that the binaural beats retune brain, or that someone forgot that any straight-ish piece of wire is a radio antenna, and the signal being seen comes straight from headphones? Using pneumatic headphones would make it go away too.
apolloartemis|2 months ago
ggm|2 months ago
rdgthree|2 months ago
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
If you model the brain this way, dementia looks like a clear breakdown of System 2, which is an interesting thought experiment even if the mechanics aren't perfect: https://1393.xyz/writing/alzheimers-is-the-symptom-not-the-p...
jstanley|2 months ago
moffkalast|2 months ago
andrewflnr|2 months ago
Animats|2 months ago
The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing, in a rather approximate way. The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.
This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."
That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?
[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6063354/
tgv|2 months ago
It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.
But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.
> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness
OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.
xattt|2 months ago
I’ve tried to replicate it, but my chances have become slim-to-none with CRTs going out of fashion.
skeledrew|2 months ago
nurettin|2 months ago
I wonder if that correlates with people who believe in astrology.
catoc|2 months ago
rdgthree|2 months ago
This was where I started pulling this thread (October 2025): https://1393.xyz/writing/could-the-root-cause-of-alzheimers-...
And this is an even further ancestor of the ideas (December 2023): https://1393.xyz/writing/are-we-only-conscious-while-were-le...
I'm operating off of my own subjective experience, and this idea lines up tightly with System 1 and System 2 in cognitive psychology.
It seems that many jump to "AI psychosis" when one mentions magnetic fields, but the evolutionary tree is very straightforward:
1. Nature evolves magnetoreception for navigation
2. Eventually, a brain in nature with magnetoreception accidentally "hears" its own magnetic field with with resonance
3. That lossy global summary of the brains ends up being an evolutionarily advantageous "higher-order sense"
4. Evolution sharpens the blade for many years
On first principles, that seems perfectly viable and even likely given that magnetoreception was such a boon for survival for all life.
Just glad others are finding it interesting!
jodrellblank|2 months ago
MRI machines at 3 Tesla field strength are 100,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and pulsed very fast. They affect the spin of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atoms in the body, but apparently have no effect on the person's brain or consciousness (or biomagnetite)? We wear headphones with electromagnetic coils pulsing music on the sides of our heads for hours at a time, with no effect. We use machine's powerful electric motors, work near them, we're surrounded by alternating currents in wires, some people experiment with Tesla Coils, MagLev capable of lifting trains, wireless power delivery...
(PS. Red / Arctic Foxes might be able to see the Earth's magnetic field and use it to help find mice to hunt; they listen for mice they can't see and jump-pounce into the snow and their jumps are successful at getting the mouse 80% of the time when they are facing North-East and only 18% of the time when they aren't - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foxes-use... )
krackers|2 months ago
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
BoxOfRain|2 months ago
For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.
I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.
I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
mewpmewp2|2 months ago
If any of it was possible, it would be easily scientifically provable by very simple experiments. The fact that it hasn't been proven while people would have very high motivations to prove it, suggests it's very probably not happening.
esperent|2 months ago
I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:
1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).
2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
griffzhowl|2 months ago
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/394488
ggm|2 months ago
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
tjpnz|2 months ago
rpastuszak|2 months ago
wildylion|2 months ago
neuah|2 months ago
152334H|2 months ago
And the paper is clearly the ancestor to the article itself, based on the date (5dec -> 11dec)
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
titanomachy|2 months ago
I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.
the_gipsy|2 months ago
b800h|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
haritha-j|2 months ago
mykowebhn|2 months ago
"Wouldn't" suggests that the brain is choosing not to. I'm not sure this is the case here.
cwillu|2 months ago
It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).
mapontosevenths|2 months ago
It seems a bit silly, but I suspect that more of our life may be effected by biomagnetism than we yet realize.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1742-9994-10-80
krackers|2 months ago
Bioelectricity too, which is just now starting to get properly researched (see Michael Levin's stuff).
congoe|2 months ago
ljlolel|2 months ago
Lapsa|2 months ago
renewiltord|2 months ago
orbitalfunction|2 months ago
[deleted]
orbitalfunction|2 months ago
[deleted]
tracerbulletx|2 months ago
zellyn|2 months ago