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.
“Among the 14 studies reviewed, five supported the idea, eight contradicted it, and one ended with mixed results.”
They talk about a few studies with positive results, but then share this:
“not every study shows positive effects. One 2023 study of 1,000 people found that listening to binaural beats at home while taking a test reduced their performance, while silence or listening to other sounds had no impact.”
“Some early research suggests they may affect your brainwaves in ways that may help with attention, anxiety, sleep, and more. But other studies found unclear and mixed results. There aren't scientifically proven guidelines for how best to use binaural beats, or whether they can improve your mental health and thinking.”
It also mentions “they didn’t stop attention from declining over time.”
When asked if binaural beats work, Google’s AI answer confidently starts with the word “Yes”, but fails to back it up with scientific references. And I found some commercial sales listicles (e.g., Ohm Store) and YouTube videos that strongly claim binaural beats are amazing, but also have little to back it up.
My personal experience listening to binaural beats is it helps with focus on coding about the same amount as listening to color noise or rain & thunder or other non-musical audio tracks. Listening to anything masks office chatter and distracting noises.
Nothing as in lasting effects, or “nothing” as in you can’t hear the bineurality.
If the latter, it could be your headphones- and I assume you are using headphones, or the compression, or your ears might be non-equivalent in hearing capability.
If the former, then thats the point OP is making.
At least for me, the sound is strangely pleasurable, not incredibly dissimilar to the kind of “multiple audio sources colliding into one nice stream” that you get from a real life orchestra.
I successfully used it during college (over 10 years ago) to regulate my general brain state, particularly at deadlines. I mainly used beats to maintain focus, trigger creativity/reflection and for power naps. Got me through some tough times.
I did the same thing around 20 years ago, but with just drum and bass, nothing "binaural" about it. Might work any genre of music, as long as you like it :) YMMV
How can you tell it is not a placebo? I guess it's just weird for me to think that it seems to do absolutely nothing to me, yet some people claim effects?
There use to be one Google video (out of many) that would completely fix my migraine in 3 minutes. Used it about 200 times for that. Hangovers, lack of sleep and spontaneous headaches. At other times it just gave great clarity, very refreshing regardless of the time of day.
I didn't use headphones. I had the link at the top of my blog menu. It was that important.
When Google video shut down I forgot to download it. Caused a slight panic lol The headaches now remind me of it but it is not the right mood to search and the videos online are all useless garbage.
I played it for a friend one time. He instantly put both hands on his head and screamed that I should shut it of immediately. He was really upset and thought I did it on purpose. Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
If I didn't find that video I'd be convinced it's bullshit.
> Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
It's very possible that even though everyone's brains are built from the same template, each brain is tuned uniquely, leading to different processing of the same stimuli (and conversely, perhaps similar processing of different stimuli) in various cases. The thought experiment that comes to mind is the possibility of 2 persons looking at objects of a particular colour, and agreeing for example that the colour is "red", but internally their brains are actually receiving different signals; it's the common language which makes it possible to share similar experiences.
FWIW, your first line by itself does not come off as a friendly reminder at all. If that’s all that was there before your edit, I can understand why it inspired some reactions. The edit suggesting it’s everyone else’s fault isn’t going to help either, but I will take your comment as well intentioned and vote it up, it sucks your friend had eye cancer, and it’s a good idea to get preventative checkups.
Even as a friendly reminder, an implication of your first line is that binaural beats should work, and that if it doesn’t something is wrong. Did you mean to imply that? If so do you have an answer to the question about scientific support?
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
It should have been called confabulation, hallucination is not the correct analog, tech bros simply used the first word they thought of and it unfortunately stuck.
Undesirable output might be more accurate, since there is absolutely no difference in the process of creating a useful output vs a “hallucination” other than the utility of the resulting data.
I had a partially formed insight along these lines, that LLMs exist in this latent space of information that has so little external grounding. A sort of deeamspace. I wonder if embodying them in robots will anchor them to some kind of ground-truth source?
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.
You know the mechanism of TMS is not mysterious. It requires no magnetoreception or "stochastic resonance". It is simply inducing electrical currents to modulate neural activity. Its effects are consistent with the known laws of physics, known properties of neurons, and decades of neuroscience research.
I think you're conflating one question with another. The "why" in question is why altering neural activity in that way results in clinical effects. It is not the "why" TMS alters neural activity.
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... )
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?
This is further info because I think it’s interesting rather that any sort of correction but fMRI doesn’t quite measure blood flow - at least not directly.
Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have slightly different magnetic properties. So the fMRI is trying to detect from that how oxygenated the blood is, with the assumption that active areas are using more oxygen which causes a small dip then blood flow increases so then there’s an increase that follows over about 5-6 seconds. I don’t know if more advanced things are used now but when I messed about with it you’d measure the change then apply a 6s linear convolution to the signal to estimate activity.
There’s an interesting set of layers of assumptions in all this, and to me the idea that the mri part works at all seems like wild magic.
> 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.
Mainly there's not remotely enough evidence to justify the claims. I don't even know if the hypothesis is impossible (though it certainly needs to explain why consciousness survives exposure to strong magnetic fields, etc), but the idea of long range, detailed internal communication in the brain by magnetic fields needs much, much more evidence to be taken seriously. And that's putting it gently.
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.
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)
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.
(Slightly more seriously, the diamagnetic properties of Sn would in actuality very much interfere with the B1 field modulation of the (f)MRI sequence; and disturb the local B0 homogeneity; and thus disturb the experimental results.
Although that was of course not what I meant when initially responding)
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.
Yeah, synesthesia combined with being attuned to body language and emotions could account for lot. I even remember there was some anecdote of a famous physicist (Feynman?) who investigated this soviet mind reader and found that he was picking up on subtle bodily clues.
“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?
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.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Of course, the substrate being researched back then is different from human wetware.
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.
Just the fact that your brain 'sums' those signals somewhere, to let you hear that interference frequency, has always fascinated me.
Do you have a link to the pmeumatic headphones study you mention?
I did some digging, I couldn't find the paper but I found a reference to it on a wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe#Hemi-Sync
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.
I wonder if they tested by running the experiment without a human in to get a baseline measurement.
Is there any actual science behind binaural beats? They do nothing in my experience…
Quick google search… from Popular Science:
“Among the 14 studies reviewed, five supported the idea, eight contradicted it, and one ended with mixed results.”
They talk about a few studies with positive results, but then share this:
“not every study shows positive effects. One 2023 study of 1,000 people found that listening to binaural beats at home while taking a test reduced their performance, while silence or listening to other sounds had no impact.”
(Here’s the study referred to: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372220600_Reverse_e...)
https://www.popsci.com/science/do-binaural-beats-work-focus/
WebMD has no clear results either, summarizing:
“Some early research suggests they may affect your brainwaves in ways that may help with attention, anxiety, sleep, and more. But other studies found unclear and mixed results. There aren't scientifically proven guidelines for how best to use binaural beats, or whether they can improve your mental health and thinking.”
It also mentions “they didn’t stop attention from declining over time.”
https://www.webmd.com/balance/what-are-binaural-beats
When asked if binaural beats work, Google’s AI answer confidently starts with the word “Yes”, but fails to back it up with scientific references. And I found some commercial sales listicles (e.g., Ohm Store) and YouTube videos that strongly claim binaural beats are amazing, but also have little to back it up.
My personal experience listening to binaural beats is it helps with focus on coding about the same amount as listening to color noise or rain & thunder or other non-musical audio tracks. Listening to anything masks office chatter and distracting noises.
“nothing”, how?
Nothing as in lasting effects, or “nothing” as in you can’t hear the bineurality.
If the latter, it could be your headphones- and I assume you are using headphones, or the compression, or your ears might be non-equivalent in hearing capability.
If the former, then thats the point OP is making.
At least for me, the sound is strangely pleasurable, not incredibly dissimilar to the kind of “multiple audio sources colliding into one nice stream” that you get from a real life orchestra.
I successfully used it during college (over 10 years ago) to regulate my general brain state, particularly at deadlines. I mainly used beats to maintain focus, trigger creativity/reflection and for power naps. Got me through some tough times.
I did the same thing around 20 years ago, but with just drum and bass, nothing "binaural" about it. Might work any genre of music, as long as you like it :) YMMV
How can you tell it is not a placebo? I guess it's just weird for me to think that it seems to do absolutely nothing to me, yet some people claim effects?
There use to be one Google video (out of many) that would completely fix my migraine in 3 minutes. Used it about 200 times for that. Hangovers, lack of sleep and spontaneous headaches. At other times it just gave great clarity, very refreshing regardless of the time of day.
I didn't use headphones. I had the link at the top of my blog menu. It was that important.
When Google video shut down I forgot to download it. Caused a slight panic lol The headaches now remind me of it but it is not the right mood to search and the videos online are all useless garbage.
I played it for a friend one time. He instantly put both hands on his head and screamed that I should shut it of immediately. He was really upset and thought I did it on purpose. Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
If I didn't find that video I'd be convinced it's bullshit.
> Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
It's very possible that even though everyone's brains are built from the same template, each brain is tuned uniquely, leading to different processing of the same stimuli (and conversely, perhaps similar processing of different stimuli) in various cases. The thought experiment that comes to mind is the possibility of 2 persons looking at objects of a particular colour, and agreeing for example that the colour is "red", but internally their brains are actually receiving different signals; it's the common language which makes it possible to share similar experiences.
I'm now super interested in that video, what was it like?
Did you ever find the video again or another like it?
go visit a doctor.
edit: lol. downvotes on friendly reminder, what a classic.
my friend was not sure what everyone sees on 3d TVs. then got rid of it. later it turned out it was because of eye cancer.
take care.
FWIW, your first line by itself does not come off as a friendly reminder at all. If that’s all that was there before your edit, I can understand why it inspired some reactions. The edit suggesting it’s everyone else’s fault isn’t going to help either, but I will take your comment as well intentioned and vote it up, it sucks your friend had eye cancer, and it’s a good idea to get preventative checkups.
Even as a friendly reminder, an implication of your first line is that binaural beats should work, and that if it doesn’t something is wrong. Did you mean to imply that? If so do you have an answer to the question about scientific support?
Two main reactions:
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
If a camera can see your eyes, why can't you?
Mirror sold separately.
If this were true wouldn’t fMRI machines cause either loss of consciousness or extreme hallucinations?
I believe in dead salmon, they do.
Thank you for the giggle, I misread this as a statement of faith and a non-sequitur.
Yeah, really needed the comma on the left side of the parenthesis.
I had an fMRI and also believe in dead salmon now, it's a common side effect but it's worth it for the diagnostic data they get.
They cause hallucinations in dead salmon? I find that hard to believe.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...
I'm not 100% sure I'd call that a hallucination, but it's close enough and interesting enough that I'm happy to stand corrected.
When improper use of a statistical model generates bogus inferences in generative AI, we call the result a "hallucination"...
It should have been called confabulation, hallucination is not the correct analog, tech bros simply used the first word they thought of and it unfortunately stuck.
Undesirable output might be more accurate, since there is absolutely no difference in the process of creating a useful output vs a “hallucination” other than the utility of the resulting data.
I had a partially formed insight along these lines, that LLMs exist in this latent space of information that has so little external grounding. A sort of deeamspace. I wonder if embodying them in robots will anchor them to some kind of ground-truth source?
Loss of consciousness seems equally unlikely.
True, though an easier mistake to make, I imagine.
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.
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...
You know the mechanism of TMS is not mysterious. It requires no magnetoreception or "stochastic resonance". It is simply inducing electrical currents to modulate neural activity. Its effects are consistent with the known laws of physics, known properties of neurons, and decades of neuroscience research.
Of course!
But also:
> Although the biology of why TMS works isn't completely understood, the stimulation appears to affect how the brain is working.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag...
I think it's reasonable to assume there's room to sharpen our understanding of it quite a bit.
I think you're conflating one question with another. The "why" in question is why altering neural activity in that way results in clinical effects. It is not the "why" TMS alters neural activity.
If you're interested in my personal chain-of-thought on the subject:
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!
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... )
The whole argument hinges on the idea of tuned resonance: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07988-2
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?
[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6063354/
This is further info because I think it’s interesting rather that any sort of correction but fMRI doesn’t quite measure blood flow - at least not directly.
Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have slightly different magnetic properties. So the fMRI is trying to detect from that how oxygenated the blood is, with the assumption that active areas are using more oxygen which causes a small dip then blood flow increases so then there’s an increase that follows over about 5-6 seconds. I don’t know if more advanced things are used now but when I messed about with it you’d measure the change then apply a 6s linear convolution to the signal to estimate activity.
There’s an interesting set of layers of assumptions in all this, and to me the idea that the mri part works at all seems like wild magic.
> 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
OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.
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.
The "malfunctioning" part is probably critical to replication.
It does sound pretty fantastic. What parts in particular to you find invalid, and why?
Mainly there's not remotely enough evidence to justify the claims. I don't even know if the hypothesis is impossible (though it certainly needs to explain why consciousness survives exposure to strong magnetic fields, etc), but the idea of long range, detailed internal communication in the brain by magnetic fields needs much, much more evidence to be taken seriously. And that's putting it gently.
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.
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)
FWIW that’s debunked
Good find. Here's a paper reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7887692_Sensed_pres...
Maybe there is a correlation between religion and the proximity to power lines.
The whole article is making a category mistake.
I don't want to be mean but this honestly reads like an AI-fueled delusion.
+1. The article itself hides it well, but the draft paper linked at the end is clearly 100% AIGC.
And the paper is clearly the ancestor to the article itself, based on the date (5dec -> 11dec)
That's exactly what I read out of it. I should yave stopped midway.
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.
> The result: some of those people showed a response to the magnetic fields on the EEG!
I wonder if that correlates with people who believe in astrology.
If you don’t want the EEG to capture your brainwaves you can wear a tin foil hat to lead the magnetic field astray.
tinfoil hat does NOT help with that. field tested
It works, weber you like it or not (⌐⊙_⊙)
(Slightly more seriously, the diamagnetic properties of Sn would in actuality very much interfere with the B1 field modulation of the (f)MRI sequence; and disturb the local B0 homogeneity; and thus disturb the experimental results. Although that was of course not what I meant when initially responding)
I'm getting blasted with (most likely) microwave auditory effect audio messages - tinfoil hat does not help
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.
Haha yes, I developed the same thing following a blackout! It was scary at first but now it doesn't bother me, sometimes can be distracting though.
> * 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.
Yeah, synesthesia combined with being attuned to body language and emotions could account for lot. I even remember there was some anecdote of a famous physicist (Feynman?) who investigated this soviet mind reader and found that he was picking up on subtle bodily clues.
I feel like the title should read: "If an Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why couldn't the brain?"
"Wouldn't" suggests that the brain is choosing not to. I'm not sure this is the case here.
“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).
Using your explanation, let me try this on an example, say the extinction event that killed off many dinosaur species.
If some mammalian species were able to survive this extinction event and subsequently flourish, why wouldn't dinosaur species?
Not sure that works for me. I'd put "couldn't".
This reminds me of the study about dog poop being aligned to magnetic north/south.[0]
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
>may be effected by biomagnetism
Bioelectricity too, which is just now starting to get properly researched (see Michael Levin's stuff).
See this pubpeer discussion about critiques of plausibility of the papers conclusions: https://pubpeer.com/publications/155C1B85C0680A558D4431D059A...
This is cited
Good point. I missed that, thanks.
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
That’s because that’s obviously mind writing not mind reading.
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?