Experiments confirming the ability of a person to sense changes in the magnetic field were carried out.

It is known that many living organisms have the ability to sense a magnetic field (magnetoreception). These include, first and foremost, migratory species of birds and fish that use the “built-in compass” to create routes. In recent years, the ability to magnetoreception found in lobsters, snails, worms, newts and frogs. Have the ability and representatives of the cat family.

With the evidence base in relation to mammals, the situation is more complicated, but nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that it is also present in them. So, for example, little rams and forest mice place their nests, guided by the direction of the earth's magnetic field, and deer and cows in pasture place their bodies along it. Until recently, the ability of a person to have magnetoreception was questioned. Nevertheless, research and the search for analogies with the animal world did not stop, and on June 23, the journal Science published an article entitled “Joe Kirschvink” from Californian Technological Institute, which, after conducting a series of experiments, came to the conclusion that a person has a physiological mechanism responsible for the ability to sense the direction and change of magnetic fields. Prior to the publication of the research results, the scientist reported in April 2016 at a conference at the Royal Institute of Navigation in London.

Experiment
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Taking into account the specifics of the conditions and for the purity of the experiment, the latter was conducted in one of the university laboratories located two floors below the ground: a volunteer entered a room with a magnetic screen, the walls of which were covered with a layer of aluminum (Faraday cage). There was also a system of three mutually perpendicularly arranged rectangular coils (Merritt system), creating a uniform magnetic field passing through the center of the window. Due to this arrangement, the direction of the magnetic field can be flexibly changed by changing the magnitude of the current in the coils. The possible reaction of the brain to the magnetic field was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG): by the change in alpha waves recorded by the EEG, it was possible to judge the specifics of the changes occurring in the cerebral cortex.


_{Scheme of the experiment with Faraday cage, Merritt coil, non-magnetic chair, and encephalograph}

A series of eight tests was performed for an hour in automatic mode: in some cases, the magnetic field, approximate in absolute value to the field of the earth, slowly rotated around the subject's head, in others only the natural geomagnetic field affected the person. The tests alternated randomly and were conducted in complete darkness, so that neither the experimenter nor the subject knew which particular test was currently being conducted.

It turned out that when the magnetic field rotates counterclockwise, the alpha waves sharply weakened. The same thing happened when the magnetic field deflected down. Explanations for why alpha waves react to changes in a magnetic field oriented in this direction and do not react at all to changes if the field is directed oppositely have not yet been found, but it is quite likely that this may indicate the polarity of our “magnetic compass.

Conclusion: The ac magnetic field itself can affect the electrical currents of the brain that could simulate an EEG signal, but such an immediate effect would have to be displayed and recorded immediately. In this case, it is important, and this emphasizes Joe Kirschwink, that the nervous reaction was delayed by several hundred milliseconds - such a delay could have arisen because of the active reaction of the brain, that is, if a certain magnetically sensitive analyzer really worked in it.

So far, the collected statistics is based on experiments involving only 20 people, but, nevertheless, according to the author of the experiment, in all cases he managed to achieve a stable repeatability of results. Of course, even systematically repeated test results against the background of poor statistics cannot yet form the basis of a detailed scientific article with a sound evidence base, but Kirschwink is sure that he will be able to fill the required information gap in the very near future.

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