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Ball Lightning Caused By Magnetic Hallucinations
KentuckyFC writes "Transcranial magnetic stimulation involves placing a human in a rapidly changing magnetic field powerful enough to induce eddy currents in the brain. Focus the field in the visual cortex, for example, and the induced eddys cause the subject to 'see' lights that appear as discs and lines. Move the field within the cortex and the subject sees the lights move too. Physicists have calculated that the fields associated with certain kinds of multiple lightning strikes are powerful enough to induce the same kind of visual hallucinations in anybody unlucky enough to be within 200 meters or so. These fields ought to induce hallucinations that would take the form of luminous lines and balls that float in front of the subject's eyes, an effect that would explain observations otherwise classed as ball lightning, say the scientists."
Doesn't explain people having captured ball lightning on video from in some cases miles away.
Sent from your iPad.
Feds will ban Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on the assumption that it can be used recreationally.
I can see the fnords!
Is how effective Tin foil might be at stopping the hallucinations. They haven't stopped since I started wearing my hat, I'm beginning to doubt they are hallucinations like my doctor tells me.
Now that they know how to create this phenomenon, this fad could catch on and lure our children into magnetic hallucination parties! Won't somebody think of the children!
There are four lights!
Unless you actually got hit by the lightning.
What it does explain is the convoluted plot of Lost. That's not a smoke monster, Freckles. Just electromagnetic hallucinations.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
For those that suffer from migraines, these lights and balls should be familiar as "aura", or scintilating scotoma. For migraineurs, these lights last longer because they are caused by changing bloodflow to the occipital lobe over a longer period of time. It most assuredly activates the same neurons that this magnetic stimulation of neurons produces. I would not be surprised of reports of concomitant parosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, with the display of ball-lightning caused by magnetic fields.
Typical of Slashdot. From TFA: "That's an interesting idea: that a large class of well-reported phenomenon may be the result of hallucinations induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation."
From the Summary:
Ball Lightening Caused by Magnetic Hallucinations
From 'interesting idea' to stated fact in record time!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
My dad saw ball lightning at the warehouse he managed a few years ago. A ball went from the warehouse floor in to the office area (I believe it went through a wall to do this) and stopped above an employee's head, where it dissipated suddenly.
I just can't see this entirely being a hallucination if it can be tracked with your eyes.
Perhaps this explains the appearance of a giant pair of scissors in the sky when performing the iron pyramid experiment.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
While this is interesting research, what this has to do with the real phenomenon of ball lightning, I have no idea.
As a famous scientist once said: "My visual hallucination effectively knocked over a tree in its path".
I've often wondered why I "see" spinning disks (as the article described) when on road trips or on hot days. It's very odd to explain, the best analogy I could come up with was a "Video game style targeting system"... But seeing it explained as a hallucination makes sense.
--alop
Transcranial Magnetic Stmulation is used to ameliorate auditory hallucinations in schizophrenics.
ideopath @ play
There has been a story in my family of ball lightning going through the old family house. And everyone thought it was really weird because even thought they saw it, they thought it would be impossible for such a thing to occur. That something would catch on fire, or the ball would be attracted to the wiring in the home instead of just floating away down the hall. Multiple people saw it, so they felt it could not be people "just imagining things". But if it was a hallucination created by eddy currents in the whole family (they were all in the kitchen together) that explains everything quite nicely.
Way to go science, 50 year old family mystery is solved.
A whole branch of my family was fathered by ball lightning! Happened back in the Great Storm of 1806. Granted, they always were the black sheep at the family reunions, but they were certainly real!
Now tell me that's a hallucination. I dare you!
Taken from a comment on the TFA's commentary, and it proves a point. I've always wondered why we tend to take scientific recreations in a lab and automatically apply them to phenomena to the world outside the lab as "absolutely the truth". Are we that desperate for a logical-sounding answer that we'll immediately say "these phenomena were reproduced in this lab using these specific resources and therefore this must automatically happen every time similar phenomena happens under uncontrolled circumstances"
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Apparently it also affects cameras too.
http://www.google.com/images?q=ball+lightning&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=48vpS-vZB8T7lwfijKn_Cg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQsAQwAA
I did NOT ingest LSD.
Yours In Houston,
K. Trout
This is your brain on lightning. Get the picture?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
There's references from 2008 on the WikiPedia article for ball lightning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
The only paranormal phenomenon here is the granting of funds for this research.
I saw ball lightning years ago and my ex-wife who was setting next to me saw it as well. I saw a rare form that was around a foot in diameter but it only lasted for around a second. Other accounts I've read had multiple witnesses and several involved physical contact, in one a woman actually hit it with a tennis racket and it fell to the ground before it popped out of existence. There are reports of it burning holes in objects including a sleeping bag, I've seen pictures of the damage. Also it's often described as having a popping sound when it disappears. There's even historic accounts of people killed by it. Add to this multiple photos I've seen of ball lightning. Sorry but a poor explanation of all the evidence.
... until the conspiracy theorists start wearing tin-foil hats in lightning storms? Double or nothing anyone?
Perhaps this explains the "UFO" sightings by aviation crew and some astronauts? I would suspect that as one increases their altitude, they increase their odds of experiencing such an occurrence: with a statistical spike as one approaches/escapes the earth's atmosphere. As such this could even cause a "mass hallucination".
That being said, I find it rather troubling that now "mass hallucinations" could be highly probable in environments with high magnetic activity. Perhaps astronauts should start carrying magnetic field detection gear (assuming they aren't already).
I don't care how fast you do it, there's only two albums.
Not so silly now am I.
Regards,
Tin Foil Hat Man
Can anyone explain why people are so interested in this? I never really understood it.
-Xoltri
What about cases where multiple people see the same phenomenon, behaving the same way?
Proverbs 21:19
Either the hallucinations can be transmitted via video too, or a piece of this airplane caught fire and fell off.... Looks like "ball lightning" anyway - whether it is or not I leave to the physicists.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm not a neurologist, so school me. But look, we all know when we are having ocular hallucinations. Press on your closed eyes for a while and open them. There's no perception of depth to it; no sense of "oh, that hallucination looks like it's hovering over that hill 30 meters away." Now, these are allegedly affecting the visual cortex directly, but still...
How would a magnetic field hallucination within the visual cortex create a sense of binocular depth, and consistently track to a static location in space, within each input to the cortex? It's _obvious_, isn't it, when we hallucinate? Just flick your eyes a bit and move your focus, and watch the hallucination follow.
My grandfather told me about when a ball lightning came in thou the door in the basement, made a 90 degree turn in front of him and passed thou the door to the boiler room. And then went in the boiler.
It was roughly 20 cm big. And left a burn mark on both doors. And there was the smell of ozone. So even if what he saw could be explained be a hallucination, it still would not explain the burn marks after the ball.
Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid.
I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line,
it's alright, you are forgiven.
This effect can be easily prevented by the judicious use of tinfoil headgear; hence it's popularity in areas subject to lightning strikes.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Just turn your head. If you still see it, maybe it's not really there. Was it really necessary to mess with people's brains using expensive equipment to come up with this theory?
My sister witnessed the incident.
Hallucination? Can a hallucination start a perfectly round fire where it entered the house, then melt the telephone ringer coils that it disappeared into with a loud bang?
What we saw was a bright orb about a foot across bouncing slowly around the house for a few seconds. It did no damage except where it entered and exited the house
This actually sounds plausible, I did some "ball lightening" earlier today, and I was sort of hallucinating at one point.
Yesterday I watched Jesse Ventura's conspiracy show on Youtube. The subject matter was HAARP. The scientist that Ventura's people interviewed described the exact same events as being effects that can be induced by use of the HAARP array. Got to wonder now how much of what else was said of it could possibly be true!
-Oz
Eh, I dunno. Some types of hallucinations are somewhat less obvious. Mushrooms and LSD come to mind. Also, auditory hallucinations (the type often caused by severe sleep deprivation) definitely have volume and distance. It makes sense that it would be possible to manipulate the visual cortex in some way as to cause hallucinations that also contain depth perception. High powered EM fields directed at specific parts of your brain are somewhat more exotic than "pressing on your eyeballs" after all.
Pff, everyone known that Ball Lightning is caused by tapping three Mountains.
Imagine the very complex and dynamic standing wave of the magnetic field around a biological brain. Can it be duplicated with a machine to produce coherent thoughts in a biological brain by magnetic induction? Can two biological brains induce such coherent activity in each other? Could this be the basis of the legendary powers of telepathy that so many have claimed to possess throughout history?
CG Pin-Ups?
Yeah, I pointed that out above.
Hallucinations only appear to have 'real locations' if your brain is generated them, aka, you're mentally ill.(1) The eyes or the visual cortex generating them is pretty easy to figure out. Moving your head or eyes would, due, make the object move in sync. So I have trouble seeing anyone getting fooled by that at all.
If you only see if for a second or so, sure, you can get fooled...we've all thought we saw something out of the corner of our eye, or opened a door and perceived something that wasn't there before our brain corrected itself.
But not only does 'ball lightning' show up for longish periods of time, I have trouble conceiving that people would actually be this stupid in the first place if it didn't...if I see some bright flash and it goes away, I assume, duh, that was some trick of my eyes.
1) And it doesn't even really work like that. You just 'perceive' them without them really being in any location or whatever. It's like dream logic, where your bicycle ride can somehow include a conversation with your aunt. Somehow, they are there, talking to you.
Seeing invisible-to-everyone-else people walking around in your environment is just TV. Same with seeing a floating glowing ball that you can wander around and look at from multiple sides. Not one has ever imagined that, using their eyes, visual cortex, or brain. There is simply no possible biological way to do that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have seen ball lightning, it can't have been induced by magnetic waves I was wearing my tinfoil hat at the time!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
ufo and alien sightings?
I've been seeing them 4 years. Whatever.
I would not be surprised of reports of concomitant parosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, with the display of ball-lightning caused by magnetic fields.
That's unlikely as the reported experiment are focused on the visual cortex in the occipital region (Visual region stimulated => Only visual hallucination).
But theoretically by focusing on other sensory regions, other kind of hallucination could be produced.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It would be helpful if people actually read reports of ball lightning sightings before they jump to conclusions.
Is this a possible explanation of some ball lightning sightings? Well it could be.
Does it explain them all? Definitely not. Ball lightning has been observed many times to do lots of damage. It has also been observed in areas where there has been no lightning or storm activity at all. Including sunny days. Read up on it then make up your own mind. This is not a simple phenomenon. No one explanation seems to explain it all and perhaps there are multiple physical mechanisms to create the reported glowing balls of light with wildly different properties. I read a monograph some years back which detailed about 2 dozen different scientific theories and many good witness accounts showing the mismatch to each of these theories. Well there have been even more theories since, each of them compelling and reasonable ... and contradictory. The real problem of course is that the data is from witnesses, it is not repeatable so the theories cannot be tested against each other.
Bitter and proud of it.
My neighbor, myself, and a baby sister saw ball lightning when I was a kid. We all saw it in the same place traveling the same direction. Another neighbor in a different house saw it just before it leapt into the house where I was and seemingly disappeared into the fridge. If it was a hallucination how could all of our experiences be exactly the same?
I saw ball lightning from about 6 to 10 inches away, eye level, then it slowly dropped to my knees, then slowly back to eye level. /I still swear it was sentient and it communicated. //The other room was the only safe place I could think of, for it to hit. ///Yeah, maybe it DID influence my brain waves.....
It hovered a second, then shot to the other room and blew the base board off the wall.
The nails that held on the base board were melted, but the wood was fine.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
This does explain all the Alien Sightings over the years. They were simply hallucinations!
Be yourself and aim high!
Everybody who ever has experienced any of these visual disturbances should be aware of the concept of form constants
I think I may actually know the one you are talking about. It's like leapord spots spiraling inward, and they tend to be darker than the background. Solution? Drink more water. No kidding. However, by the time you see them it's usually too late.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't know about others.
I started having hallucinations some time ago. The hallucinatios were extremely complex... auditory, visual, tactile. Sometimes I saw smoke and it was exactly like the real thing.
Even though I knew it was not real there was no way to convince myself during an episode.
After a while I went to a psychiatrist and take meds for my disorder now. No episodes since then.
You underestimate the power of the human brain.
I've seen this phenomenon from just a few feet away. Immediately after a massive thunderstorm, a ball entered through my bedroom window, and exited through another at the bottom of the stairs. The hallucination theory is interesting, but doesn't explain two partially-melted window screens.
I've seen ball lightning. So have the people that I've been with when I saw it. We would have to be hallucinating at the same time, and we would have to be hallucinating the same thing.
Bryan
Years ago (20-25?) I read an article in Radio Electronics magazine where they were artificially creating ball lightning. There were photographs. They had modified the electrical system of a diesel locomotive; basically put in a huge knife switch that would let them cut the current in an instant. The resulting arc would heat the interior up by several degrees instantly, and produce ball lightning that would bounce around the cab of the engine.
Never seen any myself, but Indiana isn't exactly a normal place to see it.
--Rubinstien
Only on Slashdot...
so the ball of blue fire that came out of the telephone in our kitchen during an intense thunderstorm, dancing across the room, knocking my mother ass-over-teakettle before grounding itself in the clock on the stove (ruining it) was JUST something i hallucinated?
If this were true, we'd have a whole lot of trippin' RF Engineers running around.
While RF Engineers are an interesting bunch over-all, I haven't heard of any who see ball lightning at Radio, TV and other communications transmitter sites.
FAIL
This might also explain people seeing angels and gods during violent storms? Or maybe they're just hallucinating because they are gullible? Seems quite hypocritical when a Christian claims that ball lightning does exist because no one can prove it's existence.
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/presse/pi/05_06_pi.html
FAQs are evil.
Run for the hills! The Vogons are upon us! Run!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
...to the "strobe-light" effect I sometimes see late at night when I'm trying to fall asleep? Close my eyes, and I see fluctuating "flashes" behind my eyelids for a few seconds that don't seem to be coming from any lights in the environment. Maybe some sporadic electromagnetic or other RF interference?
Didn't Wesley Crusher and Ensign Lefler have to save the Enterprise from a game that worked like that?
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/episode/68518.html
I remember seeing articles on how to make ball lightning in a microwave, complete with video. Then again, people may be lumping a lot of things under the header ball lightning.
Honestly, what you could create in a microwave wasn't that impressive, especially considering I had been brought up being read old Reader's Digest stories about ball lightning basically stalking people. I'd assumed that was just fiction (though they claimed it was true for whatever that's worth), but maybe there's something to the hallucination theory.
I was fifteen when lightning stuck about 15 feet away from me.
I saw the air get bright blue, and then I was getting up off of the ground. I never heard the thunder, I felt it. The shock wave literally knocked me on my ass.
Afterward, I had three separate "epileptic episodes" where I was convinced I "SAW GOD". However, now I know that all the synapses in body brain were firing all at the same time, making me feel and think EVERYTHING at once. (((If this is death, then bring it on!)))
But alas, I know that it was just an electro-chemical response to the shock to my system. Reality can be quite a let-down when you analyze things from a scientific standpoint.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
'Smoke' is not a thing. You were almost certain imagining 'things smoking', not 'smoke' per se.
For example, seeing things 'glowing', aka 'auras', is a not uncommon effect of migraines. Your visual system adds glowing light around and things, and that moves correctly three dimensionally. (Because it's being added to objects in the processed image of your field of view.)
Other hallucinations can happen in the same way. You can hallucinate that something else is invisible. Not that you can't see it, that it's invisible but you can see it. Your brain assigns it the attribute of 'invisible'.
Or 'fake', that's a pretty common one. You can see people and think they're fake, or tables are fake, or whatever. This is often a 'hallucination', because things in photographs look real.
And you yourself might have hallucinated something 'smoking'.
But all these have one thing in common. It's your brain taking something that actually exists in your field of view, something with actual coordinates, and altering it in some manner. Of course this object moves correctly in space, because it's actually there, you're just seeing it wrong.
Of course, there is a way to hallucinate and add things, but you add things everywhere. For example, you can imagine a room is full or water, or full of, tada, smoke. (An especially terrifying one is the entire room being full of fire.) Maybe that's what happened with you.
That is pretty much the only two ways your brain can 'add' things. Either it edits something else or it adds them everywhere...or they're clearly hallucinations because they don't occupy space correctly. (Or, like I said, were so dream-like they don't occupy space at all, they're just 'here'.)
Your brain has no ability to add thing that exist at certain unoccupied points in space and keep up with them as you move around and look at them from different directions. There simply is no possible brain mechanism to do that. It would requite you running your visual cortex backwards or something.
OTOH, you could be so screwed up you couldn't actually tell that said objects weren't occupying space correctly, but that would require such a high level of 'broken brain' that it would be fairly obvious if witnesses to ball lightning were that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This theory supports an incident that happened when I was still living at home. My family was gathered in the living room and kitchen when lightning must have struck our house (or close by). We each saw ball lightning appear before us at varying distances, but always in whatever direction each of us was looking. We weren't seeing the same instance of the phenomenon. Mine appeared about 20 ft away and moved a short distance before disappearing. My mom's appeared outside the window she was facing.
That would all strongly depend on where in the cortex the stimulation happens. If you consider that it takes the raw input of the optic nerves and integrates it all into your visual perception of the world, there must be a point far enough up the chain where it will appear to have depth (after the point where the two separate visual fields are integrated) for example. Your eyes make small movements all the time that don't show up in your perception of the world. At some point, the cortex manages all of that, so a stimulation above that point won't necessarily follow your eye movements.
This only works for some people, but could be enlightening. Look directly ahead for a moment. Without moving your head or eyes, cover your right eye. Now shift your gaze to the far right, far left, far right, and back to directly ahead. pay attention to the right peripheral of your field of view. You will see the image there distinctly at first, then darkening and breaking up. You saw it because your visual cortex expected to be able to see there and it had data for that area. It faded and broke up as real input from your covered eye (darkness) conflicted with the conscious constructed image.
All this time I thought it was caused by Braveheart lifting his quilt!
popped out of a wall socket in my living room when a lighting bolt struck a pole near the corner of my house. The power cord to a Thomas clock plugged into that socket melted. The ball had the size of a soccer ball and the color of a basketball, except that it was iridescent. It floated across the living room a distance of about 12 feet, gradually settling down and touching the carpet, where it disappeared in a flash and left a burned patch about three inches in diameter. This was the first and only plasma ball (ball lightening?) I ever saw.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Ball Lightening Caused by Magnetic Hallucinations
It's clearly a bogus theory. In my experience, ball lightening is usually caused by filling it up with helium.
I'd thought that Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xeon, and Radon is used in a Geissler device (whether globular or tubular, in shape) rather than Helium?
If we can perceive lighting directly by magnetic-stimulation of the brain, rather than through perceiving reflected illumination from surrounding objects . . . . . well, that just means we're going to be bumping into all those objects that don't moderate the magnetic-stimulation in any way at all!?!?
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Perhaps this explains the "UFO" sightings by aviation crew and some astronauts? I would suspect that as one increases their altitude, they increase their odds of experiencing such an occurrence: with a statistical spike as one approaches/escapes the earth's atmosphere. As such this could even cause a "mass hallucination".
. . .
But that doesn't explain, in any way at all, the Nordic-type EBEs looking back through the portholes, and miming: "Please stop exploding those nasty, contaminating, nuclear devices on your planet! They are affecting our transmission of Magnetic Hallucinations direct to your cranial stimulus centers, and blocking our essential message!"
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"