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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."
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!
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."
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!
Oh wow, I feel so proud, my first ever [citation needed]
Do I get a Slashdot "Achievement" for that?
I didn't expect anyone to take my comment seriously. Every video ever seen showing "ball lightning" appears to be either edited heavily or easily explained away as something else.
Carry on about your day, good sir.
Sent from your iPad.
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.
This is your brain on lightning. Get the picture?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
He'll certainly have a lot to answer for if it turns out those spinning disks are really just the uplifting, smiling faces of pure-hearted children!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
From 'interesting idea' to stated fact in record time!
almost, Saddam's WMDs are still in front by a fair margin
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Your grandmother has a Tyler Durden complex?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oooh yeah I'm really religiously "jumping" to conclusions. We've had DECADES to flesh this one out and the evidence is not there. The onus is on the claimant to prove the phenomenon exists, not on me to prove it doesn't. The religious ones are the ones who take flaky anecdotes and blurry photos as real evidence and reject any skepticism about their credulity as "hasty". No.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
...let me also point out that LSD doesn't explain real spiders.
HOLY SHIT THOSE THINGS ARE REAL?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
at first he thought it might be a UFO but then realized it was definitely from this earth
Dude, that's just what they want you to think!
Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal. I was terrified, alone in that darkness. Slowly daylight crept in through the bandages, and I could see, but something else had changed inside of me. That day I had my first headache.
When I was growing up on my grandpa's dairy farm, he used to tell us kids not to pee on the electric fence. When HE was pressed for further citation, his response was, indeed, "Ball lightning."
Don't anthropomorphize electricity, it makes it mad.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
> We've had DECADES to flesh this one out and the evidence is not there
a possibly fake observation hasn't been documented in incontrovertible ways after decades, therefore it does not exist. Galileo would be proud.