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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!
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.
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."
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
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.
This is your brain on lightning. Get the picture?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Possibly, but it seems odd that they would all see the same thing in the same position acting in the same way.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
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.
Actually, this ability to be "tracked" is common in color/light optical hallucinations that are produced in the "front end" of your brain's visual processing, as opposed to more life-like and realistic (i.e. a deceased relative) visual hallucinations that occur father down the image-processing pipeline.
You can demonstrate this on your own: Look just to the side of a small, bright light source for a few seconds, then look away, ideally towards a blank wall or other plain surface. (Don't stare into the sun or a laser or anything... I don't want people responding with "OMG now I'm blind!") If you did not focus directly on the light source to begin with, the "echo" of the light should appear slightly off center. As you move your eyes and/or head to try and focus on the echo, it will move away as the spot is fixed with respect to your retina, giving you the illusion of being able to "track" this visual phenomenon across a room or other space.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
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 noticed that the majority of actual images of ball lightning that Google turns up fall into one of three categories: Illustrations, pictures of scientific experiments, or variations on this picture.
Though I do think that this description of ball lightning sounds as viable as the TMS theory. (Summary: A lightning strike heats fractal silicon "fluff balls" on the Earth's surface which can burn violently and hold themselves aloft like ashes from a fire.) Perhaps we are looking at two entirely different phenomenon: TMS causing the "cool" ball lightning which can mysteriously appear indoors or in airplane cockpits and then disappears without doing damage, and the burning silicon vapor explaining the "hot" ball lightning which has been reported to cause damage and leave scorch marks wherever it goes.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Just because it has been modded up, I'd like to respond to the troll: on what basis exactly would you exclude funding for this research? Obviousness? Clearly not, because no one had any idea what a modulating magnetic field would do to the inner workings of the brain. Uselessness? Can't see how you arrived at that conclusion, considering that it indicates a way to manipulate how the brain processes inputs, which has a ton of potential application.
No, the only reason that this is research unworthy of funding is that it doesn't immediately yield a product, which is the lamest, most short-sighted reason for which to deny a grant request.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"Ball" lightning is essentially impossible. Electricity cannot behave that way, as far as we know. And yet, many people claim to have seen it. So either it exists, and we'd like to learn how, or it doesn't, in which case we'd like to learn what those people are actually seeing.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
There are a few phenomenon that are known to cause things like ball lighting.
St. Elmo's Fire, for example, can look like a floating ball. Not usually, but it can, if it forms on an unseen point like a tree branch.
There's probably other forms of ionization that we simple don't know about. There's plenty of ways to generate things that look likeball lightning is supposed to look, you can do it in your microwave. (Although that method does not seem likely to occur in nature.)
And I love the idea that Will-o-wisps aren't real. Yes, half the cultures in the world independently invented the idea of lights rising up from marshy water. It's like that old world-wide myth that the stars could fall out of the sky, which, of course, we know is absurd, stars streaking across the sky and plummeting to earth is obviously crazy talk.
I'm frankly astonished at all the people here who apparently think it's all a hallucination, which is, frankly, just stupid. Plenty of ball lightning has multiple observers and has been tracked for moderate distances.
As has been pointed out, visual hallucinations are pretty easy to recognize as such, considering they either follow the field of view, if generated in the optic nerve, or the eyes, if some sort of vision after-effect.
People who see fake lights and don't recognize them as such after about ten seconds as such are, quite likely, schizophrenic or have some other mental illness. Hallucination and optical illusions do not work that way in normal people.
It's only when it's the brain itself generates stuff that it appears even slightly consistent with reality. No one can walk around tracking an optical glitch and think it's an actual floating ball in space.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
Burning mod points by saying this, but digging around on Google turned up a site that has an form lightning that I don't recognize that was captured by film - http://www.ernmphotography.com/Pages/Ball_Lightning/BL_Gallery1.html