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."

Comments

idea != fact

[Itninja]

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!

Re:Doesn't explain...

[rubycodez]

there are photos in encyclopedias and on web.

I've seen ball lightening from distance of half a mile, and it's been created in lab

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070122-ball-lightning.html

Re:Same Lights Common in Migraineurs, too

[Anonymous Coward]

If these are equivalent to migraine auras, I'm very skeptical that they can explain ball lightning. I've periodically experienced migraines and what doctors assure me is an aura preceding it. I don't know about others' subjective experience with auras, but while it's an annoying visual artifact covering some or all of my visual field, at no point did I ever perceive it as some localized 'ball' with anything like a defined position, distance relative to me, etc. as ball lightning is often described. It was always something I perceived as an internal static that makes my vision mostly useless, not some external object.

Again, there could just be subjective difference, but I've never heard a fellow migraine sufferer describe an aura as some ball of light.

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.

Re:Doesn't explain...

[deglr6328]

Absurd, you'd might as well also claim the Fox Alien Autopsy video and all the various close encounters of the blurred kind on Youtube aren't explained by the fact that we now understand things like kanashibari. The videos of so called ball lightning out there are far away, shaky, defocused and about as convincing as Chupacabra photos in the Weekly World News.

Look, I'm sorry to piss on everybody's parade, but its time to relegate ball lightning to its rightful place in history alongside phrenology and N-rays. The invention of the CCD and the associated UNBELIEVABLE proliferation of personal digital imaging devices over the past decade means that virtually everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times now. If the phenomenon of ball lightning existed at all, we should be seeing like one multiply reported HIGHLY CONVINCING video a week uploaded to the internet showing this. In fact, the number of ball lightning sightings and recordings over the past who knows how many years has pretty much stayed constant. If ball lightning exists at all, it's in the heads of observers, either as a result of a terrified mi-d thunderstorm hallucination or a result of some magnetic field induced phosphene as reported in this new paper.

If ball lightning were an actual physical phenomenon, the number of video observations of it should have skyrocketed over the past 10 years along with the availability of personal digital imaging devices in the same way that once Red Sprites and Blue Jets were first reliably observed with very high speed video in 1994, observational replication around the world was practically IMMEDIATE and widespread.