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Human Eye Protein Senses Earth's Magnetism
chrb pointed out a story at BBC News about the discovery of a light-sensitive protein in the human eye that acts like a "compass" in a magnetic field. The molecule at the center of the study is called cryptochrome and is found in every animal on Earth. If removed from the eyes of flies, the flies lost the ability to respond to a magnetic field. From the article: "Despite much controversy, no conclusive evidence exists that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field, and the find may revive interest in the idea. Although humans, like migratory birds, are known to have cryptochrome in their eyes, the idea of human magnetoreception has remained largely unexplored since pioneering experiments by Robin Baker of the University of Manchester in the 1980s."
Damn it. I read "cryptochrome" and now I have the song Kodachrome running through my head...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There is a lot of research suggesting that women as a whole are less adept at that sort of thing. It also makes sense as to why many men prefer directions with set distances and instructions to turn on specific streets going north, south, etc. Women on the other hand tend to understand directions when they are relative, i.e "Take a left at the dunkin donuts, drive about a mile till you get to the T intersection..."
It turns out that breasts contain high concentrations of magnetic material.
Always amazed that so few people haven't been taught that you can see polarisation. It's so clear that it's visible in the large white space on this submission screen. AFAIK, we don't credit this further sense with any value. No surprise that little credence is given to any subtle magnetic influence.
That seems to have a ring of truth about it, though I've never been crazy about the idea of labeling roads "North/South" or "EastWest", etc.. because few roads actually maintain any consistent kind of vector, or, they often run diagonally. When it's 6pm, and the setting sun is right in your eyes and in front of you as you're driving down a road that claims to run North/South, it's a little disconcerting..
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It has a faint tinge of purple, like when you put a magnet up to an old CRT and screw up the ion gun.
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Up until a few years ago, I could be put in just about any given room in any given city, and if I took a minute, closed my eyes, I could point almost due North without any aid. I never knew how it worked, but I was pretty accurate. When I closed my eyes, I imagined I was standing on the south end of a major road in a city I was very familiar with. With my eyes closed, I'd picture looking up the street (North) as I slowly turned around. As I turned, the image just seemed to feel right, and I knew I was looking more or less North. I'd guess I was never out more than about 10 degrees.
I've since lost that ability. I was on Ritalin for a while in my early 30s, and I don't know if it was the Ritalin, or aging, but the ability went away. Even after I went off the drug, the ability never really returned. At the point I was losing the ability, I didn't realize it, and nearly got my wife and I lost in a city I'd only driven in a few times. I was sure I was headed North, and after years of trusting this instinct, even over other people with a map, I couldn't understand how we weren't getting where I was trying to go. She was insisting we were going the wrong way, and I wouldn't believe her. After I finally realized we weren't getting to our destination, I finally pulled over, looked at the map, and saw she was right. Spent a lot of time apologizing to her for that one.
While it sounds like the evidence is quite strong that we have a known-magnetic-sensitive protein in our eyes, it seems likely that (if we use it at all) we do so in only a very subtle way.
.3-.6 Gauss, depending on where you happen to be.
The earth's magnetic field, the one that would be mostly likely to be relevant across evolutionary time, is a puny
By comparison, an MRI will put a magnetic field of ~1-6 Tesla, depending on the system, across the subject being imaged. Even a boring HDD magnet(at it's surface, a magnet of such size will have its field strength drop to nearly nothing at even modest distances) can be good for more than a Tesla. Humans are exposed to such fields with reasonable frequency and don't seem to notice anything unusual. If our 'magnetic sense' were something clearly perceived, simply holding a rare-earth magnet against your closed eye should be a weird, disorienting experience. It doesn't seem to be.
There's some bad logic going on here:
* Flies need that protein for magnetic sensing.
* Humans have the protein.
* Therefore humans can do magnetic sensing.
Obviously humans also do photosynthesis:
* Plants need water for photosynthesis.
* Humans need water.
* Therefore humans do photosynthesis.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I learned about this in some college course. The theory is, women were mostly gatherers. They gathered things from plant sources that were usually in the same place. Best way to find those things is via landmarks.
Men hunted. They hunted things that ran and roamed around. Best way to keep track of where you are is vector navigation.
I'd be really interested in seeing the structure of these proteins and what possible biochemical reactions could be taking place in the eye that could affect our brain/perception. Perhaps it's a vestigial protein that we no longer actually use or maybe the relative amounts that we make aren't large enough to actually use the ability as smaller creatures do.
Maybe at some point she had her nose broken, since that's where the compass is for humans..
The book The Compass In Your Nose: And Other Astonishing Facts About Humans is a fun read for all.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
How about intersections like this one?
East Ave & East St.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=east+ave+and+east+blvd,+rochester,+ny&hl=en&sll=43.148799,-77.568821&sspn=0.011178,0.015342&z=16
I'm exceptionally good at picking North/South myself and have been able to do this since I was a kid, when I first noticed that other people often are unable to do this, and never been able to explain it. Later in life I'd guessed it was just good spatial awareness.
I think it's rather easy to train yourself to have a sense of direction based on the sun and a sense of time of day, and this can become quite a subconscious thing. However I find I can still orient myself on heavily overcast days and without a view of the sky. I seem to have a good sense of direction while others feel completely lost but I quickly run into limitations.
I live at latitiude 41' in the southern hemisphere and when I went on vacation to a pacific island I was utterly lost and couldn't find north and felt oddly disoriented until I had an idea of where I was on the island by looking at maps.
I just atributed this to the position of the sun and unfamiliar territory. Until one day back home I got a little lost driving in a foreign city, once I stopped, got out of the car and walked about a bit I quickly reoriented. After reading this I think I know why, just as a compass might read wrong if you try use it inside a metal car, perhaps that was at work? The sun explaination is no longer entirely satisfactory.
Last time this hit the news a few years back I read that birds are ultra senstive to introduced electromagnetic fields, something like one third of one percent earths field strength could crash the brids geomagnetic sense. This might explan why I can only do this on foot and have no hope in a car, and the only time it worked really well when I got "lost" in the back country with a couple young cousins. I wasn't really feeling very lost, I directed the group on a short cut through some bush in the right direction to the walking track we had missed. Can't explain why it felt like the right direction.
Some people seem exceptionally good at navigating outdoors, indeed indigenous peoples performed quite amazing feats of crossing distances. It should be little suprise that people claim to be able to do this, and indigenous people demostrably can. Yet your average urbanite lost in the woods or desert walks around in circles. I wonder if there really is more than just experience at work? Our animal cousins all seem to have geomagnetic sense built-in, it's probably unlikely that we've somehow completely lost it. There's certainly plenty of annecdotal evidence for justifying some serious scientific study.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I vote for aging. I also used to have a good sense of direction, particularly with maintaining a consistent travel direction despite roads angling and turning, or being underwater (handy as a teenaged lifeguard). I simply assumed that ability, same as being able to imagine a 3D object from engineering plans and projections. Over time, it has become much less reliable.
I don't believe in magic, but I do believe that humans have lots of little abilities that we haven't measured yet because we haven't found the things to measure and haven't invented the units to measure with.
What uses do you think humans have for a protein like this? How does it present?
Some thoughts I had just sitting here:
1) Supplements instinct to seek higher ground (mountains are traditionally heavy metals, which will even distort gravity slightly).
2) Couldbe responsible for migranes in people that are exposed to high electrical fields. 3) Could possibly cause unexplained dizziness from time to time. 4) Could be responsible for the moving light fragments (phosphene) I see when my eyes are closed.
Why isn't it more noticeable? Perhaps in animals that demonstrate magnetic knowledge, the eyeball mass to body mass difference is significant compared to humans, so we can't readily discern what our eyes are telling us in this regard.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Up until a few years ago, I could be put in just about any given room in any given city, and if I took a minute, closed my eyes, I could point almost due North without any aid. I never knew how it worked, but I was pretty accurate.
You missed a truly golden scientific opportunity to try before and after taping a magnet to your baseball cap.
From my fooling around with magnetic compasses for orienteering, obviously in the pre-GPS pre-geocache era, I don't think whatever you were doing was magnetic. I suppose it depends on the vehicle, but even something as small as an ATV made orienteering pretty much impossible, aside from the obvious (head 1.0 miles at 23 degrees and the only path is a ridgeline trail with impassible 30 foot cliffs on either side, who cares what the compass says we're taking the trail...)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I can do this, although for me I think it's more to do with having an idea of the orientation of the building as I enter and remembering the changes as I've moved around internally.
Nick
Apparently some road builders have problems too. In Buck County, Pa, Route 202 south and Route 611 north share the same bits of concrete for a few miles. (As an interesting aside, 202 north and 611 south do too...).
I believe that they both are running east/west at that point.
Funny enough, I have a deviated septum and I can still do this just fine.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Extra points when the same road is Route X North, and Route Y South for some stretches.
That's why heading south always feels like going downhill. I thought I was just a descendant of Treebeard. Ba room.
It wouldn't surprise me at all that it was aging. I only mentioned the Ritalin because it was a major change in my life at that point, and I initially attributed it to being on the drug. However, after being off the drug for months (and years now), I doubt it had any affect on losing that ability. I still miss having it, but with GPS in the car (and on smartphones) its not as necessary as it once was.
I'm not convinced any of this is magnetic though. I've travelled a fair bit, and I've noticed several failure modes in my navigation ability:
Because my navigation is normally so good, when I do get it wrong, I really believe my error for quite a while, which is not so great.
The north/south swap in the southern hemisphere leads me to believe that the dominant factor is to do with the position of the sun in the sky. I don't do it consciously though, and I live in London, and it still works on frequent cloudy days, so however it works, it's subtle.
The 45 degree grid shift one is strange and very disconcerting. I think what happens is my accuracy is only to the nearest 45 degrees, and I mentally orientate the grid to north. The mismatch between mental model and reality combined with my limited accuracy can cause the whole mental model to jump 90 degrees. Too much thought - should just trust the instinct.
The fact that it all still works at night and indoors could just be that I'm pretty good at dead reckoning. But maybe there is a magnetic aspect - if so it's not the dominant factor.
It helps maintain circadian rhythms by detecting blue light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRY2#In_mammals It just happens to, when excited by blue light, have the ability to effect the speed of other reactions, depending on the magnetic field. But humans don't seem to produce the proteins that participate in those other reactions, hence, no magnetovision.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Birds have been proven to be able to see magnetic fields by default, is this the same thing as birds?
"...and when I went on vacation to a pacific island I was utterly lost and couldn't find north and felt oddly disoriented until I had an idea of where I was on the island by looking at maps."
Apparently residents of Joplin, MO, are having problems navigating after part of the town was level by tornados. They removed all of the landmarks people used to find their way around, leaving nothing but rubble and flat fields.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
..to use their eyes to look at a map, and see if they can sense what way is north now?
Some humans have a fully developed ability to consciously 'see' electromagnetic/etc energy fields around biological systems. I've seen flashes of auras before, but not all the time.
Many devotees of Scientism deny that the human body has energy fields that science doesn't know how to measure, but they do concede that magnetic fields are created by electrons in motion, and that nervous tissue communicates with electrical impulses. Electrons are in continuous motion in the human body, so that's a very complex magnetic field that's generated! All tissues have quantum field effects too...
The term is cognitive dissonance.
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Psst.. Your moron is showing.
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In studying linguistics, one of the examples we were given was that Australian languages don't generally have "left" or "right" but describe everything in cardinal directions. If I recall correctly, there were experiments done that found that Australian Aborigines could tell cardinal directions even inside a windowless room in an entire other hemisphere (i.e. Northern hemisphere) from their home. I don't recall if this particular ability was considered miraculous or simply neat, and of course we were interested in the linguistic aspects of the idea, not the actual "sensing North" part of it.
Maybe this is how they did it?
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
There must a common ancestor between us and birds that developed the first magnetism sensitive protein. Hope someone does the study to pin point which gene was responsible and when it occurred.
I and a few of my friends who have spent a large portion of our lives backpacking and doing other out-doorsie things can tell where north is sans compass just by feel. This is not looking at moss or the sun or the stars -- it is really sensing north. In a closed room we can do it with very high success rates. I can recall a story from ./ some time ago that had a fella who wore a belt with a vibrating magnet that always "pointed" north, and after wearing the belt for some time, he claimed that he could naturally sense north. I can't find the link. Perhaps someone else knows it.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
How about Interstate 680 South which turns into Interstate 280 North near HWY 101 as you travel southwest? Or going the opposite direction on Interstate 280 South which turns into Interstate 680 North near HWY 101 traveling east (northeast just at that point)?
Yup, you can't make this stuff up:
I680 at I280, Santa Clara, CA
Zoom out and take a look.
You'd pretty much have to wear a wireless router cranked up to the max legal broadcasting strength as a hat for it to have a any effect. I have one sitting not six feet from me, putting out 251mW to a fair, aftermarket, omni antenna and north still feels just as northy as it ever has.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Likewise. And occasionally I'll catch myself stopping to think about it, like in a huge, non-grid box store (I'm thinking of a particular menards).
We had a discussion about this at work, my boss and I almost always know which way is which, but the women in the office had no idea if they weren't on a major road.
I wrote it off as being and old eagle scout. You spend a little time with a compass and map, finding your way around without obvious landmarks.
All this is actually rather simple; for people there are two main methods of navigating, call them the cartesian and graph.
The mechanics is easy, you have a rather effective giro-compass in your inner ear most of the time it works very well, but it's not attached to any particular absolute directions. To provide the base for this you have what could be described as "local knowledge" -- at some point/times you know which way is north because there's a sign that says 'to the north' or the sun is in the south or main other similar clues. Though some people never base it in this way, instead they give themselves a 'journey base' and their "north" is the direct route to the destination.
If you navigate by "graph" you're not really using the giro part; you're going to landmarks, you're taking left and right turns you're following the route. If it's used your giro is just giving you a feeling that you're headed in the right general direction.
If you're navigating by cartesian you're not really following the map until you get near the end of the journey, you're just heading off "thataway" for "this long" near the end of the journey you have to "recognise the area" and switch to the graph method so you don't "overshoot" or "miss the turning".
Both methods have problems but normally it all works very well with the known capabilities; there's no need for magnets.
East Blvd is named after someone, East Ave heads East. as West Ave heads West.
"Girls," said Edmund. "They never can carry a map in their heads."
"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.
eyeball goo changes somewhat over the years, Vitreous Humor it's called, and perhaps that change is what caused your direction finding to fade
Definitely, I think it's more down to practice than to innate gender differences as I know plenty of guys with a terrible sense of direction. I remember I always used to run off in shops, get myself "lost" and find my way back. My mum used to get stressed at me but after a while, she figured out I'd always find my way back and I promised to just never leave whatever shop we were in.
Nick
Ah yes, back the in the day. Now everyone is sure their kid is going to be snatched up, anywhere they go.