Weird Science: BRAIN MAGNETS

[athelind]

Emission of extremely strong magnetic fields from the head and whole body during oriental breathing exercises.

I have no idea what to make of this, but it's fascinating. This is mostly a reference post; this is exactly the sort of thing I like to crib for SF stories.

The abstract says that "One subject emitted a magnetic field at the level of 200-300 mT (2-3 mGauss) and the other at 0.13 mT (1.3 mGauss)."

This gives two different conversions of Tesla to Gauss -- the correct value is that one Tesla is 10⁴ Gauss. I think the HTML converter for the site may have screwed up converting the µ symbol; I'd try and figure out what's what, but it's after midnight, and my brain's ability to slide decimal points around shut down about an hour ago.

The human nervous system normally generates 0.1 - 1.0 picoTeslas, so even if that is supposed to be in µT, we're looking at a field eight orders of magnitude more intense.

More Benchmarks.

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Comments

[jonaswins.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Do you buy this? How could the human body even generate that much magnetism?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If it's measurable and repeatable, you could make a million bucks doing it under controlled conditions at the Randi Institute.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I'm not a biophysicist -- I can't even begin to hypothesize. It appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, so now it's a matter of waiting for other studies to try to confirm or contradict this one. If the data's reproducible, and outside influences are eliminated, THEN it's time to try and figure out the MECHANISM.