I wonder how the researchers came up with the idea to study this.
Anyway, this is good news? Dogs are more similar to humans, than what birds are, right. Maybe there's a magnetic field sensing dog gene that can be copied to humans? So that at least the future generations won't lose their orientation, as fast as I do, in the streets and indoor shopping malls.
> revealed a decrease in alpha-band brain activity -- an established response to sensory input -- in some participants
Interesting this happened in only some participants.
Makes me wonder about sensing fields caused by electricity or the very weak fields caused by flowing water (which tends to contain some salt ions / charged particles).
Edit: flowing water = no fields, because plus and minus ions evens out, no net charge. However if one is small as a molecule and really close to the water, then I suppose one would feel the fields of individual dissolved salt ions passing by
Or maybe, dogs just don’t like to look straight into the sun when they poop, which rises in the east and sets in the west. Good grief. Sometimes the smartest people are also the dumbest. Would you stare right at the sun when pooping?
> Or maybe, dogs just don’t like to look straight into the sun when they poop, which rises in the east and sets in the west. Good grief. Sometimes the smartest people are also the dumbest. Would you stare right at the sun when pooping?
> This calls for necessity to test whether the dog alignment is not actually influenced primarily by time of the day and most probably by position of the sun on the sky. We can, however, exclude this alternative. First, days when the magnetic field parameters change erratically and unpredictably (i.e., magnetic storms) are quite frequent. These changes have been well studied by others and are described in the literature (cf. [21,22] for re-views). Second, the data collection was not biased to either morning or afternoon (Table 8). Third, periods of sampling under conditions of quiet magnetic field were rather evenly distributed in the course of the day.Fourth, and most importantly, alignment during excreting was apparent under conditions of quiet magnet field,irrespective of the time of day or month. Time of day per se was not a reliable predictor of expression of alignment (Figure 2, Tables 3, 9). Fifth, generally, there are on average 1,450 sunshine hours per year at maximum in the Czech Republic and in Germany, on localities where measurements were done. Even if we would assume that these sunshine hours were evenly distributed over the daylight period and the year (as our observations were),there would only be a probability of 33% that the observation was made when the sun was visible. Hence,with high probability (67%) most walks during the day-light period were made when it was cloudy.
> Last but not least, the argument that the dogs might orient with regard to sun position so that they turn with their back to the sun in order to avoid dazzling by sunshine during such a sensitive and vulnerable act as excretion can be questioned. This argument is not plausible for urine marking, which is a brief act. We doubt that a dog that cares of not being attacked would always make sure to be turned away from the sun. The dog will likely look in that direction from where danger can most probably be expected - and this is for sure not always the direction away from the sun. In contrast to a human, the dog is relying also on its nose and its ears (in some breeds even more than on its eyes) when monitoring its surroundings - so we may expect that the dog heads with its nose and pinnae against the wind or in the direction of interest. Directing the pinnae and the nose may take priority over eyes. One can also often observe that dogs (especially during defecation) align in a certain direction, which is actually a different one from the direction of interest and they turn their head then in that other direction. Also we have to take into account that dogs are smaller than humans, they look at a different angle over the horizon and even in situations when we are dazzled, they might be not. Quite important: note also that the preference is axial - there are many cases when the dog actually looks southwards. There is no evidence for shift of the alignment axis during the day.
---
Shoot, they even have pitch-dark measurements on page 8 (pg 7 pdf)
I’m right about this and all you guys are someday if you remember it going to regard this as tremendously embarrassing.. I mean you all just immediately believed the most far fetched of hypotheses based on one flawed study in which they didn’t record which days were sunny.. signing off
...I used to joke with my wife this must be the case.
My dog spends so much time trying to find the right place. It’s during the day, so it can’t be astrology, so must be leylines or the magnetic field of the earth. Elementary really
I encourage everyone to read the paper linked in the article. They've gone through surprising amounts of effort to justify their conclusion, and it includes some surprisingly nice graphs of the 'alignment during defecation' of dogs.
I sincerely hope their works will be recognised by the (Ig)-nobel committee.
I did not understand the 3 bins of 0%, 1%, 2% etc. declination. Does anyone have a simple explanation for that?
Also, the point about the sun is good -- maybe they just don't want sun in their eyes. Clearly the very dedicated and obsessed researcher needs to do a similar study but indoors. Can you imagine who has the personal passion to do this data collection?
I don't have a particularly good explanation for those specific choices, but I did notice that they resulted in somewhat similar sample sizes across all three bins, so it might just have been that.
I’ll bet if you repeated the whole thing on cloudy days only the effect would go away. You’d have to have very very strong evidence that dogs have some sensory organ that detects magnetic fields when the sun is right there in the sky and explains the effect in a way that is obvious to everyone.
> I’ll bet if you repeated the whole thing on cloudy days only the effect would go away. You’d have to have very very strong evidence that dogs have some sensory organ that detects magnetic fields when the sun is right there in the sky and explains the effect in a way that is obvious to everyone.
again, pages 5-6:
> Even if we would assume that these sunshine hours were evenly distributed over the daylight period and the year (as our observations were),there would only be a probability of 33% that the observation was made when the sun was visible. Hence,with high probability (67%) most walks during the day-light period were made when it was cloudy.
There's wisdom in reading the study before commenting further considering your specific rebuttals have all been addressed in the source material. There were literally nearly 7,500 measurement events factored into this study, the majority of which were likely cloudy given the location.
Likely? so let me get this straight, they didn’t even record which days were sunny? Extraordinary claims and all that. Sorry but I’m right about this no matter how many downvotes I get.
> Likely? so let me get this straight, they didn’t even record which days were sunny? Extraordinary claims and all that. Sorry but I’m right about this no matter how many downvotes I get.
Please just read the paper. Events were timestamped, aggregated over two years, and took place at all times of day (including well after dark) with the same outcome.
The dataset seems to be robust. Would be even more interesting if reproduced, but I'd be surprised if someone faked nearly 7500 datapoints for the sake of giving dogs a magnetic sense.
I think it depends on the dog. Mine circles several times until she has found the perfect spot. Some fosters we had would just throw down wherever. I’ll definitely watch the direction next time.
The reason I've read is that it's a leftover from when they lived in the wild, and it would help make sure they don't lay down on top of something dangerous, like a snake or ant colony. It would also make since to do it before pooping since they're going to be in a vulnerable position.
hm. upon reading the paper, this is sounding very suspicious.
> The study was truly blind. Although the observers were acquainted with our previous studies on magnetic alignment in animals and could have consciously or unconsciously biased the results, no one, not even the coordinators of the study, hypothesized that expression of alignment could have been affected by the geomagnetic situation, and particularly by such subtle changes of the magnetic declination. The idea leading to the discovery of the correlation emerged after sampling was closed and the first statistical analyses (with rather negative results, cf.Figure 1) had been performed.
Like, am I reading this wrong, or are they straight-up saying "we couldn't achieve statistical significance on our original hypothesis, so we just went fishing for correlations until one of them came up significant, and it turned out to be magnetic declination"?
Why not? Science that insists on hypotheses written down beforehand is cargo-cult science. Observation is the first and most productive science. Double-blind experiments are to cement gains.
Not if you want to claim statistical significance. The math behind this method is based on defining the hypothesis before seeing the data (and even then it's usually very weak evidence of a tiny signal within the noise).
basically, because once you start trying multiple hypotheses on the same dataset, the math used to determine "is this conclusion real, or am I just fooling myself" begins to break down.
The statistical significance threshold usually used is p<0.05, meaning that something is (generally, this is beginning to change since the replication crisis) considered to be a real discovery if it has less than a 1/20 chance of being a false positive under the chosen model.
As soon as you start trying multiple hypotheses, then that 1/20 chance of being a false positive begins to become meaningless. If you can just keep rolling d20s until one of them comes up with a critical hit, then you can easily generate false positives that still look very robust.
This is exactly the sort of bad science - p-hacking, fishing expeditions, and the garden of forking paths - that led to the replication crisis. (And that makes sense, as this paper is from 2013, and predates the widespread discovery of the crisis)
p<0.05 is also cargo-cult science, and is much more responsible for the replication crisis -- along with biased sampling (pop. 18-22 yo US psych students).
It is also why we see repeated, spurious insistence that anti-depressants don't do anything.
The math continues to work out as long as you use the right approach. You have to collect twice as much data, and then set half of it aside at random without examining it. Then you can do whatever perverse p-hacking multi-modeling curve-fitting whatever to the half you kept until you reach a hypothesis, then check it against the half you set aside to recover the statistical significance you lost by using techniques that may have overfit the first half. Unsurprisingly, the math works out because this approach is isomorphic to collecting the first half, studying it to form a hypothesis, then conducting a proper pre-hypothesized experiment to collect the second half. Validation via holdout sets is the same approach used in machine learning and elsewhere to prevent models from overfitting data.
This is true! I was trying to simplify things a bit for a basic explanation, but I fear I oversimplified. I just meant that the generally used math breaks down; if you're aware of the problem, you can correct for it, but very often people don't.
No. If you collect data and then hunt for "significant" results in it you are guaranteed to find spurious results. This is one of the most basic truths of statistics.
xkcd explains it better than I can. Basically if you pick p values that give 95% certainty 20 times you're probably going to "discover" at least one falsehood.
You seem to be under the impression that a study like this gives a hard "yes/no" answer as to whether some hypothesis is true. That is not the case, nor is it ever the case with most studies like these. Instead, you need to do some sort of statistical hypothesis test.
As other comments have pointed out, once you start testing multiple hypothesis on the same dataset, you cannot apply the same significance threshold that you would if you had just begun with a single hypothesis before observing the data. Instead, you need to apply some sort of correction that takes into account the number of hypothesis being tested:
Well, it would be p-hacking if you tried 1,032 different hypotheses until you got one that passed your threshold. There's quite a lot of scientific history (e.g. Kepler's discovery that planets went in elliptical orbits) that would have to be thrown out if you decided you could never use data for anything other than the original hypothesis. Kepler didn't even collect the data, much less collect it with the idea that the planetary orbits were elliptical.
Having said that, the results smells (pun intended) bad, just because I cannot think of any plausible reason for a non-migrating animal to align with the magnetic field, when defecating or at any other time.
When the magnetic field is non-calm that is probably due to a space weather event that is geo-effective and inducing large currents in the ground. The local magnetic field an then be significantly distorted depending on local conductivity. So to me that is not an oddity.
You're right to still feel suspicious. Who's to say they didn't try 1,000 different post-hoc ideas? They declare only one, the may have been others. I'd be looking for preceding research and any published protocols, if I wasn't on mobile and didn't think it would be fruitless.
I mean, humans can detect magnetic fields as well. There's even languages without relative egocentric positions like left/right, only north south east west. Given all that, I don't think it's out there that dogs sense it and like being aligned when they're trying to poop.
The predominance of geographic directions in Guugu Yimithirr has nothing to do with magnetic sensing; humans know what north and south are from sun positions and memory.
> any plausible reason for a non-migrating animal to align with the magnetic field, when defecating or at any other time.
I got my dog a few years back when she was just a pup. Over the years, she's done things that she was never taught how to do (swim, hunt, bury her food), she just new how to do them instinctually. I believe something like this falls under that category.
And for the record, she took a crap this morning and was pointing directly north/south.
I'd argue the study would only be truly blind if the dogs were blind. If blind dogs also oriented themselves north-south, then that would prove that they weren't using visual cues for alignment, such as the position of the sun.
P-hacking only apply to proofs. This study does two things, it falsifies a previous hypothesis fair and square, with no p-hacking, and it postulates another hypothesis, an activity where the concept of p-hacking does not even apply.
The only wrong party here is the one that reported the study found something.
Is it just me or is it really weird to start a scientific paper with "sleep has been one of God’s most precious blessings since human’s existence and it is vital for both body and soul"?
I'm extremely skeptical of the study you linked about magnetic alignment and sleep latency.
Just looking at table 6 (the only table related to the only association stated significant), the stats for South-North sleepers look noticeably better than the stats for North-South sleepers. I'm no statistician, but just look at it. The South-North sleepers sample, versus the North-South (supposedly best) sleepers, has proportionately three times more people experiencing zero days weekly of difficulty getting to sleep, two-thirds as many people having even one day of difficulty, two-thirds as many people having two days of difficulty... and 50% more people having three days of difficulty, but even then, we're talking only four people each among a group of 47 vs a group of 35. Again, I'm no statistician, but does that last and smallest column overshadow the three much bigger columns with the opposite trend, to the point of being a 1 in 1000 result assuming the null hypothesis?
Furthermore, the sleep measures were self-reported, through the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory (PSQI), which I quote:
>In Iran, Tehran psychiatry institute assessed the validity and reliability of the Farsi version
of this questionnaire with 89.6% for sensitivity and 86.5% for specificity.
Did the math behind this eye-catching <0.001 p-value take into account that the questionnaire used was measured to have a 10.4% false negative rate and a 13.5% false positive rate? I find it hard to believe. But I'd love to see a statistician who actually knows how to interpret these numbers tell me that I'm wrong.
EM fields are sensed at different levels by different animals, plants, etc. Arguably the fact that the human brain is so complex and interconnected means that we sense very hardly these fields (like a black box).
No study needed really,this has been known for decades.
The thing I love about this story is that it is SUCH a dog thing to do. Dogs would absolutely poop in alignment with earth's magnetic field. They wouldn't need a reason to do it. It's just the kind of thing they'd do.
168 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadAnyway, this is good news? Dogs are more similar to humans, than what birds are, right. Maybe there's a magnetic field sensing dog gene that can be copied to humans? So that at least the future generations won't lose their orientation, as fast as I do, in the streets and indoor shopping malls.
Interesting this happened in only some participants.
Makes me wonder about sensing fields caused by electricity or the very weak fields caused by flowing water (which tends to contain some salt ions / charged particles).
What does "this" here refer to? (Thanks for the reply :- ))
Pages 6-7 (pdf pages 5-6, or just grep 'sun') of the source study (https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.11...):
> This calls for necessity to test whether the dog alignment is not actually influenced primarily by time of the day and most probably by position of the sun on the sky. We can, however, exclude this alternative. First, days when the magnetic field parameters change erratically and unpredictably (i.e., magnetic storms) are quite frequent. These changes have been well studied by others and are described in the literature (cf. [21,22] for re-views). Second, the data collection was not biased to either morning or afternoon (Table 8). Third, periods of sampling under conditions of quiet magnetic field were rather evenly distributed in the course of the day.Fourth, and most importantly, alignment during excreting was apparent under conditions of quiet magnet field,irrespective of the time of day or month. Time of day per se was not a reliable predictor of expression of alignment (Figure 2, Tables 3, 9). Fifth, generally, there are on average 1,450 sunshine hours per year at maximum in the Czech Republic and in Germany, on localities where measurements were done. Even if we would assume that these sunshine hours were evenly distributed over the daylight period and the year (as our observations were),there would only be a probability of 33% that the observation was made when the sun was visible. Hence,with high probability (67%) most walks during the day-light period were made when it was cloudy.
> Last but not least, the argument that the dogs might orient with regard to sun position so that they turn with their back to the sun in order to avoid dazzling by sunshine during such a sensitive and vulnerable act as excretion can be questioned. This argument is not plausible for urine marking, which is a brief act. We doubt that a dog that cares of not being attacked would always make sure to be turned away from the sun. The dog will likely look in that direction from where danger can most probably be expected - and this is for sure not always the direction away from the sun. In contrast to a human, the dog is relying also on its nose and its ears (in some breeds even more than on its eyes) when monitoring its surroundings - so we may expect that the dog heads with its nose and pinnae against the wind or in the direction of interest. Directing the pinnae and the nose may take priority over eyes. One can also often observe that dogs (especially during defecation) align in a certain direction, which is actually a different one from the direction of interest and they turn their head then in that other direction. Also we have to take into account that dogs are smaller than humans, they look at a different angle over the horizon and even in situations when we are dazzled, they might be not. Quite important: note also that the preference is axial - there are many cases when the dog actually looks southwards. There is no evidence for shift of the alignment axis during the day.
---
Shoot, they even have pitch-dark measurements on page 8 (pg 7 pdf)
My dog spends so much time trying to find the right place. It’s during the day, so it can’t be astrology, so must be leylines or the magnetic field of the earth. Elementary really
She will get a kick out of this article for sure
Mamy who saw dog select a spot are aware of the 'thrice blessed' dance.
I sincerely hope their works will be recognised by the (Ig)-nobel committee.
https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/winners/#ig2014
Also, the point about the sun is good -- maybe they just don't want sun in their eyes. Clearly the very dedicated and obsessed researcher needs to do a similar study but indoors. Can you imagine who has the personal passion to do this data collection?
again, pages 5-6:
> Even if we would assume that these sunshine hours were evenly distributed over the daylight period and the year (as our observations were),there would only be a probability of 33% that the observation was made when the sun was visible. Hence,with high probability (67%) most walks during the day-light period were made when it was cloudy.
There's wisdom in reading the study before commenting further considering your specific rebuttals have all been addressed in the source material. There were literally nearly 7,500 measurement events factored into this study, the majority of which were likely cloudy given the location.
Please just read the paper. Events were timestamped, aggregated over two years, and took place at all times of day (including well after dark) with the same outcome.
Disengaging. Cheers, friend.
There have been no follow up studies that I can find to replicate this “experiment”.
Searching around just finds lots of duplicate stories in the old echo chamber based on the original paper.
The dataset seems to be robust. Would be even more interesting if reproduced, but I'd be surprised if someone faked nearly 7500 datapoints for the sake of giving dogs a magnetic sense.
Mine almost always face mostly north or mostly south, now that I'm thinking about it.
And I'm pretty sure the dogs out my apartment window face mostly N/S. Will observe. There's a busy road right there so they might face it some
> The study was truly blind. Although the observers were acquainted with our previous studies on magnetic alignment in animals and could have consciously or unconsciously biased the results, no one, not even the coordinators of the study, hypothesized that expression of alignment could have been affected by the geomagnetic situation, and particularly by such subtle changes of the magnetic declination. The idea leading to the discovery of the correlation emerged after sampling was closed and the first statistical analyses (with rather negative results, cf.Figure 1) had been performed.
Like, am I reading this wrong, or are they straight-up saying "we couldn't achieve statistical significance on our original hypothesis, so we just went fishing for correlations until one of them came up significant, and it turned out to be magnetic declination"?
Also, the weasel word "truly" signifies deceit.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/
The statistical significance threshold usually used is p<0.05, meaning that something is (generally, this is beginning to change since the replication crisis) considered to be a real discovery if it has less than a 1/20 chance of being a false positive under the chosen model.
As soon as you start trying multiple hypotheses, then that 1/20 chance of being a false positive begins to become meaningless. If you can just keep rolling d20s until one of them comes up with a critical hit, then you can easily generate false positives that still look very robust.
This is exactly the sort of bad science - p-hacking, fishing expeditions, and the garden of forking paths - that led to the replication crisis. (And that makes sense, as this paper is from 2013, and predates the widespread discovery of the crisis)
It is also why we see repeated, spurious insistence that anti-depressants don't do anything.
Experiment design is a subtle skill.
https://xkcd.com/882/
As other comments have pointed out, once you start testing multiple hypothesis on the same dataset, you cannot apply the same significance threshold that you would if you had just begun with a single hypothesis before observing the data. Instead, you need to apply some sort of correction that takes into account the number of hypothesis being tested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family-wise_error_rate#Control...
Having said that, the results smells (pun intended) bad, just because I cannot think of any plausible reason for a non-migrating animal to align with the magnetic field, when defecating or at any other time.
(Besides, there's some other oddity there, like that apparently the alignment only matters when the magnetic field is calm)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/03/humans-other-animals...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language
Snow foxes seem to hunt better when oriented in direction of the magnetic north.
https://m.phys.org/news/2011-01-predation-foxes-aided-earth-... https://youtu.be/D2SoGHFM18I
I got my dog a few years back when she was just a pup. Over the years, she's done things that she was never taught how to do (swim, hunt, bury her food), she just new how to do them instinctually. I believe something like this falls under that category.
And for the record, she took a crap this morning and was pointing directly north/south.
I'd argue the study would only be truly blind if the dogs were blind. If blind dogs also oriented themselves north-south, then that would prove that they weren't using visual cues for alignment, such as the position of the sun.
The only wrong party here is the one that reported the study found something.
Also interesting and relevant:
Magnetic alignment contributes to difficulty falling asleep (north-south alignment is best) [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280093617_The_Relat...]
Grazing cattle align on north-south axis [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23700176]
https://www.litscape.com/author/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge/The_...
Just looking at table 6 (the only table related to the only association stated significant), the stats for South-North sleepers look noticeably better than the stats for North-South sleepers. I'm no statistician, but just look at it. The South-North sleepers sample, versus the North-South (supposedly best) sleepers, has proportionately three times more people experiencing zero days weekly of difficulty getting to sleep, two-thirds as many people having even one day of difficulty, two-thirds as many people having two days of difficulty... and 50% more people having three days of difficulty, but even then, we're talking only four people each among a group of 47 vs a group of 35. Again, I'm no statistician, but does that last and smallest column overshadow the three much bigger columns with the opposite trend, to the point of being a 1 in 1000 result assuming the null hypothesis?
Furthermore, the sleep measures were self-reported, through the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory (PSQI), which I quote:
>In Iran, Tehran psychiatry institute assessed the validity and reliability of the Farsi version of this questionnaire with 89.6% for sensitivity and 86.5% for specificity.
Did the math behind this eye-catching <0.001 p-value take into account that the questionnaire used was measured to have a 10.4% false negative rate and a 13.5% false positive rate? I find it hard to believe. But I'd love to see a statistician who actually knows how to interpret these numbers tell me that I'm wrong.
It would be a different sensory system.
No study needed really,this has been known for decades.
https://frontiersinzoology.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.11...