Hmm this leads me to recall a bunch of ancient pseudoscientific sounding beliefs and see whether or not they might be plausibly explained by this mechanism:
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
Well how far do these fields propagate and do you need to read them from different directions to make sense of them? Think you’d want to answer those questions first. The sensors from the study are very close and all around the head. Also demonstrate there is some phenomenon to explain in the first place.
Contrast this with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and claims this can induce the feeling of religiosity in people: you may believe in god, because your ferromagnetic particles align to believe in god in the right magnetic field..
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
I’ve long thought it would be unsurprising if we eventually found evidence of certain kinds of telepathy. It would just be too damn useful, and tuning up one exquisitely complex magneto-electro-chemical instrument in close proximity to another similar one seems like a good way to at least get resonance. Who knows?
This feels just north of conspiracy theory logic. It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields, so how about if they can also sense extremely finely detailed fields in a way that solves long-standing philosophical and medical problems? Here are some supporting coincidences that have any number of alternate explanations, but it would sure be cool if this whole tower of conjecture was true, right? If you've seen conspiracy-theory debunks, the resemblance is rather strong.
Reminds me of a study I read once on binaural beats[0], that found the effect disappeared when they used pneumatic (non-magnetic) headphones.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
whenever I remind about mind reading - I get down voted and called schizophrenic. it's worse - tech is being actively used to sway large groups of population
The brain could be using the weak magnetic field to glean info on what the brain is thinking...or you know, the brain could use the fact that its electrically connected to...the brain.
This reminds me of Dr. Adrian Thompson's interesting findings from the mid-1990s on the influence of electromagnetic phenomena in evolvable hardware on FPGAs.
Then why aren't we totally losing it when immersed in incredibly powerful magnetic fields inside an MRI machine? I'm pretty sure, that 1.5-3T field will totally down ANY useful signal.
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] thread* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
It seems a bit silly, but I suspect that more of our life may be effected by biomagnetism than we yet realize.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1742-9994-10-80
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
"Wouldn't" suggests that the brain is choosing not to. I'm not sure this is the case here.
I wonder if that correlates with people who believe in astrology.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Of course, the substrate being researched back then is different from human wetware.
This was where I started pulling this thread (October 2025): https://1393.xyz/writing/could-the-root-cause-of-alzheimers-...
And this is an even further ancestor of the ideas (December 2023): https://1393.xyz/writing/are-we-only-conscious-while-were-le...
I'm operating off of my own subjective experience, and this idea lines up tightly with System 1 and System 2 in cognitive psychology.
It seems that many jump to "AI psychosis" when one mentions magnetic fields, but the evolutionary tree is very straightforward:
1. Nature evolves magnetoreception for navigation
2. Eventually, a brain in nature with magnetoreception accidentally "hears" its own magnetic field with with resonance
3. That lossy global summary of the brains ends up being an evolutionarily advantageous "higher-order sense"
4. Evolution sharpens the blade for many years
On first principles, that seems perfectly viable and even likely given that magnetoreception was such a boon for survival for all life.
Just glad others are finding it interesting!
The Meta paper, as well as other studies which have been interpreted as rudimentary "mind-reading" have measured activity in sensory cortex correlated with direct sensory inputs. There's a fairly close mapping between the initial layers of sensory cortex and patterns of activation in the sense organs. e.g. the optic nerve from each eye projects onto the initial layer of visual cortex in a way that closely preserves the geometry of the retinal image, so it's not that difficult to correlate information in the stimulus and these parts of cortex. Making sense of activity in deeper areas of cortex which isn't as closely correlated with immediate sensory stimulation is a much harder task.
Secondly, the idea seems to be that the brain could make use of a "lossy image" of its own overall functioning. This part seemed very handwavy to me. The brain already contains the information about its own functioning, by definition, so it's not clear to me what functions would be served by the brain's being able to "sense its own magnetic field". It's known that the brain integrates information from distant regions through the patterns of neuronal connectivity. It's not clear that something similar can be done with magnetic fields, because these would mostly affect very nearby areas of the brain, and long-distance effects would be scrambled with all the other activity going on in other parts of the brain.
The idea to look at the effects of the electromagnetic fields in brain functioning is interesting though. The general idea has been around for a long time[0]. The dificult part is making a detailed proposal for how it would actually work and finding experimental evidence for that.
[0] Burr, Northrop (1935) The Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/394488