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The Sense We May Have Forgotten
Magnetism, Ancient Humans, and the Mystery of Göbekli Tepe
What if one of the oldest human senses is one we barely notice anymore? We tend to think of the human sensory world as consisting of five familiar channels: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. But biology is considerably stranger than that list suggests. Animals can detect electric fields, pressure, vibration, infrared radiation, polarized light, and Earth’s magnetic field. Some organisms navigate across enormous distances using information that is completely invisible to us. Magnetoreception — the ability to detect and respond to Earth’s magnetic field — is well established in many animals. Birds, turtles, fish, insects, and other organisms can use geomagnetic information for orientation and navigation. The remarkable part is that they don’t need to understand magnetism. Their nervous systems simply respond to it. And that raises an intriguing question: could humans have a magnetic sense too?
The answer is not settled, but the evidence is much more interesting than it once appeared. In 2019, researchers reported that Earth-strength magnetic-field rotations produced repeatable changes in the alpha-band activity of human brains. The responses depended on the direction and polarity of the magnetic field, leading the researchers to conclude that at least some modern…
