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Hungry men exposed to blue light are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field (2019)
- scott-smith_us 6y agoI've always said this.
- Forge36 6y agoSaid what?
- loblollyboy 6y agoWell we were all thinking it
- rhacker 6y agoThey need to have a MacGyver episode where they're trapped in a cave armed with just a blue LED light and they need to figure out magnetic north to get out.
- xvedejas 6y agoI wonder if this hypothesis was pre-registered?
- Forge36 6y agoThe hue of light is not something I would have expected to pay a role in this. Nor the presence of hunger. What other studies were affected by the time of day they were conducted?
- whoisburbansky 6y agoThe paper cites previous work where blue light is associated with magnetoception in other species. The whole color thing really threw me off at first, too, so seeing the previous results was a little reassuring in the sense that it made the light color association seem, so to speak, less out of the blue.
- trolololooo 6y ago"For the food association, a subject who faced toward the ambient geomagnetic north or east, depending on the experiment, was gently provided with a chocolate chip [52] (nutrient facts, S1 Table) on his/her right palm by an experimenter, and given 30 s to eat it."
- floatingatoll 6y agoThis is a lovely title. Thanks, OP.
- whoisburbansky 6y agoThanks, haha. I felt that the original paper title didn’t give the result as much “holy cow wait what” punch as it deserved, glad you enjoyed the editorializing.
- IgorPartola 6y agoI believe editorializing titles of articles on HN is prohibited. The mods might be by in no time to fix it.
- floatingatoll 6y agoEditorial biasing of article titles is prohibited. Restating a title using plain language is acceptable in cases where the original wording is too long for the headline limit, and/or not good in the judgement of the submitter.
- guram11 6y agoyeah straight on point to capture your curiosity
- wbl 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ is all too relevant to a result of this form.
- guram11 6y agoGENTLEMEN, ready your blue light and fast for SCIENCE
- Jun8 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia : "Humans are not thought to have a magnetic sense, but there is a protein (a cryptochrome) in the eye which could serve this function" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception How come they thought to add the blue light dependency? Because light-dependent magnetoreception has been observed in other animals: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/204/19/3295 https://jeb.biologists.org/content/204/19/3295 The gender difference is interesting though.
- saalweachter 6y agoI'm leaning towards p-hacking myself, but I'll note the composition of your photoreceptors is partially coded on your X chromosome, which leads to differences if you have 1 or 2 X's -- one X makes colorblindness significantly more likely, 2 X's are needed for tetrachromatism.
- Analemma_ 6y agoThis is absolutely p-hacking.
- PopePompus 6y agoIt's pandering to the Ig Nobel Prize Committee.
- anfilt 6y agoHard to say (that’s what make p-hacking evil) but 3 variables blue light, hunger and men does raise questions for me. I think an other study would be worth it to double check. Especially if we can artificially induce an other sense. It means we could also maybe find ways to enable it. Also some commenters do mention blue light triggers similar things in other animals so at least that variable has prior work.
- aaron695 6y agoI'd like a follow up to this experiment where someone augmented magnetic fields - "For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads - the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly." https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/ https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/
- kortex 6y agoEver since I heard about this kind of sensory augmentation, I have wanted a higher bandwidth port into the brain, and ideally a minimally invasive one. Vision is great bandwidth but tricky to tap into. I have wanted to try the North sense as a single rgb LED on my glasses. Tactile is good for a side channel - and you can even read with it - but the coding/modulation is key. Auditory is probably the best overall to attack.
- copperwater69 6y agoWhat on earth is 'retinal cryptochrome expression' and how does that function? Is this same mechanism shown in this article? https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/declining-eyesight-improved-looking-deep-red-light https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/declining-eyesight-impro...
- copperwater69 6y agoWow just had a read of the cryptochrome wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome Real eye opener, for some reason I thought I could replace millions of years of evolution with a capsule of vitamin D.
- catlifeonmars 6y agoI see what you did there...
- treeman79 6y agoSo blue light is known for triggering migraines. One aspect of Migraines is EXTREME sensitivity. This is mostly a huge negative, but can be interesting at times. Can smell foods and identity all the individual spices used. Eyesight is so intense that only a pitch black room is comfortable. Sense of touch brings textures alive, etc. Hearing goes from average to I always notice things first. So if there is any chance of extra senses registering, migraines are the way to go. I do see weird distortions at time, but I think it’s just reflections of blood vessels in eyes, hard to tell.
- matthew-wegner 6y agoDistortions like these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma
- treeman79 6y agoI get those, but no. More like shifting bubbles Transparent version of https://static.brusheezy.com/system/resources/previews/000/040/720/non_2x/bubbles-pattern-photoshop-patterns.png https://static.brusheezy.com/system/resources/previews/000/0... Or if I have an eye stroke going on, then a black shifting mass in center of vision.
- shoeffner 6y agoMaybe it's related to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon .
- treeman79 6y agoYes. I do get exactly that. Get lots of other interesting effects, but usually only if I take a break from blood thinners.
- loceng 6y agoTime for me to buy blue light blocking glasses. It's interesting too that hunger is involved, and it makes sense: you want your senses to be heightened if not having access to a food source - for hunting and/or gathering. I definitely experience an increasing sensitivity when water fasting.
- bcdarwin 6y agoBrief comments suggesting this result is p-hacking are being downvoted, but I highly doubt this result will replicate. There's just so many chances (men/women/everyone, light, hunger) to reject the null hypothesis, no attempt as far as I can see to correct for this (e.g., Bonferroni), no priors/regularization, etc.
- jolincost 6y agoJust because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it isn't true it makes sense that this would have evolved. Men go out at night to hunt they hunt better on moonless nights under the cover of relative darkness they might need to travel far and then get home. If you can sense the Earth's magnetic field you'll be a better navigator and more likely to get home with the food from the hunt more likely to help your tribe and propagate your genes
- stretchcat 6y agoThere's a lot more blue light during the day than at night.
- bcdarwin 6y agoI'm not saying it isn't true, just that it's not statistically supported by the evidence presented in the paper. You can invent post hoc justifications for almost any positive conclusion (although this one is weak since the authors admit the effect cannot be detected in individuals, only in aggregate). [edit: you can even p-hack and retroactively justify your way to entire subfields; see famously https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...]
- f430 6y agoI mean just because the statistics don't satiate your standards doesn't exclude the possibility of being sensitive to GMF. In mammals, this is what guides birds to migrate. We really need to stop treating the Earth like its just a magnetic rock. It's far more than that and the earth undergoes these field changes every interval with profound impact on life on earth. You and I are all made out of Earth and the things we eat and breathe are all Earth itself. When you die your body decomposes and it becomes soil and nutrients for plants which in turn feed the ecology which where our food comes from. So its hard pressed to just dismiss this as "spiritual pseudoscience". It is precisely this type of shallow thinking in Western ideology that is responsible for the global climate crisis. Your culture has thoroguhly destroyed earth and the next generation will pay the price because of your ignorance. There's just no way that we can brush off this phenomena with pedantry. edit: HN has a serious pedantry problem. Anything that challenges conventional wisdom is villified and attacked by nitpicking minor details that many only have surface level understanding. There is no p-hacking here, overwhelming portion of the samples shows the said sensitivity described qualitatively and quantitatively.
- ggggtez 6y agoSo... they p-hacked an experiment that really only shows that some people can avoid getting dizzy some of the time. > the subjects were gently rotated to face toward the ambient geomagnetic north or east, depending on the experiment > With the touch cue, subjects were asked to freely rotate toward any direction > Subjects were informed of the [desired] direction before each experiment Faulty experiment and P Hacking.
- kortex 6y agoWhat is most fascinating about this is the complete naivety of the subjects. If the effect is real, I would expect it ought to be trainable. I would expect conditioned subjects to perform better than naive. But I am not being cheeky when I say I've read more rigorous ESP experiments. At least this has a vaguely plausible biological mechanism? > Cryptochrome forms a pair of radicals with correlated spins when exposed to blue light.[50][51] Radical pairs can also be generated by the light-independent dark reoxidation of the flavin cofactor by molecular oxygen through the formation of a spin-correlated FADH-superoxide radical pairs.[52] Magnetoreception is hypothesized to function through the surrounding magnetic field's effect on the correlation (parallel or anti-parallel) of these radicals, which affects the lifetime of the activated form of cryptochrome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome#Magnetoreception https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptochrome#Magnetoreceptio... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment
- PointyFluff 6y agoOOK. Also, this is bad "science" taken personally.
- jugg1es 6y agoUpvoting for great title.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- WClayFerguson 6y agoThe paper says this magic power was "abolished" under a blindfold or a longer wavelength light, but I bet there's another way to "abolish" it: ...simply have another experimenter try to replicate it, and I bet it magically goes away. haha.
- exabrial 6y agoI'm many things when hangry and people are shining flashlights in my face... Grumpy and irritated for sure.
- gattis 6y agoDon't even have to read the paper to know exactly what transpired here with high confidence. The author(s) set up an experiment without a hypothesis, threw in 100 candidate variables such as 'were they exposed to blue light', 'was the roof on fire', etc etc. They calculated P-values on all 100 and with a threshold of P < 0.05, they predictably rejected the null hypothesis 5 times. Then they conveniently left out 90 or so variables that failed the test.
- knodi123 6y agoaka Data Dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
- gattis 6y agowow thank you, i don't know how i never knew the term for this. it's gotten frustrating explaining so often, as it happens too often. as my old econometrics professor would say, "knowing a little bit about statistics is a very bad thing"
- meowface 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- calkuta 6y agothis looks like bunk to me
- notjtrig 6y agoAnecdotally as a man, when I am hungry I'm more sensitive to radiation from cellphones and when I'm well hydrated I can dowse for water easier.