12 ms·

My old man - an old-fashioned cat by anyone’s description — can pick true north anytime, anywhere. It’s made me wonder if he has some kind of internal magnetic

My old man - an old-fashioned cat by anyone’s description — can pick true north anytime, anywhere. It’s made me wonder if he has some kind of internal magnetic compass. And now, having read this, I wonder if this ‘turtle skill’ is latent in humans but only emerges in a rare few.

pinoy420 2y ago
Can he notice when it shifts? What happens when the magnetic field flips?
swores 2y ago
You maybe meant "magnetic north", not "true north"? Or if you meant what you wrote, then fairly safe to rule out magnetism from being involved! (I suspect it's not involved either way, but I don't know anything) (Explanation of the difference between true and magnetic norths: https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/true-north-magnetic-north-whats-difference https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/true-north-magnetic-nor... )
blueflow 2y ago
I can sense magnetic fields of some strength through my nasal bone. Its like a metallic taste except its not where your taste buds are. I don't know if its rare? I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.
- Retric 2y ago
  People get exposed to extremely strong magic fields when getting an MRI. So that’s probably not it.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    On the surface this looks like a non-sequitur. I'm not sure what people getting exposed to strong magnetic fields while getting an MRI has to do with detecting a magnetic field. Are you saying something like "we should have been able to detect this"? This doesn't seem correct to me, because the magnetic field is through the aperture of the MRI -- ie head to toe in most MRI applications. If the MRI field is orthogonal to earth's typical magnetic pole, you wouldn't expect the same signal. I'm skeptical of a claim from a person that they can "detect" the earth's magnetic field, but I don't think "we have MRIs" implies anything about that ability.
    - squeaky-clean 2y ago
      They're responding to this part > I don't know if its rare? I think most people just never held a magnet against their face. If it were not rare, and simply because most people haven't held a magnet against their nose, people would definitely feel it during an MRI scan, since those are much much much stronger than any regular magnet. An MRI will rip a nose piercing right out of you, a regular magnet you'd have around the home couldn't do that.
    - Retric 2y ago
      “I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.” I don’t think they comprehend just how strong an MRI is. You don’t need to be inside the machine for it to be the strongest magnetic field you’ve experienced, that’s likely true if you’re in the room nearby. Sure it falls as the square of the distance, but those suckers are big. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo For comparison earths magnetic field is ~50 microtesla vs an MRI at 200,000 to 7,000,000, with 1.5 million microtesla (aka 1.5 T or 15,000 gauss) being common.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - blueflow 2y ago
        Most people haven't been in an MRI, either. I only know about their existence from TV.
        Retric 2y ago
        That doesn’t really matter here. ~300k people in the US get an MRI per year (significantly more are near the things) and they have been around since the 1970’s. If simply waving weak magnetic fields in people’s faces were enough for anything close to 1% of people to notice then it would be common knowledge at this point. When the signal is strong enough you don’t need careful experiments to pick out the difference. IE the rest of the universe outside of earth isn’t made of antimatter because our telescope’s aren’t on fire. https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/
- 725686 2y ago
  You should probably approach some of the people investigating this.
- GrumpyNl 2y ago
  Sounds more like you can taste static electricity.
hnuser123456 2y ago
I can do that, it's just having a mental image of the room and building I'm in, as well as the surrounding landscape, sky, and where the sun rises and sets. Even if I have to pass through a bunch of twisting corridors, there's just a mental arrow in my head that's always being updated in the background when I turn.
- colonCapitalDee 2y ago
  Is that something that you learned how to do? Any suggestions for picking up this skill?
  - deepsun 2y ago
    Try playing First person shooter games that don't have a map. But as I said in a sibling comment, it's just orientation using memory, not a compass.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    When I was a kid at some point I just realized I could close my eyes and try to visualize my room that I knew really well. And then I'd imagine what it would look like if I looked at it making a 90 degree right turn. Then visualizing what happens if I walked out of the room, then up the stairs, etc. And then trying to make sure that as I'm doing these turns around corners in my house, connecting it with if I'm facing north/east/south/west until it became second nature to know that. And then as I got older I connected it implicitly with other senses of my surroundings (e.g. time of day + location of sun = you know which direction). I'd just sit for like 5-10 minutes at a time every day doing that until I got "bored" by the skill. Not necessarily sure if it's something you can practice as I know there's actual brain structural differences that can determine whether you have this skill and how advanced it is, and I'd imagine it's potentially harder to rewire your brain for this as an adult.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
    I found "Natural Navigator" by Tristan Gooley to be a fascinating read with a lot of good ways to train your navigation skills without instruments.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bongodongobob 2y ago
That's just spatial awareness. Put a giant magnet by his head. He'll still be able to do it.
- kuhewa 2y ago
  Have you ever done any of these controlled experiments with giant helmets or blindfolds and elaborate movements to defeat orientation though?
- Biologist123 2y ago
  I can just imagine the experimental set-up…”son, what the f** are you doing”. “Chill out dad, I’m just going to blind fold you and run some electricity through this coil, and you have to tell me where New Bedford is, got it”. “I told you you ain’t getting no inheritance”. Etc
LeifCarrotson 2y ago
Lots of people have a good "sense of direction" in terms of an awareness of their surroundings that keeps track of cardinal directions. It also correlates with an ability to use other indicators to reinforce or reacquire this awareness. Put me on some winding singletrack in the woods, or driving around an unfamiliar part of town, and I'll remember an imaginary map of where I've been and which directions I've turned, and be able to tell you where north is all day. If I forget, there are context clues everywhere - it's late afternoon here in Michigan so the sun is setting in the southern sky, pointing south-southwest. I'm currently in a windowless manufacturing facility, but I know where the front door is and I remember that's on the west side of the building, so I'm facing east. It helps a lot that many roads and buildings are indexed to be precisely aligned with the compass. It also helps that my Garmin GPS watch has a built-in compass, so if I ever need to shoot a bearing precisely, I train and recalibrate this sense of direction. But if you put a blindfold on me, sit me down on an office chair, spin it around for a couple minutes as you wheel me down the hall and into an unfamiliar room...after I have finished retching, I hypothesize that I'd have no sensation to tell me where north is. I appreciate the author's study design here - the source PDF [1] and linked website [2] describe feeding the turtles in the same pool, but exposing them to varied magnetic fields by surrounding the pool in a giant Helmholtz coil. It's not as if they flew the turtles alternately to New Hampshire and to the Gulf of Mexico, which might leave lots of context clues in light or smell or taste, but as if they effectively teleported them to an identical pool of water with slightly different magnetic fields. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?sharing_token=3jyO_nr20tkXxF-Esv7ZJNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PSnysHTEUp3kJfbIuzukZMThbZ8UBJFCT2hnGyGlumPkJLfUAJPW5LikAnQfKvu93LI60cSZLUJe2cedXeaZ1dwUnJCiAk3QOyzbJQepZOnJ0rWmckUY_B4ROlR9SQEt8%3D https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?shar... [2] https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/oceanweb/turtles/index.html https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/ocean...
climb_stealth 2y ago
Hah, I thought you meant a literal cat. Our dogs do that. There's a building we used to go up with six elevators. Three on each side of the hallway facing each other. Without hesitation the dogs will pick the correct direction to go coming out of the elevator. Whereas I always had to check because it all looks the same and depending on which side the elevator is on you have to turn left or right. It's like they have an innate sense of where they are.
- ryanianian 2y ago
  Could there be a different smell or air-flow coming from one side versus the others? My apartment building has identical elevator lobbies. I thought my dog was smart by not leaving the elevator on seemingly identical incorrect floors. But actually I think she just knows what home smells like.
  - climb_stealth 2y ago
    Not sure, but I wouldn't think so. They'd basically spring out of the elevator with no hesitation.
AngryData 2y ago
Atleast when I was younger I always felt like I could point towards north within 20-30 degrees at any time. I tried testing it out many times, and was right the vast majority of the time, even when trying to eliminate possible subconscious factors like sound reflections and what surface I was standing on. We do technically have the right associated nerves and structure for it, but obviously underdeveloped compared to animals who use it to live and survive, so I would totally believe it is possible to some extent, atleast among some people. I would attribute part of it to practice, because when I was younger I spent a lot of times in the woods where you can easily get turned around following animal trails and skirting around obstacles, and finding your way back out accurately was extremely helpful.
kaushikt 2y ago
Same with my old man. He is a farmer in southern India. All the farms nearby are super identical with tall beetlenut trees. Im often confused where we are and which direction is the house, he is not. He has set over a 100 water gates across the farms and the instructions he gives is always east face or turn the gate north facing as an example.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language, uses cardinal directions instead of relative, e.g. "That man is to the west of her" instead of "That man is to the left of her", which of course means that speakers need to be aware of the direction they are facing at all times, and thus these people have a remarkable sense of direction. Can't remember where I first heard about this, I think it may have been a Malcolm Gladwell book, but in any case if you search you can find lots of articles on the topic.
burnished 2y ago
Foxes can, and a brief search suggests cats may also?

pinoy420 2y ago

Can he notice when it shifts? What happens when the magnetic field flips?

swores 2y ago

You maybe meant "magnetic north", not "true north"? Or if you meant what you wrote, then fairly safe to rule out magnetism from being involved! (I suspect it's not involved either way, but I don't know anything) (Explanation of the difference between true and magnetic norths: https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/true-north-magnetic-north-whats-difference https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/true-north-magnetic-nor... )

blueflow 2y ago

I can sense magnetic fields of some strength through my nasal bone. Its like a metallic taste except its not where your taste buds are. I don't know if its rare? I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.

Retric 2y ago
People get exposed to extremely strong magic fields when getting an MRI. So that’s probably not it.
- daveguy 2y ago
  On the surface this looks like a non-sequitur. I'm not sure what people getting exposed to strong magnetic fields while getting an MRI has to do with detecting a magnetic field. Are you saying something like "we should have been able to detect this"? This doesn't seem correct to me, because the magnetic field is through the aperture of the MRI -- ie head to toe in most MRI applications. If the MRI field is orthogonal to earth's typical magnetic pole, you wouldn't expect the same signal. I'm skeptical of a claim from a person that they can "detect" the earth's magnetic field, but I don't think "we have MRIs" implies anything about that ability.
  - squeaky-clean 2y ago
    They're responding to this part > I don't know if its rare? I think most people just never held a magnet against their face. If it were not rare, and simply because most people haven't held a magnet against their nose, people would definitely feel it during an MRI scan, since those are much much much stronger than any regular magnet. An MRI will rip a nose piercing right out of you, a regular magnet you'd have around the home couldn't do that.
  - Retric 2y ago
    “I think most people just never held a magnet against their face.” I don’t think they comprehend just how strong an MRI is. You don’t need to be inside the machine for it to be the strongest magnetic field you’ve experienced, that’s likely true if you’re in the room nearby. Sure it falls as the square of the distance, but those suckers are big. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLjxhuybFWo For comparison earths magnetic field is ~50 microtesla vs an MRI at 200,000 to 7,000,000, with 1.5 million microtesla (aka 1.5 T or 15,000 gauss) being common.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - blueflow 2y ago
      Most people haven't been in an MRI, either. I only know about their existence from TV.
      - Retric 2y ago
        That doesn’t really matter here. ~300k people in the US get an MRI per year (significantly more are near the things) and they have been around since the 1970’s. If simply waving weak magnetic fields in people’s faces were enough for anything close to 1% of people to notice then it would be common knowledge at this point. When the signal is strong enough you don’t need careful experiments to pick out the difference. IE the rest of the universe outside of earth isn’t made of antimatter because our telescope’s aren’t on fire. https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/114/
725686 2y ago
You should probably approach some of the people investigating this.
GrumpyNl 2y ago
Sounds more like you can taste static electricity.

hnuser123456 2y ago

I can do that, it's just having a mental image of the room and building I'm in, as well as the surrounding landscape, sky, and where the sun rises and sets. Even if I have to pass through a bunch of twisting corridors, there's just a mental arrow in my head that's always being updated in the background when I turn.

colonCapitalDee 2y ago
Is that something that you learned how to do? Any suggestions for picking up this skill?
- deepsun 2y ago
  Try playing First person shooter games that don't have a map. But as I said in a sibling comment, it's just orientation using memory, not a compass.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  When I was a kid at some point I just realized I could close my eyes and try to visualize my room that I knew really well. And then I'd imagine what it would look like if I looked at it making a 90 degree right turn. Then visualizing what happens if I walked out of the room, then up the stairs, etc. And then trying to make sure that as I'm doing these turns around corners in my house, connecting it with if I'm facing north/east/south/west until it became second nature to know that. And then as I got older I connected it implicitly with other senses of my surroundings (e.g. time of day + location of sun = you know which direction). I'd just sit for like 5-10 minutes at a time every day doing that until I got "bored" by the skill. Not necessarily sure if it's something you can practice as I know there's actual brain structural differences that can determine whether you have this skill and how advanced it is, and I'd imagine it's potentially harder to rewire your brain for this as an adult.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
  I found "Natural Navigator" by Tristan Gooley to be a fascinating read with a lot of good ways to train your navigation skills without instruments.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bongodongobob 2y ago

That's just spatial awareness. Put a giant magnet by his head. He'll still be able to do it.

kuhewa 2y ago
Have you ever done any of these controlled experiments with giant helmets or blindfolds and elaborate movements to defeat orientation though?
Biologist123 2y ago
I can just imagine the experimental set-up…”son, what the f** are you doing”. “Chill out dad, I’m just going to blind fold you and run some electricity through this coil, and you have to tell me where New Bedford is, got it”. “I told you you ain’t getting no inheritance”. Etc

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

Lots of people have a good "sense of direction" in terms of an awareness of their surroundings that keeps track of cardinal directions. It also correlates with an ability to use other indicators to reinforce or reacquire this awareness. Put me on some winding singletrack in the woods, or driving around an unfamiliar part of town, and I'll remember an imaginary map of where I've been and which directions I've turned, and be able to tell you where north is all day. If I forget, there are context clues everywhere - it's late afternoon here in Michigan so the sun is setting in the southern sky, pointing south-southwest. I'm currently in a windowless manufacturing facility, but I know where the front door is and I remember that's on the west side of the building, so I'm facing east. It helps a lot that many roads and buildings are indexed to be precisely aligned with the compass. It also helps that my Garmin GPS watch has a built-in compass, so if I ever need to shoot a bearing precisely, I train and recalibrate this sense of direction. But if you put a blindfold on me, sit me down on an office chair, spin it around for a couple minutes as you wheel me down the hall and into an unfamiliar room...after I have finished retching, I hypothesize that I'd have no sensation to tell me where north is. I appreciate the author's study design here - the source PDF [1] and linked website [2] describe feeding the turtles in the same pool, but exposing them to varied magnetic fields by surrounding the pool in a giant Helmholtz coil. It's not as if they flew the turtles alternately to New Hampshire and to the Gulf of Mexico, which might leave lots of context clues in light or smell or taste, but as if they effectively teleported them to an identical pool of water with slightly different magnetic fields. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?sharing_token=3jyO_nr20tkXxF-Esv7ZJNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PSnysHTEUp3kJfbIuzukZMThbZ8UBJFCT2hnGyGlumPkJLfUAJPW5LikAnQfKvu93LI60cSZLUJe2cedXeaZ1dwUnJCiAk3QOyzbJQepZOnJ0rWmckUY_B4ROlR9SQEt8%3D https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08554-y.epdf?shar... [2] https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/oceanweb/turtles/index.html https://oceanweb.sites.oasis.unc.edu/www.unc.edu/depts/ocean...

climb_stealth 2y ago

Hah, I thought you meant a literal cat. Our dogs do that. There's a building we used to go up with six elevators. Three on each side of the hallway facing each other. Without hesitation the dogs will pick the correct direction to go coming out of the elevator. Whereas I always had to check because it all looks the same and depending on which side the elevator is on you have to turn left or right. It's like they have an innate sense of where they are.

ryanianian 2y ago
Could there be a different smell or air-flow coming from one side versus the others? My apartment building has identical elevator lobbies. I thought my dog was smart by not leaving the elevator on seemingly identical incorrect floors. But actually I think she just knows what home smells like.
- climb_stealth 2y ago
  Not sure, but I wouldn't think so. They'd basically spring out of the elevator with no hesitation.

AngryData 2y ago

Atleast when I was younger I always felt like I could point towards north within 20-30 degrees at any time. I tried testing it out many times, and was right the vast majority of the time, even when trying to eliminate possible subconscious factors like sound reflections and what surface I was standing on. We do technically have the right associated nerves and structure for it, but obviously underdeveloped compared to animals who use it to live and survive, so I would totally believe it is possible to some extent, atleast among some people. I would attribute part of it to practice, because when I was younger I spent a lot of times in the woods where you can easily get turned around following animal trails and skirting around obstacles, and finding your way back out accurately was extremely helpful.

kaushikt 2y ago

Same with my old man. He is a farmer in southern India. All the farms nearby are super identical with tall beetlenut trees. Im often confused where we are and which direction is the house, he is not. He has set over a 100 water gates across the farms and the instructions he gives is always east face or turn the gate north facing as an example.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

The aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language, uses cardinal directions instead of relative, e.g. "That man is to the west of her" instead of "That man is to the left of her", which of course means that speakers need to be aware of the direction they are facing at all times, and thus these people have a remarkable sense of direction. Can't remember where I first heard about this, I think it may have been a Malcolm Gladwell book, but in any case if you search you can find lots of articles on the topic.

burnished 2y ago

Foxes can, and a brief search suggests cats may also?