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10 Things an Electromagnetic Field Can Do to Your Brain

Esther Inglis-Arkell
10/21/11 1:00pm
Filed to: Daily 10
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We all know that electromagnetic fields are magic and can do anything at any time for any reason.
Sometimes, though, they can be harnessed to do certain things in particular. Electromagnetic fields can be
applied to the skull, making your brain do strange, and sometimes completely inexplicable things. Find out
how scientists use magnetic fields to rip your mind apart, make it better, and have it do tricks like a trained
puppy.
10. Shred its DNA
Well, it's no surprise that not all the things a high electromagnetic field can do are good. Actually, even a
mild electromagnetic field can wreck a brain if it's applied over a long time. Scientists found that an

electromagnetic field applied to lab rats over time resulted in broken strands of DNA in the brain. Not just
anywhere - the brain specifically. It's possible that this DNA damage is the cause of brain tumors, and the
reason why people don't just walk around with brain-boosting electromagnetic hats all the time.
9. Stimulate its Growth
Oh, electromagnetism! It's such a trickster! One moment its ripping through DNA strands like a pit bull
through an old sock, the next minute it's tenderly nurturing the growth of neurons. Scientists found that
brains subjected to regular transcranial electromagnetic stimulation for only five days showed an increase in
stem cells in the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain that governs memory, making electromagnetic
stimulation a possible treatment for Alzheimer's and stroke patients.
8. Train you off food and water
Rats who had been deprived of water were placed in a strong electromagnetic field and offered a sweetened
solution. Although they did drink, they drank less than those given the solution without exposure to the
electromagnetic field. When rats were given the solution and later exposed to the field, they developed an
aversion to the solution over time. Enough electromagnetism may turn you off your favorite food.
7. Make you spin in circles
Other rats (who have a terrible time of it during experiments like these) were found to walk in tight circles
under the influence of an electromagnetic field. Scientists think that the field takes out the rats' sense of
balance, making them lurch in circles. The lack of balance also may have induced nausea, which causes
lethargy and could be one of the reasons that rats go off their feed.
6. Pacify you completely
Transcranial electromagnetic stimulation - subjecting people to strong electromagnetic fields aimed at
specific parts of the brain - is sometimes used as a treatment for bipolar disorder or clinical depression.
Some patients find an immense relief in this. Other people, who don't suffer from depression, have reason
to worry about it. People without any diagnosed medical illness while under such stimulation can be relaxed
to a state where they can't think of anything, at all, that bothers them. If that kind of relaxation can be
induced at will, it could be used to pacify large parts of the population.

5. Alter your morality

All that relaxation has a price. Sometimes we're meant to fret. For example, if someone is about to cross a
dangerous bridge, and we're aware of the chance it can collapse, and they aren't. Those without a magnetic
field dancing around their brain, think that allowing the person to cross the bridge would be immoral. Those
with a field gaily capering through their neurons think that, as long as this hypothetical person made it to the
other side in one piece, there's no real moral problem. Judging the morality of a situation strictly by the
outcome makes any crimes with 'attempted' in their description no longer crimes at all. It takes away a
person's intentions and bases morality entirely on what happens to occur. Morality becomes a matter of
chance.
4. Take out your power of speech but leave your ability to sing
Broca's area in the brain controls the ability to speak. A large electromagnetic field applied to the area takes
out that ability entirely. Subjects under this kind of stimulation simply stop speaking the moment the field
disrupts that part of the brain, while the rest of the functions are unimpeded. One of those other functions is
singing. Although many people think that singing words and speaking words are much the same function,
the ability to perform each action is housed in completely different parts of the brain. So people who are
unable to talk will sing perfectly normally.
3. Induce panic, disorientation, and deep fear
Although some kinds of electromagnetic fields, applied to certain areas of the brain, pacify people and put
them in a good mood, others are said to induce fear. Sometimes people report a persistent, if mild, sense of
unease. Others have a more visceral response, feelings of despair and paranoia, sliding into overwhelming
terror.
2. Cause Seizures and Death
Under the worst circumstances, exposure to electromagnetic fields can cause a number of serious effects in
the brain. Studies have shown that it can change the flow of blood in the brain, and turn off neuron groups.
Some people, under the influence of high magnetic fields have caused people to have violent seizures, and
even lose consciousness, slip into comas, and die. This is one of the reasons why houses under high

electromagnetic fields have ghost stories associated with them. In conjunction with the deep feelings of
unease, mysterious seizures and deaths start all kinds of rumors. Of course, those rumors aren't as bad as . . .

1. Make you see ghosts

Electromagnetic fields, or electric shocks, have induced specific hallucinations in people. Those who are
exposed to them, even in laboratory settings, have caused people to complain about a feeling of people
following them, talking to them, or watching them. This is not always an uncomfortable sensation. Some
people interpret this presence as a malevolent presence, especially if it's coupled with a feeling of unease,
but others say they felt an inspiring or comforting presence. Ghost hunters will sometimes say the reverse that ghosts cause a high electromagnetic field, or sometimes that a high electromagnetic field will allow
ghosts to appear. Nobody is sure, yet, what these fields do to ghost brain DNA.

https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/how-strong-would-a-magnetic-field-have-to-be-to-killyou/
How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
January 12, 2015
by Brian
Theres a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie,
a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant non-metallic being (a monsterified human). The human is finally
defeated by a makeshift spear, which prompts the robot general to say:
Funny, isnt it? The human was impervious to our most powerful magnetic fields, yet in the end he
succumbed to a harmless sharpened stick.

The joke, of course, is that the human body might seem much more fragile than a metallic machine, but to a
robot our ability to withstand enormous magnetic fields would be like invincibility.
But this got me thinking: how strong would a magnetic field have to be before it killed a human?

Unlike a computer hard drive, the human body doesnt really make use of any magnetic states there is
nowhere in the body where important information is stored as a static magnetization. This means that there
is no risk that an external magnetic field could wipe out important information, the way that it would for,
say, a credit card or a hard drive. So, for example, its perfectly safe for a human (with no metal in their

body) to have an MRI scan, during which the magnetic fields reach several Tesla, which is about
stronger than the normal magnetic fields produced by the Earth.

times

A computer hard drive stores information in a sequence of magnetically aligned segments.

But even without any magnetic information to erase, a strong enough magnetic field must have some
effect. Generally speaking, magnetic fields create forces that push on moving charges. And the body has
plenty of moving charges inside it: most notably, the electrons that orbit around atomic nuclei.
As Ill show below, a large enough magnetic field would push strongly enough on these orbiting electrons to
completely change the shape of atoms, and this would ruin the chemical bonds that give our body its
function and its structure integrity.

What atoms look like

Before I continue, let me briefly recap the cartoon picture of the structure of the atom, and how to think
about it. An atom is the bound state of at least one electron to a positively charged nucleus. The electric
attraction between the electron and the nucleus pulls the electron inward, while the rules of quantum
mechanics prevent the electron from collapsing down completely onto the nucleus.

In this case, the relevant rule of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says
that if you confine an electron to a volume of size , then the electrons momentum must become at least as

large as
. The corresponding kinetic energy is
, which means that the more
tightly you try to confine an electron, the more kinetic energy it gets. [Here, is Plancks constant, and is
the electron mass$.] This kinetic energy is often called the quantum confinement energy.
In a stable atom, the quantum confinement energy, which favors having a large electron orbit, is balanced
against the electric attraction between the electron and the nucleus, which pulls the electron inward and has
energy

. [Here is the electron charge and

is the vacuum permittivity]. In the balanced state,

these two energies are nearly equal to each other, which means that

meters.

This is the quick and dirty way to figure out the answer to the question: how big is an atom?.
The associated velocity of the electron in its orbit is
, which is about
m/s (or about a
million miles per hour). The attractive force between the electron and the nucleus is about
, which comes to ~100 nanoNewtons.

Who pulls harder: the nucleus, or the magnetic field?

Now that Ive reminded you what an atom looks like, let me remind you what magnetic fields do to free
charges.
They pull them into circular orbits, like this:

The force with which a magnetic field pulls on a charge is given by

, where is the strength of
the field. For an electron moving at a million miles per hour, as in the inside of an atom, this works out to be
about 1 picoNewton per Tesla of magnetic field.
Now we can consider the following question. Who pulls harder on the electron: the nucleus, or the external
magnetic field?
The answer, of course, depends on the strength of the magnetic field. Looking at the numbers above, one
can see that for just about any realistic situation, the force provided by the magnetic field is much much

smaller than the force from the nucleus, so that the magnetic field essentially does nothing to perturb the
electrons in their atomic orbitals. However, if the magnetic field were to get strong enough, then the force it
produces would be enough to start significantly bending the electron trajectories, and the shape of the
electron orbits would get distorted.
Setting

from above gives the estimate that this kind of distortion happens only when

Tesla. Given that the strongest static magnetic fields we can create artificially are only about 100
Tesla, its probably safe to say that you are unlikely to experience this any time soon. Just dont wander too
close to any magnetars.

Distorted atoms
But supposing that you did wander into a magnetic field of 100,000 Tesla, what would happen?
The strong magnetic forces would start to squeeze the electron orbits in all the atoms in your body. The
result would look something like this:

So, for example, an initially spherical hydrogen atom (on the left) would have its orbit squeezed in the
directions perpendicular to the magnetic field, and would end up instead looking like the picture on the
right. This squeezing would get more and more pronounced as the field is turned up, so that all the atoms in
your body would go from roughly spherical to cigar-shaped, and then to needle-shaped.
Needless to say, the molecules that make up your body are only able to hold together when they are made
from normal shaped atoms, and not needle-shaped atoms. So once the atomic orbitals got sufficiently
distorted, their chemistry would change dramatically and these molecules would start to fall apart. And your
body would presumably be reduced to a dusty, incoherent mess (artists conception).

But for those of us who stay away from neutron stars, it is probably safe to assume that death by magnetic
field-induced disintegration is pretty unlikely. So you can continue lording your invincibility over your robot
coworkers.

UPDATE:
A number of people have pointed out, correctly, that if you really subjected a body to strong magnetic fields,
something would probably go wrong biologically far before the field got so ludicrously large fields as 100,000
Tesla. For example, the motion of ions through ion channels, which is essential for nerve firing, might be
affected. Sadly, I probably dont know enough biology to give you a confident speculation about what,
exactly, might go wrong.
There is another possible issue, though, that can be understood at the level of cartoon pictures of atoms. An
electron orbiting around a nucleus is, in a primitive sense, like a tiny circular electric current. As a result, the
electron creates its own little magnetic field, with a north pole and south pole determined by the
direction of its orbital motion. Like so:

Normally, these little electron orbits all point in more or less random directions. But in the presence of a
strong enough external magnetic field, the electron orbit will tend to get aligned so that its north pole
points in the same direction as the magnetic field. By my estimate, this would happen at a few hundred
Tesla.
In other words, a few hundred Tesla is what it would take to strongly magnetize the human body. This isnt
deformation of atoms, just alignment of their orbits in a consistent direction.
Once the atomic orbits were all pointed in the same direction, the chemistry of atomic interactions might
start to be affected. For example, some chemical processes might start happening at different rates when
the atoms are side by side as compared to when they are front to back. I can imagine this subtle
alteration of chemical reaction rates having a big effect over a long enough time.

Maybe this is why, as commenter cornholio pointed out below, a fruit fly that grows up in a ~ 10 Tesla field
appears to get mutated.

Footnote
I have been assuming, of course, that we are talking only about static magnetic fields. Subjecting someone
to a magnetic field that changes quickly in time is the same thing as bombarding them with radiation. And it
is not at all difficult to microwave someone to death.
[Update: A number of people have brought up transcranial magnetic stimulation, which has noticeable
biological effects at relatively small field strengths. But this works only because it applies a time-dependent
magnetic field, which can induce electric currents in the brain.]

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/bending-morality-magnetism
A Magnetic Field Applied to the Brain Can Alter People's Sense of Morality
Perfect for brainwashing an evil clone army
By Clay Dillow Posted March 31, 2010

http://www.princeton.edu/~napl/
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation can impair the brain's ability to make moral decisions based on another
person's intentions.
Moral judgments often have less to do with outcome and more to do with intention. Take murder, for
instance: The U.S. legal system makes distinctions between a crime committed in the heat of the moment
and one that is planned ahead of time. But moral judgments may not be as sacrosanct as we believe: MIT
scientists have shown that they can alter our moral judgments simply by magnetically interfering with a
certain part of the brain.

Studies have shown that the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) lights up with activity when we engage in
moral judgments like evaluating the intentions of another person, indicating the region is important to
making moral decisions. But while we like to think we're very consistent in our morality, the MIT team
showed that an electromagnetic field applied to the scalp impairs our ability to evaluate the intentions of
others, leaving us with little by which to hand down a moral judgment.
The study relied on non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to interfere with the right TPJ,
temporarily impeding the normal firing of neurons in that region. In one experiment participants were
exposed to TMS for nearly half an hour then asked to complete a quiz in which they had to judge characters'
actions based on their intentions. In a second test, subjects were hit with a 500-millisecond burst of TMS just
as they were evaluating a moral problem.
In both cases, control subjects were able to evaluate the harmfulness and morality of characters' intentions,
whereas those exposed to TMS made judgments based purely on outcome. For example, one common
question asked whether or not it was morally permissible for a man to allow his girlfriend to cross a bridge
he knows is unsafe, even if in the end she makes it across safely. Control subjects found the intention to do
harm morally impermissible, but those exposed to TMS largely based their judgment solely on the outcome;
no harm, no foul.
The study not only shows that our morals aren't exactly incorruptible, but also sheds light on the way the
brain organizes and compartmentalizes moral decision making. It also reinforces something we all know
intuitively to be true: finding the difference between right and wrong is rarely as simple as it sounds.

http://news.mit.edu/2010/moral-control-0330

Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets

By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway peoples views of moral
situations.
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
March 30, 2010
To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions an ability known as
theory of mind. For example, if one hunter shoots another while on a hunting trip, we need to know what
the shooter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his fellow hunter for an animal?
MIT neuroscientists have now shown they can influence those judgments by interfering with activity in a
specific brain region a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.
Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly
active when we think about other peoples intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the
researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field
applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects ability to make moral judgments that require an
understanding of other peoples intentions for example, a failed murder attempt was impaired.
The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, report their
findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 29. Funding for the
research came from The National Center for Research Resources, the MIND Institute, the Athinoula A.
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, the Simons Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard
Foundation.
The study offers striking evidence that the right TPJ, located at the brains surface above and behind the
right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper. Its also
startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral
judgments, says Young, a postdoctoral associate in MITs Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior, she says. To be able to apply (a magnetic field)
to a specific brain region and change peoples moral judgments is really astonishing.
Thinking of others
Saxe first identified the right TPJs role in theory of mind a decade ago a discovery that was the subject of
her MIT PhD thesis in 2003. Since then, she has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show
that the right TPJ is active when people are asked to make judgments that require thinking about other
peoples intentions.
In the new study, the researchers wanted to go beyond fMRI experiments to observe what would happen if
they could actually disrupt activity in the right TPJ. Their success marks a major step forward for the field of
moral neuroscience, says Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy at Duke University.
Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by
moving beyond correlation to causation, says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.

The researchers used a noninvasive technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to
selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A magnetic field applied to a small area of the skull
creates weak electric currents that impede nearby brain cells ability to fire normally, but the effect is only
temporary.
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a
series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden)
to seven (absolutely permissible).
In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was
asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man
to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In
such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even
though it appears he intended to do harm.
In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely
to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS
interfered with subjects ability to interpret others intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome
information to make their judgments.
It doesnt completely reverse peoples moral judgments, it just biases them, says Saxe.
When subjects received TMS to a brain region near the right TPJ, their judgments were nearly identical to
those of people who received no TMS at all.
While understanding other peoples intentions is critical to judging them, it is just one piece of the puzzle.
We also take into account the persons desires, previous record and any external constraints, guided by our
own concepts of loyalty, fairness and integrity, says Saxe.
Our moral judgments are not the result of a single process, even though they feel like one uniform thing,
she says. Its actually a hodgepodge of competing and conflicting judgments, all of which get jumbled into
what we call moral judgment.
Saxes lab is now studying the role of theory of mind in judging situations where the attempted harm was
not a physical threat. The researchers are also doing a study on the role of the right TPJ in judgments of
people who are morally lucky or unlucky. For example, a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian is
unlucky, compared to an equally drunk driver who makes it home safely, but the unlucky homicidal driver
tends to be judged more morally blameworthy.