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Neodynium mood
A 21st century human brain can be destroyed by many unexpected experiences too shocking to be handled (war, accident, drug, rape, jail...)
What about a new electro-magnetic sense ? (very unexpected physical experience for a human body I guess, not violent but everlasting sensation)
Question is simple : does this kind of body modification ever leave you alone ? Couldn't it lead you to unsanity ?
Do you sleep well when your fan/computer/tv is on ?
Do you focus on a discussion in a room full of cellphones waves ?
Do you ever reach a sort of inner peace or is this new sense too invading ?
I can't find any precise reports on those everyday life issues here, still I find it vital to know a bit more before getting involved in such a modification.
Comments
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if you are refering to magnetic implants. those are magnetic, not electro-magnetic.
the sensation from implanted magnets is rather weak as magnetic fields get weaker fast with increasing distance. it also affects only a very small bandwith due to the magnet's inertia.
take a step away from your fan, and it won't bother you. and cellphones electromagnetic waves are in the MHz to GHz range, while the magnets will have trouble catching up with some kHz already. besides mobile communication is encrypted and happens ways to fast for your brain to interpret it in any meaningful way even if it would not be encrypted.
from what i can tell, it behaves like every other sens you have,too. just like taste, or hearing. it's there, your brain will get information from it, but unless your brain decides that it is interesting or important, it'll just discard the information it got. i mean, if it would cause any harm, living in a city with constant car noise, or wearing clothes which causes a sensation of touch all the time would drive billions of people insane.
so.. without having conducted any scientific research, just based on common sense and observation:
no it will not drive you insane, you'll still be able to sleep well, it will not munge away all your brain and turn you into a magnetic zombie.
after all. your brain wasn't born ready to rumble. it had to learn how to interpret many senses within the first years of your life. so.. one more or less, what does the brain care.
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Seconded. Your brain is more plastic than you think; after a while, it just becomes like any other sense as your brain rewires itself to accommodate the new data.
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For the record, it isn't as much a new sense as it is an extension to your tactile sense. Your brain already knows how to feel vibrations in your finger, it's just likely that the section of your brain dedicated to feeling these vibrations will expand as you're using your new abilities more often.I can't imagine it being a traumatic experience for anyone unless perhaps someone had the magnet forcibly implanted.
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So it actually becomes a common tactile sense, assimilated by your brain as a natural perception of environment ? Ian I have no doubt about brain plasticity (which I try to developped myself by intense stimulis/learning experiences) only this sensation is really new compared to others (million of years for evolution to teach us how to interpret colors, smells, tastes...)rdb you provide a reassuring point of view, still I'm wondering, on a personal level, how could I be focused on my writing if I feel the hard drive spinning underneath my hands ? Like you said we get used to city's sounds or clothes perception on our skin. But you can close the windows and get naked, right ?Could you compare it to some extend to internet box waves perception ? In my case, I can clearly feel those nasty wifi waves tickling my head when trying to sleep or to relax. Only I can turn the damn device off for a while :)
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You can feel your feet against the floor when you pay attention to it, but it doesn't bother you when you're focusing on writing. You can feel your heart beat when you pay attention to it, but it doesn't keep you awake. The brain is good at filtering out stimuli that aren't relevant to what you're focused on. It's probably comparable to that, in the sense that when you don't pay attention to it, you probably won't even notice it.That said, I don't have a magnet implant yet, so perhaps someone who does can comment on this.
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Yeah I think ThomasEgi already gave a very relevent personal point of view, like you rdb I'm going to get an implant sooner or later and I was essentialy searching for negative experiences (I'm not sadistic, though)I'm not talking of physical pain. It's really on the mental aspect of the magnet, how much space does it take in your thoughts ? how often are you disturbed by a magnetic field in your day ? is it sometimes bothering ? unpleasant when the field becomes too strong ? can you ignore it ?
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I might not be the best reference since my implant hardly reacts to things like hard drives (I can feel it, but it is sometimes hard to distinguish it from the tingling you get when trying to focus on something that mightor might not be threre).But it really is not a new sensation at all. It's (as rdb said before) an old sensor (touch) connected to a new source. The sensation is somewhere between vibrating and tingling. So if you have your hand on your laptop and the fan spins the laptop starts to vibrate. Just like that. Does that annoy you while working on it? If no, there you go. When I want to feel the magnetic field I have to keept some distance from my laptop since otherwise the vibrating case is stronger.As for unpleasant sensations: yep, if some really strong magnet passes by (doesn't really happen in real life) it can be unpleasant, mostly because it is unexpected. The main disturbance is being distracted because I love playing around with it. Other than that, make sure it is small enough to not cause any pain just being there (or being in the way when grapping), since being magnetic or not, it still is a foreign object to your body.
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Ezekiel, based on my experience with my own magnetic implant, I agree with what everyone has written here so far.
You seem to have an exaggerated sense of how sensitive the magnet is. For the most part, I don't feel anything with it unless I go out of my way to find things. I don't feel my hard drive unless I put my finger in a very specific place over my computer, extending up to maybe a centimeter over the plastic cover. I don't remember ever feeling a fan or a TV at all.
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Thanks, that's exactly the kind of personal feedback I was looking for.Still I disagree with you Skeptikos : everyone has a very different level of physical sensitivity.As I said wifi waves often bother me when I'm too close to the source. Same thing for my phone. I know I'm not the only one in that case. Not any kind of 6th sense (or maybe) it's just there, in the air, and somewhere in our body the signal gets received.From what I read in Nate's report I understood that magnet was kind of intrusive in his life (not in a bad way, just "intrusive") reminded me of the "wifi feeling", that's why I'm worried about my inner peace.
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Ezekiel , that Wifi sensitivity sorta reminds me of that story where they set up a new cell-phone-basestation. everyone started to complain about suddenly having problems to sleep , headaches etc... the technicians learned about the complains and they where like :"wow, how bad is this going to be once we actually turn this thing on" don't get me wrong, electromagnetic radiation can be troublesome. but wifi is flat out not powerful enough. even mobilephones, many times stronger than wifi, are not even close to something you could preceive. from my own experience with electronics there are many other ways an electronic device can annoy the heck out of you. some parts grow old and start to vibrate, especially coils in powersupplies. but also things like the switch of a computer-mouse that registers the "clicks". sometimes they emmit a very high frequency noise, not very loud and hard to track down, but those freaked me out for weeks befor i found out what was going on.
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Ezekiel-
"everyone has a very different level of physical sensitivity."
That's probably true, but there are limits to what you can get out of nerve cells.
I'm not sure what an industrial battery charger is like (following Nate), but I'm guessing it's much more powerful than your everyday fan or TV. Microwaves also use a lot of power. Your sensitivity is going to have to be two orders of magnitude (or more) higher than mine before it becomes a problem.
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I had to think of the same story as TE and wanted to suggest a double blind "study", so just test with phones, that are turned off and others that are turned on and see if you can distinguish them (without knowing which is which beforehand).
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Reminds me of a personnal experience :I used to "share" a neighbor's wifi; the connection rate was usually quite low due to huge ancient walls and many other networks close to it. After a few days, I realised that my position in the room and toward my laptop had influence on the speed (from 50ko/s to 300ko/s and up).Being very close to the laptop lowered the speed while standing between the source and my computer seemed to "help" the octects crossing the air. Therefore I presume human body can interact with those waves, as, maybe, with cellphones.Afterall, brain is only an organic cpu, generating itself an electrical field. Perception is mostly, in my opinion, a matter of focusing, open-mindness and, surely, a bit of faith too :)
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so.. this discussion goes a bit offtopic but i still like to explain it a bit.
of course electromagnetic waves do interact with materia, and that includes your body,too. so you can influence those waves but a piece of wood or metal can do that too and this is in no way related to sensing those waves.
i'd like to take in some numbers that might explain things a bit better. a really strong wifi sender radiates bout 250mW of energy away. that's about the same energy as a loud headphone. just as sound, radio waves propagate into the space where they quickly distribute and get weaker. if you have a very strong wifi signal, you may receive a bit less 1/1000th of that. bout 100μW. if you have a very poor wlan connection, then the signal is more likely to be in the range of 100pW (or 1/1000000 of the strong signal).
in comparison, your microwave oven typically leaks about 1W of energy( or 1000000000000pW). 2.4 ghz hardly penetrates salty water. even if your brain would pick those wave up, they wouldn't go further than maybe 2 to 5 mm thus, hardly penetrate your skull.
if your wifi or any other regular electronic device really makes you feel uncomfortable in even the slightest way, then you would collapse and faint from pain standing next to a microwave oven or using a mobile phone. as those can be billions of times more powerful than your wifi.
if you still insist you can feel electromagnetic waves. yes, it is possible to feel them, and they don't feel good. this is in fact used by some non-lethal military weapons which use electromagnetic waves of around 15ghz (not sure iirc) and dozens of kW output power. they focus narrow beams onto the targets (humans). the waves penetrate only the topmost skin layer and trigger the nerves located there. reports say it generates a hot, burning sensation and you instinctively run out of that beam to take cover. not lethal, but still not nice. altho i am not sure if they actually heat up the skin in a very thin layer or if it really only triggers the nerves, of course they don't tell.
guess pumping anything up by 15 orders of magnitude it turns into a painful weapon.
so. as i said. i can well imagine that your router or other electronic devices causes discomfort. but i'd bet it's not the electromagnetic radiation but some sort of audible noise or similar. you can try tracking it down with a microphone and a volume-metering tool/software. i had 3 devices where i was even able to track it down to the part on the pcb, and in one case i found a leak in my parent's car's air conditioning system. tool like http://www.baudline.com/ greatly helps for such things.
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It heats up the skin: it's essentially the world's biggest microwave. Yay, ionizing radiation being used to lightly toast protesters. :(
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But "only" to induce pain. As I remember it doesn't leave traces, so YEAH for new torture, this time on a mass (demonstrations) scale..
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