Posted by Geo (206.173.26.226) on September 05, 2000 at 18:14:20:
In Reply to: Question Geo ? posted by MOB on September 05, 2000 at 17:54:07:
since I've never had one. Yet I don't think it implausible, either, given the facts regarding the hypothalamus. I found some interesting information regarding the organ here. Since i'm not certain how to post a link, I just copied and pasted an excerpt. The whole article is found at
http://www.it.umn.edu/itbp/technolog/febmar99/mystery.html
"Manifest in every electrical current there is a magnetic field - electricity and magnetism being inseparable - which radiates in concentric circles out from the chain of neurons as they convey an electrical signal. For most of the twentieth century, detecting these magnetic fields was an impossible task since they are incredibly weak - a hundred million times weaker than the earth's magnetic field. Technologies springing forth from superconductivity, however, have made detection realizable and have opened the way for the revolution in magnetic brain research..."
"At the University of Minnesota, physics Professor John H. Broadhurst is playing an active role in analyzing the magnetic physiology of the brain. He investigates the magnetic patterns involved in conditioned response and researches how the brain processes a combination of sight and sound stimuli. Broadhurst hopes that his endeavors may contribute to a greater knowledge of how the brain works. Broadhurst hypothesized that two combined signals would create a pattern of magnetic fields in the brain that was distinctly different than an overlap of two independent signals. He based this hypothesis on the natural tendency to connect sight with sounds.
Magnetic fields are produced in the brain by electrical surges along neural pathways, so Broadhurst used magneto-encephalography (MEG) to measure the brain's magnetic field. Previous studies on the human brain used electroencephalography (EEG) which directly measures electrical activity in the brain, and which finds practical applications in diagnosing epilepsy and discovering tumors. EEG has limitations that MEG can supercede. First, MEG measures the magnetic field, which is a vector quantity, where EEG measures the electric potential, a scalar quantity. Researchers prefer vectors over a scalars because vectors have a magnitude and a direction, while a scalar only has a magnitude. A good example of a vector is the wind, where both the strength and direction are imperative. On the other hand, temperature and mass - both without direction - are scalar..."