No, it's got nothing to do with being able to see dead people (which is a good thing — imagine how creepy that would be).
A lone scientist thinks our sixth sense is the ability to feel Earth's magnetic field.
That's not as crazy as it sounds. The sense has been confirmed in animals who use it to navigate around the world when they migrate.
The findings come from Joe Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology, who recently gave the most 2016-esque reaction to his work:
Nailed it. Humans have functioning magnetoreceptors.
There's no real conclusion to Kirschvink's work, but his theory is so well backed he's just been handed nearly $1 million in grant money to prove it with help from labs in Japan and New Zealand. Awesome.
So how would it work exactly? There are a couple of well-documented theories knocking around. But Kirschvink believes elements of the hypothesis that we have cells in our body that carry tiny compasses which react to Earth's magnetic field.
The magnetoreceptors, he poses, contain magnetite and have been found in birds and fish.
Kirschvink is testing this theory by asking participants to sit in a special box that blocks out electromagnetic background noise. While inside, they're exposed to a pure rotating magnetic field.
In the past, Kirschvink has noted that a drop in alpha brain waves when the field is rotating counterclockwise.
He explained, "The suppression of α waves, in the EEG world, is associated with brain processing: A set of neurons were firing in response to the magnetic field, the only changing variable. "
BRING ON MAGNETIC POWERS.
