I’ve been trying to write this blog forever, but as the title indicates, I completely forgot. This is what the blog is about: the relationship between electromagnetism and memory.
Since Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply was published, I thought it would be fun to create an annotated bibliography of all the science in the book, so readers could check my sources, learn more about what’s the science, and what’s the fiction. I’ll write a few gray papers, I thought. Then I tried to recollect the actual sources of everything in the book (it’s a 24-year project; I didn’t keep comprehensive notes all the way through…I know, I know, I’ll do better next time) and this was the most difficult to assess. Where did I get all this crap from? Did I make it up or read it somewhere? Was it science or pseudoscience?
Pole shift. I know my Torsos research started with a flood story, but I really got into it when I learned about pole shift. Soon I was neck-deep in research on the flipping of earth’s poles, sparked by Charles Hapgood‘s book. This was connected to my fascination with the original source of the Piri Reis map and other dubious archaeological claims that make amazeballs fiction stories.
Hapgood’s book appears super legit. It’s got a forward by Einstein. Yes, the Einstein. Later on in life, Hapgood starting hanging around with a medium. People who write about science and people who hang with dead people-talkers are usually two different groups of people. I understand why, but I also think it’s kinda a shame to miss out on the diversity in the long run.
Anyway, I believe I got the idea that human memory and electromagnetism are linked based on Charles Hapgood’s book (The Earth’s Shifting Crust, 1958) and cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis. You’d think there would have been an update in knowledge about the topic since 1958, and maybe there has been. I haven’t really been tracking. I suppose you could say the evidence in the cultural record for that kind of cataclysm exists, but you don’t know what kind of exaggerators these authors were. After a few generations, your story has to be really good for it to stick.
And a good story is a little different from a true story.
Here’s the idea in my book: human memories get worse when the electromagnetic field of the earth weakens.
True or false?
First of all, does your brain even know what a magnetic field is?
Back up before we talk about that. What is an electromagnetic field versus a magnetic field, and what’s the difference?
People refer to earth has having a magnetic field instead of saying an electromagnetic field, but really it’s both.
NASA says, “The core of the Earth is also an electromagnet. Although the crust is solid, the core of the Earth is surrounded by a mixture of molten iron and nickle. The magnetic field of Earth is caused by currents of electricity that flow in the molten core.”
So whether you say magnetic or electromagnetic field of the Earth, it’s basically the same thing.
FYI, NASA also says there’s a dent in it. Isn’t that weird?
According to the USGS, earth’s magnetic field does not affect human health. But, based on my rock-solid memory, which may or may not be affected by the magnetic field of the earth (I can’t remember), I read somewhere that the weakening of the electromagnetic field of the earth affects human memory capacity. Was it pseudoscience? Where the hell did I read that? Why can’t I remember anything?
Researchers (who do this kind of a thing for a living, legitimately, not people who read a lot of books and google a lot, like yours truly, not to poo-poo reading and googling, both of which are the cornerstone of my whole life) have copped to the idea that animals use magnetoreceptors for navigating and other handy processes, and humans are animals, so…obviously then they did this fun experiment about it to prove humans can also sense magnetic fields.
Following Hapgood’s book (I actually don’t know if he said the thing about earth’s field weakening causing human memories to fail, so if you’ve read it and remember that line, let me know…I can’t stress that enough) I must have gotten into some fun journal articles, like this one, where they briefly list “Known Interactions Between Brain Frequencies and Natural and Simulated Geophysical Fluctuations.” Then maybe I read something like this, “Billions of Human Brains Immersed in a Shared Geomagnetic Field…” and you can see how I took off from there if you’ve read Torsos by now.
The other part of this investigative “What the hell was I thinking/reading?” thread is that all the articles I’ve posted here weren’t written yet, when I was investigating different hypotheses for major cataclysms as background research for Corporate Torsos Need Not Apply. I also didn’t have a smartphone or own a computer.
I didn’t even have a telephone. In my house. But that’s another story for another blog.
Things have changed. Now I’m surrounded by electromagnetic fields all the time, and scientists are focusing their research on that. If we all lose our minds from an earth magnetic field problem while we’re simultaneously getting brain damage from a cell phone magnetic field problem, then civilization is really in a pinch, right? A couple billion people will be okay, as long as the zombie portion doesn’t kill the no-techs in the process. Did you read Stephen King’s Cell? Fun book.
Side note: I know everybody is talking about this very negative movie about social media and I understand that social media can have adverse effects, but I’ve been reading this saga about an epic woman’s life on Humans of New York lately, and I’m telling you, even if it’s deteriorating my brain, it’s completely worth it.
Okay, so to wrap up, I can’t remember anything, including where I got the idea that human memory is linked to earth’s magnetic field. I’m going to keep working on the magnetic field-human memory research. In the meantime, if you’ve seen anything interesting about it, leave the info in the comments, or call me to chat about it on our cell phones!
