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Ball lighting may be induced hallucination
Published: 12 May, 2010, 12:36
Edited: 29 May, 2010, 11:00
TAGS: SciTech, Psychology, Physics
Numerous encounters of light balls during thunderstorms may actually be magnetic fields playing with human senses.
The phenomenon of powerful magnetic fields causing hallucinations is well known since the 1980s. Called “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS), the technique is used in the lab to study the workings of the brain. Researchers focus an alternating magnetic field, which may be as powerful as 0.5 Tesla, on a specific area. This causes currents in the synapses. If TMS is applied to the visual cortex, the test subject will “see” glowing disks and lines.
A similar effect can happen in nature in specific conditions, say Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In a paper published on the preprint website arXiv.org, they describe how a series of lightning striking in the same place can create an alternating magnetic field, acting similar to TMS experiments on people as far as 200 meters.
Such an event would be quite rare, with only about one to five percent of strikes capable of inducing a hallucination, the researchers say. And of those, only a handful would be witnessed from distance close enough, but not too close to harm the observer.
“As a conservative estimate, roughly 1% of (otherwise unharmed) close lightning experiencers are likely to perceive transcranially-induced above-threshold cortical stimuli,” say Peer and Kendl.
Despite the rarity, these hallucinations may be behind the numerous reports of ball lightning. The theory, however, will be hard to either prove or disprove, considering the difficulty of getting experimental data.
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I saw small balls of light bounce across the kitchen floor during a thunderstorm. First one appeared from a wall and went past me into the wood stove. I had no idea what it was but directly after two more balls about the size of golf balls followed. My immediate thought was that the electricity which had been cut off by the storm was somehow escaping from the power point.