What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

by Scott Carney

In the 1970s a biologist at the University of Manchester in England named Robin Baker attempted to test a theory that some humans, like birds, are able to sense direction through the use of an innate cellular compass. The theory was that humans have magnetically sensitive cells in their nasal bones and eyes that can feel the pull of the magnet poles in the same way that compass needles always point north. Baker decided to test the idea by tying magnets to the heads of healthy college male volunteers in order to reorient any magnetic cells to the local interference. He tied nonmagnetic brass bars to the heads of his control group and then drove his blindfolded test subjects into the English wilderness and asked them to point the way home. In his groundbreaking findings, he reported that the nonmagnetized students could point the way home with a significantly higher degree of accuracy than the others. The research set off a flurry of subsequent research, not all of which was able to replicate Baker’s results. Other magnet-tying tests failed. However, after many contentious debates carried out over the course of a decade, researchers reached a consensus that whether the cause was magnetism or some other aspect of underlying biology, humans do indeed have an innate directional sense. It’s just that we don’t use it very much anymore.