Article-Winter '09
Excerpt from Secret Teachings of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner, used with permission.
from pg. 63-67of chapter 3:
"Cells and living organisms not only perceive, decode, and respond to extremely weak electrical signals, they perceive, decode, and respond to magnetic signals. And magnetic fields contain information, just as electric signals do.
All living organisms create and give off magnetic fields, just as they do electric fields. Such fields strongly affect living organisms and their functioning, for living organisms and all their parts, even a single enzyme molecule, are able to detect magnetic fields and the information they carry.
Magnetic fields have been found to directly influence a wide variety of physiological processes: enzyme activity, biological signaling, cell growth and metabolism, and tissue repair, among others. These small, field-induced changes at tiny microscopic levels have profound impacts. They cascade upward, translating into biological changes observable at the macroscopic level-in other words, at the larger level of the whole organism.
And these tiny magnetic signals, just like electric signals, can be amplified. Biological cells not only amplify the magnetic fields they encounter, but also rectify the signals they pick up, increasing their coherence. This capacity to interpret and respond to information encoded within magnetic fields is built into all biological systems and is an evolutionarily intended ability.
It has long been known that salmon, pigeons, and honeybees can sense the geomagnetic field lines of the Earth in order to orient themselves in their environment. Many birds use the Earth's magnetic lines to guide themselves to their proper destinations during migration. This sensitivity of birds, fish, and bees to magnetic fields is remarkable given the relative weakness of the Earth's magnetic field.
Magnetic fields are measured in units of tesla. The Earth's magnetic field is only about 50 microtesla (50 millionths of a tesla). In comparison, the magnetic field from a tiny toy magnet is about 1000 times greater than the magnetic field of the Earth, about 50 millitesla (50 thousandths of a tesla).
Closer examination of magnetic-sensitive birds, bees, and fish has revealed that they all contain magnetite in their bodies. Magnetite is an ore that is very sensitive to magnetic fields. (Lodestone is a form of magnetite used to make the earliest compass needles. Lodestone, unlike magnetite, is polarized. One side of it is pulled toward the magnetic north pole.) It turns out that the presence of magnetite in living orgnaisms is pervasive, from bacteria to mammals. Magnetite is, in fact, made by living organisms inside their bodies, not gathered in from the environment. It is under precise biological control. Though most people do not know it, human beings have magnetite in their bodies, as well.
It is located in the hippocampus and that organ is very sensitive to fluctuations in magnetic fields.
Weak magnetic fields modulate the rhythmic oscillations of the hippocampus. That is, they change its functioning. When the hippocampus detects a magnetic field, it decodes the information within it and shifts its functioning in response. It is more responsive to extremely low magnetic frequencies in exactly the range of the Earth's magnetic field than it is to high intensity fields. In fact, hippocampal tissue is capable of discriminating among different magnetic frequencies, between, for example, 1Hz and 60Hz oscillating magnetic fields. (Sixty Hz is the frequency at which most man-made electricity oscillates.)
The hippocampus is a very important organ for human beings. It is highly involved in interpreting spatial relationships, memory, and the extraction of meaning from the vast sea of signals within which we live. It is also closely attuned to the healthy functioning of the heart.
Physiologically, the hippocampus is a primary target for the molecules that carry information, such as ion balance, blood pressure, immunity, pain, reproductive status, and stress. It is directly involved in the feedback system for blood pressure, the hpyothalamus-adrenal-pituitary axis, and the immune system. The hippocampus also works closely with the amygdala, another part of the brain, to modulate body physiology in response to emotions.
While it was long thought that the brain created no new neuronal cells after birth, it is now known that the body constantly sends stem cells to the hippocampus to be made into new neuronal cells. In response to some emotions, such as anger and fear, the body produces a great deal of cortisol. The more cortisol, or sustained negative stress, that occurs the more the ability of the hippocampus to do its job decreases. Nerve cell generation in the hippocampus slows or stops with sustained cortisol levels.
But the most interesting thing about the hippocampus is how it works with meaning. All the sensory systems of our bodies converge in the hippocampus; all the sensory impulses we receive flow to it. And all these sensory impulses contain a great deal of information. The hippocampus deciphers the meanings in the sensory impulses we receive and acts as a central transfer point for many different sites in the neocortex that, together, represent or hold memories.
In other words, the hippocampus extracts patterns encoded within sensory flows and sends these decoded patterns to other portions of the brain for storage as memories and for further processing.
Where bees and pigeons use the magnetic field fluxes to decode the information they need to orient themselves in space and direction, people use the hippocampus to orient themselves within the flow of meaning in which they find themselves daily. Once the meaning is determined, it is encoded as memory. The stronger the emotional flow that accompanies the meanings, the more strongly they are encoded as memory.
The meanings encoded in language (or in any communication, such as facial expression) cannot be decoded if the hippocampus is malfunctioning. The hippocampus decodes and integrates sensory information to provide not a directional map, but a map of experience, a map of the meanings through which we travel. The hippocampus is not only able to sense a body's orientation in space, it senses the human's orientation within meaning. And, in a sense, this is what salmon, honeybees, and birds do as well. They orient themselves within directional meaning.
The hippocampus is most active when the sensory data it receives comes from the real environment. It is designed to work-not surprisingly-with complex, nonlinear environmental information, as opposed to linear information like mathematics or what comes from a television..
New hippocampal neurons form in response to demands on the hippocampus to process complex, nonlinear information received from the environment. The greatest degree of change or plasticity anywhere in the brain, is in fact, in the hippocampus. Enriched environments stimulate the formation of many more neurons than simple environments do. We were made to be in the wild nonlinearity of the world, and this immersion is needed for the hippocampus and our central nervous system to be healthy.
In short, what this means is that all biological systems, including human beings, are highly sensitive to both electrical and magnetic fields. The vast majority of the electrical and magnetic signals given off by living organisms-including the Earth-contains information. Whole organisms, and not just their parts, give off electrical and magnetic signals throughout their lives. These fields encode highly sophisticated information about the organisms; all living organisms have been embedded within these types of fields for their entire evolutionary history, for all the billions of years that life has existed on Earth.
And living organisms have learned to do more than simply use these fluctuating fields as part of their physiological functioning or for tracking prey. They also use them to communicate with each other. They pick up electrical and magnetic field communications from one another, alter their functioning and respond in turn. There is an extremely sophisticated electric and magnetic communication that is going on all the time among trillions and trillions of organisms. A web of communication that is so complex and detailed that there is no way to understand it with the linear, analytical mind.
We, as human beings, are also of this Earth and possess, as all living organisms do, the ability, however atrophied, to understand these communications and respond in turn. What so many New Age practitioners call the "energy" of a thing turns out to be, in fact, the energy of a thing. It is the electric and magnetic signaling that all living organisms give off, not only as part of their physiological functioning, but as part of a complex signaling network among all life forms on Earth.
While machines to pick up, decode, and respond to these signals may eventually be developed, human beings have always possessed one of the most powerful instruments ever created to do this-the human heart. For the human heart is vastly more than a muscular pump-it is one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators and receivers known. It is, in fact, a highly evolved organ of perception and communication."