Your Brain Contains Magnetic Particles, and Scientists Want to Know Why.

Pedro_P

Credit: Shutterstock
▼ In a remote forest laboratory in Germany, free from the widespread pollution found in cities, scientists are studying slices of human brains.
The lab's isolated location, 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Munich, gives the researchers the opportunity to examine a bizarre quirk of the brain: the presence of magnetic particles deep within the organ's tissues.
Scientists have known since the 1990s that the human brain contains these particles, but researchers didn't know why. Some experts proposed that these particles served some biological purpose, while other researchers suggested that the magnets came from environmental pollution.
Now, the German scientists have evidence for the former explanation. In a new, small study that included data on seven postmortem brains, researchers found that some parts of the brains were more magnetic than others. That is, these areas contained more magnetic particles. What's more, all seven brains in the study had very similar distributions of magnetic particles throughout, suggesting that the particles are not a result of environmental absorption but rather serve some biological function, the team wrote in the study, published July 27th in the journal Scientific Reports.
The researchers looked at slices of brain from seven people who had died in the early 1990s at ages 54 to 87. In the remote forest lab, far from widespread sources of magnetic pollution including car exhaust and cigarette ashes, and shielded by leaves known to absorb magnetic particles, the scientists placed their slices under a device that measures magnetic forces.
After taking a control reading, the researchers placed the brain slices next to very strong magnets to magnetize the samples and then took another reading. If the slice contained magnetic particles, those particles would then show up as a reading in the magnetometer.
(Don't worry about your brain particles magnetizing in day-to-day life, though: The kind of magnet used in the experiment is way stronger than anything you would come across in nature, said lead author Stuart Gilder, a professor of geophysics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. The magnet in the study was 1 tesla strong, or 20,000 times stronger than the Earth's  magnetic field, which is about 50 microteslas strong.)
The scientists found that most parts of the brain could be magnetized; in other words, these areas all contained magnetic particles. But in all seven brains, the brain stem and the cerebellumhad greater magnetism than the higher-up cerebral cortex. Both the brain stem and the cerebellum are in the lower back portions in the brain, and both are more evolutionarily ancient than the cerebral cortex.
It's still unclear why the particles appear in this pattern of concentrations, the scientists said. But because the researchers spotted the pattern in all of the brains examined, "it probably has, or had, some kind of biological significance," said Gilder.
For example, because these particles (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note here: Source

chanakyakripa

So many new things are coming up everyday with latest research techniques available. May be some day we will be able to find out the exact source of us. Since the authors mentuoned that both brain parts where magnetism was most pronounced was the more ancient part and the fact that life evolved from primordial soup where chemical changes started with electric impulse supplied by thunder- and electricity and magnetism are interrelated~ may be this can be A clue. Looking for newer news. All the best.

cabrito

Great topic and maybe we will discover a solution  to help comatose patients

Rushcourt71

Perhaps similar research can be carried out on seven living people between 54 to 87 in the 2010s and compare results.

There may be differences in the brain of a dead person over time and living people. The study could also be extended to a range of other groups based on gender, ethnicity and some other social differences that were not included in the original experiments.  

prasadg83

off course it contains magnetic particle because brain also need blood and blood contains hemoglobin.  

sks

That's just amazing. Its really a new thing for me. Thanks for posting

karthikcet

The brain is the most complex machine in the known universe

ramyasri8

There are many unknown things, so much of untapped potential.......