Think about it. Isn’t light+eyes and ears+sound just the same in terms of their “influence at a distance”? We don’t feel that as abnormal or magic - simply because we’ve sensors for them and are used to it. But physically speaking light and magnetism are based on electromagnetic forces.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Get ready to make friends with every TSA agent you see for the rest of your life, and pray you never need an MRI.

    • swnt@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      Fair point, but then, most people don’t have this.

      And even if you do it, you need to get some experience for your brain to develop a model of what to expect in certain situations. For instance, your brain will need some time to get used to the fact, that putting our hand on a fridge will give the brain new sensory stimuli because of the magnets on the fridge.

      This intuitive understanding of light and sound is just that - brain neurons being used to what to expect. And even with an implant you would need to train that.

      Though I’m definitely curious to experience once how that would feel like 😄

    • swnt@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      I have to disagree there regardless of how one interprets “know”.

      If you mean “know intuitively”, then we don’t, precisely because we have no sensors for it and hence no experience with it. We intuitively know light, because we sense it and know what to expect in a closed room with no light source.

      If you mean it scientifically, then light and magnets are extensively studied and far from “know nothing about it”. Our knowledge of light, magnetism and sound is very good on all levels.

  • yuuki@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    And I’m over here still jealous of plants for their photosynthesis and capillary action.

    • swnt@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      Good point! 😄

      We also don’t have any feeling of how that’s like!

  • AzureKevin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We don’t have sensors to directly sense a single magnetic field, but if you’ve played with magnets a lot, you can definitely “feel” how their forces work and develop kind of an intuitive physical sense.

    Perhaps a good example/analogy of something we can feel and understand somewhat intuitively but actually do not scientifically understand is gravity. You can definitely feel its effects / force, even though you don’t have a specific gravitational field sensor in your body per say.

    We have very good theories and formulas for calculating gravitational effects, but we still fundamentally do not understand what causes it.

    • swnt@feddit.deOP
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      1 year ago

      The example with gravity is interesting indeed. We have only acceleration sensors behind our ears, but our body notices the pressure of the body tissue pressing down towards the gravity. And obviously, we also feel gravity when moving.

      However, the difference to magnetism is, that we frankly don’t have any contact with magnets during our evolution - except for the earth’s magnetic field.

      Even if we are able to sense it, it’s definitely far from being able to reliably feel it like we do for gravity.