This isn’t actually about brain control. Not really, anyway. If
I really knew anything about brain control, I’d be out taking
over the world, not writing blog posts (and mark my words, I’d
be making Jake Gyllenhaal my number one minion. Yum). It’s
really about a technique called Transcranial Magnetic
Stimulation, how amazing it would be if speculations that it
might happen in nature were true, and why I’m not 100% convinced
that they are. I read this article the other week in New
Scientist. It describes a (not so*) new idea suggesting that the
elusive phenomenon of ball lightning may in fact be a
hallucination brought on by transient powerful magnetic fields
caused by (ordinary) lightning strikes. The mechanism suggested
to be behind this is the same one that is exploited by
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which I had the joy of
playing with as part of my undergraduate research project. The
principles of TMS are fairly simple. Firstly, it’s important to
understand that neurons (brain cells) communica